Website Hosting

Building a high performance website required high performance website hosting. When I first started, I took the recommendations of the hosting companies everyone else suggested. But later I found out, they weren’t using those hosting companies for their main money sites.

I currently use or recommend two different website hosting companies. Veerotech is who we use for our website hosting that I manage and maintian. High quality, not overloaded and a variety of other upgrades you won’t see at other hosts (litespeed instead of apache, cloudlinux instead of centos, etc). And because it is not wordpress specific, I can run other platforms on it.

For my customers that want to manage themselves, and use wordpress I recommend WP Engine. Super fast, staging sites, backups, everything you need. There is just less technical hassle for a non-technical user. Add to it the speediness and its hard to beat.

Email Marketing

If you aren’t doing email marketing then you are leaving money on the table. My current email marketing platform is Convertkit.  Convertkit is fairly new compared to other companies and doesn’t have as much technical debt as legacy platforms. The two biggest pluses for me was marketing automation, and the fact that I wasn’t paying for the same email address multiple times.

Mailchimp and Aweber are the two companies I have also used for myself and my customers. Mailchimp is who I recommend for my restaurant clients because it is inexpensive to start (read free). If you are like me and have multiple products and lists, ConvertKit is a better match. If you are looking for something for your offline business, Mailchimp is what I recommend.

I have also used DRIP for one of my customers and has a lot of the same functionality as ConvertKit and is used by a lot of offline businesses. You can check them out HERE.

Shopping Carts

Ecommerce is becoming bigger and bigger every year. And the technology has gotten better every year. When it comes to e-commerce, I have found that hosted shopping cart solutions have a better cost of ownership than building it in woocommerce. Unless you are selling restricted items that the hosted solutions don’t like, or you need to do something special, they are really your best bet.

I currently have three carts I like. They all serve a multitude of purposes. Some you have heard of, others are less well know but I like where everyone is going. You can create free trials on all of them by clicking the banners below.

I have worked with Shopify, BigCommerce and 3DCart since 2010 when they were just starting out. You owe it to yourself to check them out.

Domain Names

To get online, you need a domain name. A registrar is where you buy (technically rent since you have to renew it every year) your very own .com domain name. Over the last few years, I have moved everything over to Namecheap. Their domains are fairly priced and even include Whois Privacy for the first year for free.

This is my audio interface that I plug my condensor microphone into. It runs phantom power and my headphones.

I currently use a Zoom H4n but if I did it over, I would spend the extra money and get the H6 which has more inputs and more control.