Ask HN: What "infrastructure" do you use at your startup/company?

* Hardware : Amazon EC2. We also use cloudfront (CDN) and a couple of other services. It's worked out amazingly well really.

* Accounting: My wife (PhD in Accounting). She uses Quickbooks I think. We use ADP for our payroll for quite awhile and that was nightmare. They were late with W2's and failed to pay the proper taxes they said they were paying. Just awful. My wife does payroll now.

* Email: We use authsmtp as our gateway. They've been very solid. Very few spam box issues. We also use mailchimp to manage our actual contact lists.

* Analytics: we use a combination of homegrown tools, google analytics, UserFly and CrazyEgg for usability and conversion analysis.

* Email: we use Google Apps. That's also worked out extremely well for us. No real issues and we rely on Google Docs quite a bit.

* Other services: We use Twilio to handle phone-tracking (it's an integral part of our product). We used UserVoice at one point and that was excellent.

I'll update with other stuff as I think about it.

Hardware: Half a cage at a colo with one fast box for web/db server, and a few cheap pizza boxes for build server and misc. This used to be two boxes in a garage behind a business DSL until Twiddla went big.

Content storage & delivery: S3/Cloudfront

Heavy lifting: EC2. We spin up a half dozen boxes each night for a few hours of processing for S3stat.

Email: Google Apps (they're terrible, but free and functional)

Tools: MSDN + EmpowerISV = $400 for all the dev tools for the shop. Small Business Server for the boxes in the cage. ReSharper, CodeSmith & RedGate's SQL stuff are actually the biggest per dev cost, but they make life so much better that they're worth it.

All in, it works out to about $500/month to keep up and running. Total, across all our sites (and there are quite a few). The colo is expensive, but it's so nice. Even with the cloud stuff where it is today, I'd still put a box in a datacenter if I had it to do over again.

How big to have to change?

"half dozen boxes ... for S3stat"

What kind of boxes do you use and how much do you need to process?

(I use 2 of your services and I love it)

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Dan Burkhart, the President of Recurly.

There was a very early pricing change, which was admittedly not handled well. We subsequently reached out to all of our customers twice via email surveys, and personally via telephone to all that indicated that they were willing to speak with us. Our latest pricing went over extremely well, AND we did grandfather any customer to prior pricing if they wanted. (A relatively small percentage chose to be grandfathered, since our new pricing has been favorable for the broad majority).

You can see that our new pricing posted on July 1 went over extremely well. (There was only one comment on the blog post). http://blog.recurly.com/2010/07/new-recurly-pricing/

Our customer base continues to grow rapidly, and since we raised money, we have hired full time customer support. We treat our customers extremely well. I suggest you speak to Retargeter, SlideShare, KissMetrics, Unbounce, WordTracker, SproutSocial, GroupSpaces, GOOD.is, and many others to hear from them how they have been treated, and whether they would recommend Recurly.

One last point. Understand that Recurly stores credit cards (in a PCI compliant) vault. The benefit to our customers is 1) that as their business scales, we uniquely offer the ability for our customers to easily transition from one payment gateway to another without ANY business interruption. As your business grows, you will surely be able to negotiate more favorable rates with your gateway, and we give you the leverage to do so. 2) We are also able to better address credit card declines and remediate the process by resubmitting additional information to satisfy the reason for the decline. This results in lower customer churn and for businesses doing any kind of transaction volume, this is a very big benefit. (Compare Recurly costs to services like Litle & Co who offer the same service for big $$).

Cheers.

Dan