I wouldn’t be able to earn a living online without the help of some great software, tools and services. It’s obvious I’m a big advocate of the self-hosted version of WordPress and customizing WordPress but I also live with my nose in web analytics reports.
Website Software
There’s literally thousands of site builder tools, frameworks and scripts to help you create a website as quickly as possible. Not many of them are as powerful as the WordPress core. For a long time it was wrongly considered to be a platform that could only be used for blogging – it’s now finally recognized as the powerful CMS it truly is.
The power & flexibility of WordPress is limitless.
Hosting and Servers
I’ve used more than my fair share of hosting companies and found that not all of them are equal. In fact pretty much all hosting is tweaked and tailored towards specific products and usage cases – so there’s never a 1 size fits all solution.
It used to be that you either had shared, private or dedicated hosting (and each level was an upgrade to the previous) but now you can throw cloud hosting (and multi-box hosting) and managed hosting to that mix as well.
Super Fast WordPress Hosting from WP Engine
I host my WordPress sites with WP Engine. It’s a fully managed service and the support staff are all trained WordPress experts.
It’s the fastest managed WordPress host around but it does have it’s share of quirks.
Digital Ocean for Cloud based VPS with SSD disks
I’ve used Digital Ocean for quite a while now and their system works great. Spin up a fresh server in 55 seconds and get working on it right away. Not everyone needs access to disposable servers but when you do DO are an absolute live saver.
MaxCDN as your Content Delivery Network
There’s a lot of CDNs out there that can do some fancy stuff to optimize your content and it’s delivery but my preference is to go with a well supported, easy to work with system. My choice is MaxCDN because they are part of a massive CDN allowing them access to servers that have excellent connectivity all around the world.
Try MaxCDN
Coding Software
Web developers work with code a lot. Some of us enjoy it but others don’t.
With WYSIWIG editors becoming more sophisticated and other front-end tools getting more common the necessity of meddling with code has dropped but that doesn’t mean that some of us don’t still prefer doing things in the code.
Notepad++ – A Simple and Powerful Editor for Windows
Every developer has their own preference for coding but I use Notepad++ for 90% or more of my coding. It’s only available on Windows.
SublimeText
SublimeText works on all the major OS. It does require a licence fee to use it in the long term but the power of SublimeText is unsurpassed due to it’s plugins.