Hosting

From requirements one thing was clear i need my own machine to run so many processes. So shared hosting was out of question and cloud was the best option

Rackspace vs EC2
Decision : Rackspace

Rational :

1. Amazon start with large machine (1.7 Gig RAM) where as with Rackspace you can start from 256 MB RAM machine.
2. I found Amazon was slightly complicated with so many concepts EC2, S3, EBS, SQS, RDBMS service etc. Rackspace i find breeze to use.

Steps

• Register with Rackspace
• After completing all formalities, go to https://manage.rackspacecloud.com/
• Go to Hosting > Cloud Server and click on "Add server" button. You will list of OS as shown below.

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Domain name registeration

Choices - Go Daddy vs Other  (Namesecure etc.)

Decision - Go Daddy because of cost

Decisions Rational

1. Cost put a constraints to make us of open source or free software as much as possible
2. Google ranking has major impact on my decisions
3. My past experience was another major driver for direction of my decisions
4. While choosing between two similar functionality open source project, decision were based on following parameters
1. Maturity
2. Good documentation
3. Strong Community
4. User feedback
5. There are places where i have to spend money or more money with respect to other alternate. The decision was based on perceived ROI

Objectives

My wife wanted to start a technology start-up. She asked me for help as she wanted me to give her a start. I am a java developer with little experience in Linux. I only know how to use ssh with few common commands needed for deploying applications in production environments. But i am up for challenge. Here are the her requirements.

1. She need a web site for her start-up
2. It should be based on CMS
3. She need mail boxes (there are few more people working with her)
4. She will be providing automation to few schools, so she need website for couple of schools too
5. She need mail boxes for those school too.
6. She need a easy way to manage these websites and mail boxes
7. She need Apache server
8. She will be developing her application in Grails so she need a database and servlet container.
9. She want SSO so that with same user name people can use email, cms and some part of her application.
10. She wanted to keep this project as close source at least for first few months
11. She need a project management software preferably for Agile
12. She need a wiki kind of things for documentation and collaboration
13. She need a version control software
14. She need a bug tracking software
15. She need CI environment

All this is needed at a cost as less as possible. I will keep on updating this list, But for now this is enough to get started.