I wouldn't class Voxel.net as budget, but their low VPS is affordable, and based on my own experiences very reliable. They're very pro-active at alerting you to issues, even without their managed service.
After lots of downtime across three of my VPS' at VPS.net i'm opting to migrate all of them to one box on the Rackspace Cloud. I'm not a server admin, nor do i want to be, so the attraction of the new 'Managed Cloud' is all that much stronger.
I have used Voxel.net in the past, and their technical support team are absolutely amazing. Always willing to go that extra mile. Uptime was also very good.
As you you know we are in exactly the same position as you. We have spent far more hours than should be needed to get to the place we are now.
To get our merchant account (with one of the top 3 UK banks) took about 6 weeks. About 3 weeks was wasted with 'internal paperwork' that never got actioned. Another 1 week wasted on credit reference checks for the wrong person. I had to chase them every other day.
If you are a UK startup, please do not underestimate the importance of considering VAT within your project! We made the mistake of integrating one of the leading SaaS recurring payment providers when we did not have a requirement for VAT. Our business quickly grew and we reached the threshold for having to register for VAT. That's when we realised that our chosen supplier did not support VAT, and we would have a to build a lot of custom functionality to handle VAT correctly. We are now in the process of migrating to a new recurring payment provider as this works out more cost effective based on our own circumstances.
TOP TIPS FOR UK STARTUPS:
A) Allow at least 6-8 weeks for your merchant account to be setup. Be prepared to chase the bank every other day until it's finalised. They won't chase you. They will do a credit check on you. You need to have a business bank account already setup.
B) Consider the implications of becoming VAT Registered from the get go and how this will affect collecting and recording financial data. You can't charge VAT to people who are based outside of the UK, but once you are VAT registered you MUST charge VAT to all UK customers.
C) Think about your billing requirements long and hard. Do you need to issue invoices? What information legally needs to be on them to satisfy the HMRC? Do you need to issue email invoices, PDFs? Do the invoices need to be online for the user to download?
D) Choose your SaaS recurring payment provider wisely. Have a solid set of requirements before you start integrating. Play around with their free accounts and make sure that you have all bases covered. IT's going to be very hard to migrate providers when you have a lot of customer Credit Card data already collected. Make sure they have a defined process for moving your customer data from one supplier to the next.
E) To accept payments (not using PayPal) you will need:
1) a business bank account
2) a merchant account (barclays, LTSB, RBS are a good start)
3) a payment gateway that is accepted by your merchant account provider (SagePay (UK), PaymentExpress (AU)...)
4) a UK, VAT friendly PCI compliant SaaS recurring payment provider (Recurly, Chargify...)
We learnt a lot of lessons the hard the way, hope my comments save some of you time.
I Submitted this article as i thought some you would find it useful - but they unfortunately missed off www.crossbrowsertesting.com which would take my vote.
Nice addition to the product line, but there's still a gap in the market for SaaS MySQL services - need more companies like FathomDB to take away the headache of managing DBs for startups.
I got a personal demo of Tinderbox from Mark Bernstein at LeanCamp - looks very good for rapid brainstorming and documenting multiple streams of thought:
- Evernote
- iPhone Notes
- Keeping far too many windows open in Chrome and FireFox as a reminder,
- pen and notebook (x 2),
- Things for Mac,
- Things for iPhone.
All of the above help me to document and organise ideas as i get them.
Sound like a mess?, well yes it probably is to someone else....but documenting ideas as I get them, in the most timely method possible ensures that I capture everything and i'm not left carrying these crazy ideas in my head every night.
Don't worry about not coming back to every idea, but do force a habit of reviewing your list at least once a month, you'll be surprised by what you find in there after just a few weeks!
I must admit i do check hotmail.com every day, but i mainly use it as a dumping ground for all web app signups, newsletters etc that i don't want crowding my inbox on my iPhone.
It would be handy if Microsoft released an iPhone app for hotmail, or provided full IMAP access like GMAIL.
Yes i've tried Freshbooks and was impressed with the overall experience, but it seems more geared up towards time and materials based charging and invoicing, rather than expenses and general business accounting.
Great story - really chimes with what i did two months ago...I left my well paid corporate job to do something that i really enjoyed...solving real world problems for real world clients who really need them solving (not just pleasing the boss). So i set up PageDo (http://pagedo.com).
- Barclaycard for your merchant bank account
- SagePay for the payment gateway
And if you're implementing recurring payments then I'd recommend Recurly.
After much trial and error this is the best combo that I could find.
If you're after something even simpler, try using hosted payment page solution from SagePay.
Make sure you take into account VAT when taking payments in the UK.