Freelock Blog Posts

Just the other day I got a request for proposal for hosting, complete with a statement that they knew of some hosting that would cost $15/month. The implication being that they were looking for a hosting proposal that would not exceed that amount.

Right off the bat, there's a problem here. Just the cost of paying the salary of an employee to assemble a proposal would likely exceed half a year of the total revenue at this rate! Expecting somebody to spend the time to bid on such a service at that rate is... well, ludicrous. We would lose money to even bid on the job.

I think the discussion has come up at least twice on every mailing list I'm on: Why don't we move this discussion to a web-based forum? When it came up for the umpteenth time on the Seattle Tech Startup list earlier this week, I jumped in with this comment:

We regularly import content from old web sites and systems. One recent client had thousands of documents that we needed to copy from the old site, so we wrote a scraping system to import the ones that fit a certain template into Drupal, and just copy the existing documents into sites/default/files.

Using the Filefield_sources module, you can associate an existing file with a filefield, using IMCE or other files uploaded through the file system. However, we hit a problem: if you try to browse to an existing file, Filefield returns an error when you try to refer to it:

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.