f13.net

Hi everyone. I'm starting a company with a friend, and I need help with resolving our IT needs. I'm not an IT expert so I'm learning this all from scratch, but I'm good enough with computers to think I'll get a hang of things (eventually).

Our IT needs are basic: website hosting, email, and possibly some social media (blogs, etc.) capability. I've registered our domain with one of those registration companies and I'm also using them for email, but its using some crappy proprietary system. My partner has got some friends of his working on the website code, and I'll probably be handling updates. I'm looking for any advice, I've never done this before so I'm not sure where to start and I think a lot of people here have a lot of experience.

Thanks in advance.

From one of the other more recent threads that was touching on IT, why aren't you using G-mail instead of whatever this company's lousy e-mail is?

Don't do IT half-assed. Use Salesforce until your grow big enough to have decent IT on your own. Standardize _all_ your PCs, identify what you need (laptop, desktop, pads) and select one approved model that gets upgraded at the same time. You will thank me later. You Joomla or Worldpress for your website - simpler the better. _Pay_ someone to do basic Goggle ranking optimization, but opt-out of any maintenance contracts. Learn how to advertise on the cheap with Google and learn how to read website rankings and traffic. Leverage White Pages, local business directories and so on. Push out press releases, regardless of how fluff, out as soon and as frequently as possible. Buy decent phone system, opt out of hardware solutions - these days full-blown directory with a tree, individual voice mail and so on can be had on the cheap from VOIPers.

Go with Google Apps for Business (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html) to handle all your internal needs email/intranet/im and even documents. Other products integrate with the product to allow you a single point of management. It costs $30/user per year but its so worth it compared to running your own.

Website hosting pick a good provider, there's a lot to choose on. The only recommendation I can say is a VPS but it's more work.

If it's just 2 guys, why need a phone system at all.  Get a 2 unit mobile and go with that, I'd think.

Also, check out that Wix site I found previously. It was ridiculously easy to put together a site and it had a ton of templates.  If it's photography/ art related they have a bunch of templates for that in place.

Thanks for all the advice guys. Another few things, we're in the UK, and it's going to be a startup in an engineering related field.

My initial thoughts are to move in to a set-up office, I think here they're usually termed serviced offices, at least whilst we're small (2 of us currently). This means that some things will be handled already by them, such as phones and voicemail.

With computers: branded or put it together myself? I'm just wondering whether the software on a branded will be a problem.

Branded for service, which you don't want to do yourself.  It's what all businesses I've ever been involved with do. Buy from the business/ enterprise branch and I believe it doesn't come with all the shitware and bloatware home PCs do.

from personal experience: don't get an office.  Even if you need to receive important clients, rent a new hotel room or suite as needed.  Do not spend money on an office.  Even an incubator from the few I saw in CDN -- which admittedly is 1970's slick for supporting new business -- are too expensive.  

from the advice above you can get:

email and apps free + (pay WP blog hosted on an ISP, Salesforce if needed as mentioned)
USB or external HD's for backup/security +
mobiles +
fax machine on a PC and/or all-in-one scanner/printer at home +
stamp machine for postage (if necessary) +
external mail box for deliveries +
home office tax credit

Save your money, you will need it.  With the above you have no payroll (just claim taxes as independent contractors), no fucking stamp licking admin or photocopy BS fees, and all your connectivity + wireless (even transport) is all tax deductible.

Don't mistake "spending money means I am in business".  The best metric for "being in business" is saving money and eeking out what revenue you can at first.

EDIT: and all the best, good luck

  

If you are looking for a good, reliable, cheap webhosting (and email if you so desire, it is included in their packages), www.ipower.com is who I have been using for years and never had a problem.

For computers, definitely decide on a vendor and buy from them. Home-builts for business are almost always a waste of resources due to lack of warranty and the up front cost savings are really negligible. Dell offers 3 year warranties on all new business purchases which is actually a pretty decent upgrade cycle if you just need to use general productivity applications and web/email. I am not sure what HP or Lenovo give as far as warranty terms but I am sure it is similar to Dell.

Get standardized with name brand PC's with some sort of support ie: next day onsite service. You might have to invest a small bit of time to install software/format PC's so look look at something simple like Ninite (http://ninite.com/) to install base apps and WAIK (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd349343(WS.10).aspx) for a company base image. You will spend more time ripping bits of stupid trials etc off of pc's then just formatting and installing from scratch.

Look into a Crashplan (http://www.crashplan.com/) setup for your backups ASAP.

One thing to also mention if your website is going to be really plain jane you can just host it on Google Sites (as part of Google Apps for business). It's not perfect but you can do some really fun stuff with App Script (http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/). I hate to keep harping on it but coming from SMB it's the cheapest and most productive solution your going to find.

You're only talking two people? you and a friend? You're thinking too hard.

Take Soln's advice. Don't get an office, don't get special PCs, don't get anything you absolutely don't need. You clearly have a PC already, so why get another? That's money you don't need to spend.

Google business free for up to 10 people and that includes you@yourarbitrarydomain.com. Just use that with the domain name you already registered. Use your current desktops, or, if you need to buy a laptop, just find a semi-decent used one and keep your business data in the cloud. Any computer will do.

Google Apps is the only reasonable choice at that size imo.

Thanks for all the advice. It's currently two of us, but there's money to expand depending on how things progress, so I'm open to learning about everything.

Were I to start a small company, I'd almost certainly use Google Apps For Your Domain combined with some form of regular backups (archiving email locally with imap, saving documents locally somewhere, etc).  The reason you want to back stuff up, no matter what solution you use and no matter what the SLA, is that if it's essential for you to have some piece of information and the network's down or the solution provider's having an outage (temporary or otherwise), you'll want some kind of recovery model.

For various backup information about Google cloud stuff, check out The Data Liberation Front - http://www.dataliberation.org/

If you're doing software, consider git for revision control (or mercurial, but git has much broader support at this point).  Distributed version control systems are nice in that everyone who has the project checked out has an archive of the entire project history, and also dvcs systems make replication trivial. 

Today, you are my hero.

Your biggest challenge to long-term success is managing costs. Whatever your projections/business plan, revenues will be lower and costs will be higher than you expect. _Anything_ you can do to cut on-going costs will increase your chance of success.

I don't know what your business plan is, but unless it is absolutely necessary to see clients on a daily basis - avoid fixed costs of office rent.

Also, whatever you do, don't hire consultants unless it related to accounting. If you want to find out more why, I can help you figure it out for minimal hourly consulting fee.