So we’re starting a general contractor company and i I’m wondering if anyone else did that and had general advice? Its with someone else that is not really technology savy.

Currently we’re using:

  • WordPress for website
  • OpenProject for project related task
  • InvoiceNinja for invoice purposes

Any advice and comments would be appreciated!

  • schizoEnglish
    430·
    1 month ago

    I’m going to being contrarian, as is my bit.

    I self-host everything and fully believe everyone else should too.

    HOWEVER, if your self hosted shit breaks for say, 3 days, how much money is this going to cost you?

    For business stuff you really really should determine what your backup plan for ‘Oops shit’s dead’ is well before shit’s dead, and honestly, in some cases, maybe it makes more sense not to host everything and have a couple of things that would wreck your business provided by a SaaS company that has a SLA, and on-call engineers, and all that good shit.

    Just a thought to keep in mind, I suppose.

    • atzanteolEnglish
      100·
      1 month ago

      I self-host my own damn mail server and I wouldn’t want to support infrastructure for a business I was starting…

      If your core business is not “making sure wordpress is running” then outsource it to others to worry about. You’ll have enough on your plate.

    • ZephyrOPEnglish
      20·
      1 month ago

      Well said, and the ‘oops shit’s dead’ is also in the making. We have the chance to be close to a school so electricity + internet is never down. The time to move to a VPS/other location is minimal, with encrypted backup on multiple locations. Open to suggestions to improve the setup.

      • schizoEnglish
        100·
        1 month ago

        Well, a fault isn’t just an outage.

        You said the other person involved isn’t technical: what if say, a database corrupts itself and you’re on vacation for a week.

        Is the expectation that you’ll always be available all the time to fix technical problems?

        And, as a failure state: what happens if you simply cannot be reached for that week no matter what. What’s the failover plan for the rest of the people involved in the business?

        • ZephyrOPEnglish
          20·
          1 month ago

          Yeah, the bus factor is an issue to take into account also. I’ll need to find someone else to be able to solve those issues.

          • ScrubblesEnglish
            80·
            1 month ago

            And then you are basically hiring an infra team to run the services and have the redundancy, and then with salaries you’re nearing just paying for software again