If you are looking to launch a new business venture, then keeping your costs as low as possible is of the utmost importance. You’ve probably heard terms like ‘bootstrapping’ and ‘lean start-up’, both of them basically mean to do as much as you can yourself and keep your costs as low as possible so that your business can be profitable as soon as possible. We’ll show you how you can do that by using things like a Codecademy promo code and budget hosts like Shockhosting to keep your budget small.
Use a Codecademy promo code to get skills you need
This falls under both the bootstrapping and lean start-up practices. Both of those terms mean keeping your new venture small not only in terms of budget, but also in terms of staff. Some people sing the praises of outsourcing everything and doing none of the work yourself, but I have to disagree with that. If you don’t know the nuts and bolts of how your business works then how can you know if it’s running efficiently, and you won’t be able to immediately correct any problems that come up. I personally feel that efficiency is the name of the game for a lean start-up, so that means that yes you are going to have to get into the building of your website.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you need to have a PhD in computer science, but you should at least know the basics of HTML and PHP, or whatever language your website will be built in. I say PHP as that is what most of the open-source content management systems are written in, and you should definitely not be paying for website management software. Stay away from services like Wix and Squarespace, they are overpriced and will add a lot of bloat to your budget. They also aren’t really that much easier to use than the free ones, despite what their advertising might tell you.
After using a Codecademy promo code and signing up for their ‘How to Deploy a Website’ course you will have more than enough technical know-how to get started on your own. You can go as advanced as you want in terms of learning technical skills, if you have the time to put into it coding is a skill that can be learned just like any other. You will need to invest some time up front into learning, but being able to handle the website yourself can save you massive headaches down the road. You won’t have to pay a premium for rush services if something goes wrong at a critical time, or worry about a developer that disappears into thin air (and takes their custom code with them).
Not quite free, but very inexpensive hosting: Shockhosting
This is a company that I personally have experience with, and I highly recommend them. They have 7 datacenters that you can choose from and they offer some of the lowest priced cPanel hosting around. Last year cPanel increased their prices and a lot of what used to be pretty affordable resellers either suddenly doubled their prices or just moved you to DirectAdmin. DirectAdmin is fine, and if you really want to keep the budget down you can go with a hosting reseller that is using them, but I’ve been using cPanel since I started building websites and I like the interface and options available.
Another great thing about Shockhosting? They have a promo code for 50% off for the lifetime of your account, enter 50OFF on the checkout page to get the discount. A lot of big hosting companies will offer you a real sweetheart of a deal to get you to sign up, and then once renewal comes around the price goes up by 2 or 3 times what you initially paid. It doesn’t feel very nice. You won’t have that problem with Shockhosting though, the discounted price you sign up with is the one you get for life.
You might be looking over their menu of hosting plans and be wondering which one is right for you: go with the most basic hosting plan to start. You can always upgrade later, and remember you want to keep the budget as low as possible to start so that you get to profitability faster. In the beginning you aren’t going to be using a ton of bandwidth or have a bunch of email addresses so there is no need to pay for extra services that will just go to waste.