The 5 core (paid) services we use to run WPMU DEV

Thought you guys might be interested in a quick peek behind the scenes at WPMU DEV, especially into some of the different services we use to run WPMU DEV.

Of course we use gmail, google docs, analytics, reader etc. etc. but so does everyine else… what I reckon makes a service stand out is that we’re happy to *pay for it*.

So, without further ado, here they are:

All of our SEO needs – SEOMoz

We’ve been members of SEOMoz for longer than I can remember, meaning we’re still on some excruciatingly great price that they grandfather us over on every 6 months or so…. yay :)

I’m also putting SEO Moz first in this list because we’ve also taken an almighty amount of inspiration from them in terms of business models, ways of doing stuff and generally kicking arse in a not to dissimilar field to us demographically speaking.

The blog has also been a constant source of ideas, and the Q&A section has paid for our membership many times over.

Payment provider – PayPal Pro

OK, first up I should note that Aaron who manages the integration of our systems with hates them with a passion, but from a business managers perspective what’s not to like.

Accepting all cards, all on site, setting up subscriptions, managing this all from the WPMU DEV backend and all for a ridiculously low fee ($30 /month + minor %s) – works for me!

And, added to that, while there are plenty of horror stories about PayPal floating around out there, we’ve always found them to be responsive and helpful.

Mailing List – Mailchimp

Surely the funnest of the lot, and also one of the most expensive (The Edublogs.org mailing list alone is 500k strong!) but at the end of the day, Mailchimp is money well spent.

Not only does it make creating, sending, managing and reporting on email campaigns a breeze, but also it *makes you a better email marketer* in the process and, I’m convinced. helps you reach higher standards and thus avoid the email spam pit of death!

This is one of the areas we’re really pushing hard in this year, so it’s great to have as reliable a partner as this on board.

Site monitoring – Pingdom

You just cannot beat Pingdom, it wins the monitoring game hands down.

I hardly know where to start, but the performance metrics, downtime notification (get them SMS’d to your sysadmin for extra impact :) and the sheer usefullness of having a quality third party to turn to to confirm / deny issues you might be having… rocks out.

If your site performance and uptime matters to you, you really must be using Pingdom.

Live Sales Chat – Zopim

There are a bunch of competitors out there, but we like Zopim best :)

It’s pretty much, bar the odd customization item, got everything we need… and that’s a whole heap of stuff.

Using this on WPMU DEV has most definitely helped us increase our conversion rates and clarify and address common issues – needless to say it’s pretty darn intense for the crew working on it, but they’re good enough to handle the pressure :)

So, that’s our list – of course there’s also plenty of server stuff, and Amazon S3 and all that jazz, but these are teh core tools that I get stuck into each day and keep us ticking over.

What are yours?

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