Whenever you set out to do something, you need to have a good idea of what the impact could be. In this case, the first property that the system is going to interact with is FaceBook. Sacry as that proposition is, most apps get such little traffic that it’s not going to cause you any pain BUT you don’t want to run the risk.
I decided to pull on the pieces that I have used reliably in other roles.
Hosting It starts with Media Temple and their grid server. That should get you out of the door unless your app is seriously heavy (Mine isn’t)
Blog You have to blog while you get your ducks in a row – proof of concept, video of it in action, ad account and then alpha version. Only one choice WordPress (You could go blogger if you haven’t got your hosting set up)
WebSite I went with Joomla, but any CMS that can preserve your content, offers user registration etc. is good. The learning curve can be a little steep if you are not used to it and you could just leverage your blog platform for a basic site in the interim.
Ad partner You have to love Google adsense for this. You’ll find it is hard to secure a quality network while you have low volumes.
Content Delivery Network If you are serving a lot of static content, you can lift the hit off your server and spread it around the CDNs servers which should give a performance boost to your users, save your server and save bandwidth fees as the CDN fees should be cheaper than your host. Also, go this route or with a torrent if you have a download. I am looking at PantherExpress although I understand that Limelight offer something similar
DNS provider – I use a DNS provider, although you can leverage the DNS provided via your registrar or hosting company. Having a separate DNS provider can allow you to round robin between providers and can be useful for redundany or transition. I use EasyDNS – I originally picked them when I needed a provider where I could set up a TXT record for SPF (Sender Policy Framework) which is to do with email delivery. They can also act as a secondary mail server for you so that if your primary is unavailable they will catch the mail for you until your primary is back up.
Once you have all this you can finally get back to your application, which is what I will do now.
Next: Proof of concept screenshots and video…