Indie Web Companies

Here’s a disturbing factoid: the world’s ten richest men have made $540 billion so far during the pandemic. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ worth went up so much between March and September 2020 that he could afford to give all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105k bonus and still have as much money as he had before the pandemic started (source).

What does that have to do with code? Well, some of my code used to run on Amazon services. Some of my money is in Jeff Bezos’ pocket. I was contributing to the economic inequality that Amazon enables. I decided I did not want to do that.

But more than I didn’t want to contribute to Amazon’s bottom line, I wanted to contribute to someone’s bottom line, the emphasis being on someone. I wanted to redirect the money I was already spending to small businesses, businesses that need the revenue.

We can help each other instead of Silicon Valley billionaires.

Late last year at work we started showcasing some smaller, local businesses in affiliate links. It was a pretty simple idea, find some small companies in our communities making worthwhile things and support them by telling others.

One woman whose company I linked to called it “life-changing.” It’s so strange to me that an act as simple as pasting some HTML into the right text box can changed someone’s life. That’s amazing. I bring this up not to toot my own horn, but to say that every day there are ways in which you can use the money you spend to help real people trying to make a living. If you’ve ever charged a little for a web service you probably know how much of a big deal even one more customer means. I want to be that one more customer for someone.

Small business web hosts, email providers, and domain registrars

My online expenses aren’t much, just email, web hosting, storage space, and domain registration. I wanted to find some small business replacements for the megacorps I was using.

I did a ton of research. Web hosting and email servers are tricky, these are critical things that run my business and my wife’s business. It’s great to support small businesses, but above all the services have to work. Luckily for us the forums over at Low End Talk are full of ideas and long term reviews of exactly these sorts of business — small companies offering cheap web hosting, email hosting, and domain registration.

After a few late nights digging through threads, finding the highlights, and then more research elsewhere on the web, I settled on BuyVM for my web hosting. The owner Francisco is very active on Low End Talk and, in my experience for the last three months, is providing a great service for less than I was paying at Vultr. It was so much less I was able to get a much larger block storage disk and have more room for my backups, which eliminated my need for Amazon S3/Glacier as well². I highly recommend BuyVM for your VPS needs.

For email hosting I actually was already using a small company, Migadu. I liked their service, and I still recommend them if the pricing works for you, but they discountinued the plan I was on and I would have had to move to a more expensive plan to retain the same functionality.

I jumped ship from Migadu during Black Friday because another small email provider I had heard good things about was having a deal: $100 for life. At that price, so long as it stays in business for 2 years, I won’t loss any money. I moved my email to MxRoute and it has been excellant. I liked it so much I bought my parents a domain and freed them from Google. Highly recommend MxRoute.

That left just one element of my web stack at Amazon: domain registration. I’ll confess I gave up here. Domain registration are not a space filled with small companies (which to me is like 2-8 people). I gave up. And complained to a friend, who said, try harder. So I did and discovered Porkbun, the best domain registrar I’ve used in the past two decades. I moved my small collection of domain over at the beginning of the year and it was a seamless, super-smooth transition. It lives up to its slogan: “an oddly safisfying experience.”

And those are my recommendations for small businesses you can support and still have a great technology stack: Porkbun (domain registration), MxRoute (email hosting), and BuyVM (VPS hosting).

The thing I didn’t replace was AWS CloudFront. I don’t have enough traffic to warrant a CDN, so I just dropped it. If I ever change my mind about that, based on my research, I’ll go with KeyCDN, or possible Hostry.

I also haven’t found a reliable replacement for SES, which I use to send my newsletters. I wish Sendgrid would spin off a company for non-transational email, but I don’t see that happening. I could write another 5,000 words on how the big email providers totally, purposefully fucked up the best distributed communication system around. But I will spare you.

The point is, these are three small companies providing useful services we developers need. If you’re feeling like you’d rather your money went to people trying to make cool, useful stuff, rather than massive corporations, give them a try. If you have other suggestions drop them in the comments and maybe I can put together some sort of larger list.

[Note: none of these links are affiliate links, just services I actually use and therefore recommend.]