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Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs
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Jira
I used to hate Jira when software development was the bulk of my responsibility. When I became more of an operational manager,
I grew to love it. Now that I'm more of a strategic manager, I love the integration possibilities. We formerly used Trac and
QuickBook's time tracking for billing, but getting developers to do double-entry accounting is not easy. We are now able to
use Jira for both.
It's possible that one of the newer tools like Rally would overcome some of Jira's shortcomings with process and workflow, but we were already using Jira on premises and migrating to cloud-based Jira was totally painless. Also, swapping something central like an issue tracker used by both developers and operational people alike would be very disruptive.
Additionally, Jira integrates well with Google Apps for authentication. It also worked well when we used LDAP. Single sign-on has become increasingly important to us as we've grown.
BitBucket
I felt a little dubious about BitBucket at first. Atlassian's related product, FishEye, was terribly slow. On the other hand,
BitBucket integrates with Google for authentication and integrates with Jira for history, timeline, and more. It's also cheaper
than GitHub, since BitBucket charges per user, while GitHub charges per private repository -- and most of ours are private.
(We use GitHub for our public repositories.)
We were overdue to move from Subversion to Git. We waited a good while because the IDE integration wasn't there, and Git's command-line interface is cumbersome, especially when onboarding junior staff. We took the time to do a general reorganization, so this was mostly a manual process. We've been happy with it -- although it does have one really frustrating "feature" that makes you pick a username that's unique to BitBucket and can't be an email address. If you're me, this means you either do acoliver42934 (which I loathe) or you end up with acoliverAndALotOfExpletivesJustFreakingWork.
Synaxis
As Drupal users, our natural cloud choice would seem to be Acquia, the best-known cloud-based Drupal offering. But good grief,
Acquia wanted a crap load of money or its pricing was too confusing for us simple software developer folk. I tweeted in protest
and the company said that if we were happy with an SLA that was less than what we needed, then the price wasn't so bad.
Synaxis CEO Paul Welty engaged me on Twitter, and for about $9k, we got what we needed. As far as I can tell, this is better than what Acquia offered, but Acquia has weird sliders and stuff that don't tell me whether I can get with some kind of 24/7 SLA. When our engineers tried to get a quote, it was something like $25,000 for our two sites (our DBA Bull City Mobile is used for mobile applications).
We've had outstanding service and performance with Synaxis. The company was also very helpful and supportive when we subsequently relaunched our website.
Fiber
We needed to upgrade our Internet connection. We expect to be at nearly 50 people by the end of the year. It wasn't so much
the downlink speed as our uplink speed.