Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Goals:

My Own Last Words provides a safe and secure place to create, manage, and share digital assets with your loved ones after your passing. 

Description:

Capture your memories in the form of notes, audio, and video. Share with your friends and family, after your passing. Examples: Wills, letters to children, funeral instructions, favorite music, etc.

Design:

Done mainly by myself. I did hire a graphic artist for the images and another company for the implementation. On the hosting side, we use Amazon. My husband is the part-time IT admin.

URL:

http://myownlastwords.com

Thank you for your constructive feedback!!!

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My Own Last Words

Hi MOLW,

I am just curious as to how you arrived at Amazon (vs something like Wordpress).  We help small businesses find resources, so would love to hear any thoughts on your journey!

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Make Your Business Better. cobase.com

Amazon for hosting, but Drupal for the application stack.

We chose Drupal because much of the OOTB features (e.g. user management) were critical to our application and not having to develop them from scratch saved us some time (maybe not a lot, but definitely some).

As for Amazon, we started out on Rackspace. During our development testing and Beta testing phases we found the performance was lacking. We ran a small pilot on Amazon and were amazed at how much faster everything was. Hence, we made the switch from Rackspace to Amazon before going live.

The speed, not cost, was the deciding factor. Our Rackspace servers were highly tuned, while the Amazon pilot servers were not. This should give Rackspace an unfair advantage, but it was still 3x slower.

Rackspace support is great, but that is not something that our customers "feel". They do "feel" the performance difference though.

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My Own Last Words

Thanks for the great response.  Did you/your husband already know about Drupal or did you learn it for the site?

Would this list have been helpful to you? http://cobase.com/website

(note that Drupal is not on the list)

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Make Your Business Better. cobase.com

Drupal: No, neither of us know Drupal. My husband does programming and knows PHP and other languages. We did some online research and narrowed the choice down to django or Drupal (my husband did that work). From there, we hired a separate implementation team to turn the design into code. They were given the choice of Drupal or django and selected Drupal.

As for the list, I know that he looked at several sites, but am not sure if he saw/used that list.

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My Own Last Words