My First SaaS: 9 Tech Platforms we depend on
For the last few months I’ve been sharing my story in short posts that begin with “My First SaaS” https://medium.com/@reillychase
I’ve already covered 7 things I learned, Choosing the Tech Stack, Defining the MVP, and Building the MVP. In this post, I list the tech platforms that HostiFi was built on top of.
In May 2018 I launched https://hostifi.net, a UniFi cloud controller hosting service. Many hours of research, trial and error went into choosing the tech platforms that now make the foundation our service offering.
A quote that I think of often which is very applicable here,
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” -Sir Isaac Newton
I am very grateful for all of these services and the hard-work behind them, which created the building blocks for HostiFi. In 2018, it has never been easier to start a business thanks to technologies like these. That’s certainly not to say that it is easy though!
1. Vultr
We use Vultr as our IaaS provider. Thanks to Vultr we don’t have to worry about managing hardware, datacenters, bandwidth, or IP allocations. Vultr’s API made it easy for us to create servers automatically with our Python scripts.
2. Zabbix
We use Zabbix to monitor resources and uptime on all of our servers. Thanks to Zabbix we are able to ensure reliability and security. We can spot and fix problems with server resources before they cause downtime, and configured custom alerts which trigger emails when something urgent comes up that we should look into right away. In addition Zabbix provides security monitoring on each server and is configured to alert us to certain suspicious activities.
3. Cloudflare DNS
All of our servers use Cloudflare for DNS. Records are created and deleted automatically by our Python scripts by using the API. Cloudflare ensures fast load times, and can help with DDoS protection if needed.
4. Stripe
Stripe handles our payment processing.
5. WordPress
WordPress is our website platform.
6. Startuply WordPress Theme
Startuply is our WordPress theme.
7. Easy Digital Downloads Stripe
Easy Digital Downloads Stripe WordPress plugin helped us integrate Stripe into our checkout process.
8. Easy Digital Downloads Recurring Payments
Easy Digital Downloads Recurring payments WordPress plugin helped us to be able to automatically bill subscribers each month.
9. DigitalOcean Spaces
DigitalOcean Spaces provided a super cheap storage for us to dump backups from all of our servers onto.
