Tools I use
I'm a big fan of managing your projects in-house, where possible. It's one of the best things you can do to grow your institutional knowledge of your systems, which is a huge value in the long term.
Everything I do for my clients, you can do yourself in-house, if you want. There are no secrets here.
Over the years, I’ve built up a collection of tools and services I love and recommend. Don’t be surprised, some of these links will get me a referral bonus, and some of them will get you a discount.
Hosting services
Every site you run needs to be hosted somewhere. Each of Joinery’s client sites — and my own public-facing CRM site — runs on a separate Linode VPS. Clients get rock-sold infrastructure, and I get full server-level administrative access. Managing a hosting server is not for the inexperienced or faint-of-heart, but if you’ve got the skills in-house and are looking for a hosting platform, I’ll rave all day about Linode.
This Linode sign-up link gives you $100/60-day credit on your new Linode account.
Uptime monitoring
Sites go down. It happens. And when they do, somebody usually needs to take action (or you can just wait and see if it comes back up).
Downtime notifications can be a life-saver, and at the very least they can let you cross one more worry off your list: if you have a reliable uptime monitor, and you haven’t been notified of downtime, your site is up and running.
Each of Joinery’s client sites is monitored by UptimeRobot. If a site goes off-line for any reason, my team gets an immediate notification through the Android or iPhone app, so we can take quick action. I’ve got uptime reports at my fingertips, so I can know if we’re keeping up with our uptime guarantee.
If you’ve got a site you care about, somebody should maintain an uptime monitor on it. UptimeRobot’s free plan is enough for most people, though Joinery outgrew that some time ago.
Uptime status checking
Even if you’ve got an uptime monitor, you might experience at some point that your site is just not responding in your browser.
Maybe it's offline for real — which means there’s a problem with your site — or maybe it’s just unreachable from your local internet connection — which might just mean you need to reconnect to your local wifi.
How can you be sure which it is?
FreshPing let you type in any web address to check it's a side is really offline for everyone or just unavailable from your internet connection. (It also appears to offer some kind of paid monitoring service, but I’ll recommend you go with UptimeRobot for that.)
Got more tools?
If you’ve got a tool you love that’s not listed here, shoot me a quick email and let me know — we’re all trying to improve ourselves here!
“The most competent, professional, honest, and fair developer I've had the pleasure of working with. You've been critical to our support infrastructure. ”
— David Opheim, Webmaster, International Voices Houston