The Essential 3rd Party Services Checklist

When creating a website from scratch, we usually have the luxury to recommend our clients what services to use. If the stars align, we get to set up things the way we like it and the way we believe it’s the best for our clients. Here’s our list of must haves. This is not a sponsored post.

Domain Registrar: EuroDNS

We have dealt with many domain providers throughout the years and most of them are terrible. Really, I don’t even understand how this is possible in the year 2018. On the contrary, EuroDNS has a really nice interface and their DNS services are so simple. In case we can’t use EuroDNS for some reason, Route53 by Amazon Web Services comes really handy.

File Storage: Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is an industry standard. It’s fast, it’s reliable and you pay as you go. What else do you need?

Server & Hosting: Heroku

Heroku provides a platform as a service, which means we don’t have to deal with server administration. It might look expensive at a first glance, but actually it’s kind of cheaper. The whole service scales effortlessly and developers love it.

Transactional E-Mails: Mailgun

We used to vouch for Mandrill, but after experiencing some problems with their support and a super rigid view on GDPR policies, we turned to Mailgun. We are really happy so far.

Analytics: Google Analytics & Crazy Egg

I guess Google Analytics needs no introduction, everyone should use it. Crazy Egg is reasonably priced, offers a wide variety of tools and simple enough for anyone to get started.

Comments: Disqus

We used to create custom comments modules, but not anymore. Disqus offers a free plan that will suffice for smaller websites, but their paid plans are also totally affordable. Disqus is quite popular, so people probably have an account and the interface will be familiar.

Image Processing: Imgix

Dealing with a high volume of images can lead to big bills and a terrible user experience. Imgix is an image processing proxy, which means you don’t have to store different image versions with their solution. This reduces storage costs and loading times.

Payment Processing: Stripe

There are many payment processors out there and frankly most of them are great. We pick Stripe because they offer friendy fees and a nice interface.

Conversational Marketing: Drift

Drift is so easy to set up. Everybody should try it once, just for the onboarding experience.

If you know any better, please let me know in the comments. At Evermore we are all about finding, trying and using the hottest solutions out there.