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Paypal is very expensive in terms of fees! We opted for a local card processor. They all offered us less than 2% for every transaction and a fixed monthly fee for the service. C
Compare that with Paypal! Paypal is great for quick and easy implementation - but at the end you pay a lot more..
Migration costs and effort will be high. Still, they need to become less dependent from S3. We opted for dedicated hardware at https://secure.cloudsafe.com and do not regret it: Higher security level, more uptime and in the long run much cheaper. Even if you pay some extra dollars for redundancy with added storage capacities.
I would take another step: Your colleagues don´t even have to be working in one space at all. My current startup involves 10 people - none of them working next door to me. Still, we could all meet in person within a day. We communicate via Mail and IM.
Sure, it lacks some of the old school all-night hacking in a small office. But now we are more flexible on work patterns and everyone is more productive.
I got the idea from the (highly successfull) startup Automattic. Have a look at their office: http://automattic.com/map/
1) We use dedicated hosting, it is still best on terms of reliability and security.
2) Not at all. But you need seasoned developers.
3) Our platform runs mostly in Java. So far good performance.
There is no fixed sum.
But if you are a skilled professional you should calculate "opportunity costs":
If you could get a job with 250k payment and you pay yourself only 50k - you are theoretically loosing 200k a year.
If the same startup generates 200k of profit for the first year and you own 50% if it you are still loosing 100k.
Then again if this startup could be sold right now for 500k - your up 150k.
Next step would be probabilities:
If you have no offer on the table but there is a 80% chance your startup could be sold for 1m, calculate with 800k. And stop adding this extra value if your exit probability is low.
All data is securely encrypted. And we offer data sharing by public/private key encryption. There is no online storage offering a higher security standard so far. If you need convenience, use Dropbox. If you need security, use CloudSafe.
Money will be made by offering extra storage and some company features. But you will always be able to use the free account. So any person you want to share data with will be able to access it without paying a cent.
No, we are located in Hamburg, Germany. But we got our TRUSTe approval for the US market today (logo to follow) - so our data privacy policy should meet US standards.
Hi Scott, unfortunately we do use Wicket (from apache.org) in conjunction with javascript for some of the GUI. So basically it is a requirement that we decided on quite early while developing. We will make sure the "no javascript"is more descriptive. Thanks for trying.