Name your 10 most critical business tools

[Artashes]

Name up to 10 tools (software, utilities, physical products) that are critical for you running your web hosting business.

WHMCS, Excel, Slack, Dropbox, Quicken, Notion, some chat software, Google Docs, physical notepad (as in pen and paper), etc.

Curious to see what products and tools you are using day-to-day that allow you to get the job done.

 

[bigredseo]

Since we do Design/SEO and monitor sites for clients with Hosting (we recommend places, and assist with updates etc), my list is a little different:

• Google Docs/Sheets
• Google Hangouts (internal chat/discussion)
• Google Drive & Dropbox
• Sublime Text 4 (html/php/programming markup for coding, MySQL DB editing & Log Review)
• Accelo (project management, time management, tickets & invoicing)
• MainWP (WordPress monitoring/management - plugin updates and tracking)
• Zoom / Google Meet
• Google Voice (phone in general, but we utilize Google Voice for Voicemail to Text)
• UptimeRobot - server uptime monitoring
• Spotify - can't do anything without music

I've left off SEO-specific software that we use, but from a hosting end of things, WHMCS was invaluable for us when I ran hosting. WHMCS can replace both Accelo & MainWP from my list, and I'd add a live chat software for client-facing support.

 

[John @ S4]

The list of 'tools' that we use on a daily basis and consider essential is going to be a lot more than ten...

So, instead, I'm going to base this list solely on the things that I personally have open in front of me right now, so they may not be the most critical tools, but they are things that I am using in the middle of a typical afternoon.

• Slack
• Putty
• Brackets - favourite IDE that sadly is about to be deprecated
• Coffee - coldbrew with vanilla cream right now
• MS Office
• Physical notepad and pen - a couple of each actually
• MainWP
• Matomo
• Thunderbird

 

[HostStage]

The list of tools critical to us are:

• WHMCS
• Slack
• Asana - Ideal to manage a workload.
• Dropbox
• Veryfi - Awesome invoice recognition software -> to export data for the accountants / KPI
• Skype

On the top of that, the tools critical to me:

• Evernote
• Clockify for time tracking