nickh

Which web hosting companies are "startup-friendly"? By that, I mean which ones regularly provide startups with hosting, services, or add-ons that are free and/or discounted?

Say one person comes up with the idea for a startup, and spends a significant amount of time over 2 years developing the business plan. That person then asks others to join the startup as co-founders to help build the startup.

When allocating equity to each co-founder, how much equity is that existing business plan worth?

-- Edit 2011-06-22 17:23 GMT

This is a pretty open-ended question. I should've included more details:

The person who wrote the business plan is the startup's CEO.

The business revolves around a website marketplace.

The business plan includes:

- multiple lucrative sources of revenue - a basic plan for user acquisition - identification of additional roles that will need to be filled - financial projections - detailed, yet incomplete, explanation of the website's functionality - some validated learning[1]

The other co-founders are the CTO, the front-end designer and coder, and the artist.

[1] http://lean.st/principles/validated-learning

When founders divide a startup's equity amongst themselves, are those numbers set in stone (ignoring future dilution)?

I ask this because one of my co-founders has been pondering whether we founders should re-evaluate each founder's shares at regular intervals, based upon on how much work they've put in since the last re-evaluation.

When dividing equity amongst founders, should 100% of the shares be divided, or should some shares remain unallocated for future use?

What do you guys do for hosting when releasing a new site/web app?

Do you take the time to tailor your app and environment for AWS (EC2, S3, etc), or do you prefer a simpler approach such as a shared hosting account with Slicehost/Linode/etc to just get it out there quickly?

I've never used AWS, so I don't know how straightforward or convoluted the initial process is to release a brand new site on it. However, this thread seems to believe that it isn't particularly complex, provided you're thorough and have a decent amount of *nix sysadmin experience: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202056

OTOH, this post seems to suggest that shared hosting is preferable for releasing a "small" site, and that AWS should be considered later on, when your traffic requires it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258761

What say you?

Considering that most web apps need to be tested in many different browsers, each spanning multiple versions, how do you go about that? Do you have a particular workflow? Any tips that others might find useful?