How to outsource on small budget
Many people would tell you thats its a good idea to outsource something that is not your core competency when you are doing a startup. Its all very romantic to sweep the floor and write the code at the same time but frankly neither is it possible or advisable. Specially when you are a small team, you are better off using some existing solutions than doing everything yourself. Sometimes outsourcing comes at a cost but it may be well worth it.
Why we don’t outsource
As bootstrappers, we often tend to compare all costs with zero, which is wrong. If it takes you 10 hours to do something, then basically its worth atleast a few thousand bucks (in India). Do a rough calculation considering your consulting rates per hour or something and it will all make sense to you. If something does not directly add to your product offering, it may not be worth doing yourself. Give other startups a chance. If everyone built their own websites, you and I won’t exist. Same applies to business needs also.
What can you outsource
Here are some of the things that you can outsource easily
Email: Use google apps which is free upto 100 accounts, gives you gmail interface and imap access. You can also use google sites to make simple pages (public or private) for your business. I think its a no brainer (Free)
DNS Hosting: Now this is a big one. Most people once they migrate from shared hosting to a VPS or dedicated machine try to do everything on the box. Sending/receiving emails, hosting the dns etc etc. I think its not a great idea. You should try using a service like DynDNS. Some of the benefits are
- Create subdomains easily (this is a big one .. you will need to create lots of subdomain that redirect or point to a machine)
- Change MX records very comfortably (to switch email providers etc)
- Easy to set SPF records (helps in your messages not being flagged as spam)
- Use the 20 sec timeout settting to redirect all traffic to your blog during maintenance etc. This makes sure that if you server is down or something, people can still reach your blog. Compare this to your DNS down too
Cost: $25 a year per domain
SVN, Blog, trac, backups: I think its a neat idea to host your blog on a different machine than your main one. Same holds for your code too. You want to make sure not everything goes down when your site goes down. I think a very cheap way to do this is to get an account with DreamHost. They offer one click wordpress, svn etc and you can easily setup trac and backups using rsync (a protocol to sync two folders).
Cost: Anywhere from $10 a month to $25 a year (if you are a new customer and search in their forums for a deal)
So there you are. In less than $60 a year, you can outsource a lot of work and stress. Do try out the above and if you have any further tips, leave them in comments and I will update the post.
Tags: outsource, bootstrapping, startups, less budget
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Interesting post Prateek. Definitely it makes a lot of sense to have things like Blogs, test env, dev env, prod env and mail setup on different machines.
Cheers to you for this good post.
Companies who outsourced are the one who’s business are being bankrupt or having a less profit received. That’s why they outsourced to other countries that are cost effective.
- Google Apps account have a limit of 500 emails per day. So you could create multiple accounts and use round robin to send emails.
- Try freepository.com for svn and trac access for 8$ pm ( gold package)
Nice information on outsourcing with small budget with great resources.
hey I could safely say that google apps is such a great help here at work, only prob I can see is that it has a limit on how many emails per day. Perhaps I would try what rakesh suggested.