Recommendations

I often get asked what Hosting, Domain Registrar, or Email Newsletter provider do I recommend… so I decided to put all of my recommendations on one page for easy sharing.

Hosting

For any WordPress website, there is no better hosting today than Flywheel. Flywheel not only has fast servers, easy to use interface, and the absolute best customer service I’ve ever encountered… They are also fairly affordable and provide free SSL, which alone usually costs about $60 per year, and its setup is one of the easiest I’ve ever seen. Listing all the things I love about flywheel would take most of this page. I’ve had more than 15 different hosting companies over the years, flywheel are superb.

Domains

Hover has one of the most straightforward systems for domain hosting and includes free private registration of domains. They have fantastic support and never shove ads in your face or try to keep selling you something you don’t need (for the love of goodness, stay away from GoDaddy). They also have a concierge service where they’ll move the domains for you and you won’t have to deal with the hassle of figuring out this messy multistep process yourself.

Email Marketing / Newsletter Service

After years of using Mailchimp I’ve finally moved to and started recommending Convert Kit. ConvertKit has no free tier but is far more intuitive, user friendly, and accommodate better what most business and professionals need from an Email service. A better and easier way to segment subscribers as well as an easier way to create email sequences and automation. It’s actually hard to put in words all the thousand little differences and nuances but Convert Kit simply offers both an easier user experience and a more capable system. Mailchimp still offers a free tier if you can’t afford Convert Kit right off the bat, and for many use cases, Mailchimp will suffice until you need to take it to the next level.

Online Code School

Most of what I know I’ve learned online, through free and paid courses, tutorials, videos, and forums. Even the most extensive paid courses I’ve taken left a lot to be desired. The rest were too expensive to afford. It seems now a brilliant new school is available for people, and I wish this existed when I just got started. You get to learn from a comprehensive program for free and pay if and when you get a job. I’ve taken their mini boot camps and I’m fairly impressed. They offer Computer Science, Data Science & Machine Learning, and iOS Development. Check out Lambda School.

Podcast Editing Software –

Descript is one of those rare truly magical uses of technology, not only automating transcription of audio but allowing you to edit the transcript to edit the audio. They also seem to improve their reliability and features pretty fast like adding video recording and editing. And compared to any service that only transcribes audio, it is one of the most affordable ones I’ve come across.

No Code App Builders –

FlutterFlow is one of the leading No-Code app builders. The no-code revolution is here and it is gaining steam fast. Companies like FlutterFlow have figured out ways to abstract most if not all of the coding from building apps and FlutterFlow is leading the way by offering the ability to create Native apps as well as s web app, all from a single designed source.

Draftbit is another No-Code app builder (which we are using at Seabird to build our mobile app). Draftbit is one of the few that offer a lot of flexibility by also allowing the use of custom code when needed.