Wedding, Honeymoon ... and back to Business

The long vacation is over. It actually got over some 12 days ago, but getting back to the business keeps you busy enough to stay away from blog.


Ankita is now an integral part of Goel Family. And I thank everyone who was there to witness it. You can find few selected pics of our wedding here.

Keeping in line with the message of mustseeindia.com, We went to Kashmir for our honeymoon. I would find some time later on to write a full post on how great a place it was and how much fun we had. For now, I'll just let the pictures do the talking.

Gulmarg

The remaining photos are here.

With all these sweet memories, now I am back to Bangalore. And as Ankita joins me here tomorrow, we look forward to starting a new life together. Thank you all who have always been there for us. Let the good times keep on rolling.

D-Day Tomorrow

Its almost time. Tomorrow is when me and Ankita would exchange vows to spend our rest of the lives together. And tomorrow is also the day when some 270 km away, my dear friend Vikas exchanges vows with Vinita to start their new life together.

Setting an example in extreme startup efficienby, the mustseeindia.com team has doubled its team within a span of 31 days ;-)

Here's the new team (with 2 potential hires ;-))


Wish both the couples luck as we start a new life tomorrow.

Two great startup articles

Vikas Rana, Founder and CEO mustseeindia.com, has written a great article about our experiences at running a startup, focussing on what we did right. Do check it out here.

Prateek Dayal, Founder muziboo.com, writes about costs involved in a startup.

Both are great articles if you are a budding entrepreneur. Recommended read.

Busy busy ... and MSI's new look

There has been times before when I couldn't blog for more than a month. However, I doubt there has been a more busier period in my almost 7 years of professional life.

It has been partly because of the 3 weeks vacation I took to get Engaged and to go on my last bachelor trip, a trip to the North East. I would hopefully get some time next month to write about my experiences there.

The other important reason which has kept all of us here at Must See India busy is the new look of mustseeindia.com. Our earlier theme had been around for some 8 months and we thought it was about time to get something new. We now have an orange theme throughout the site, which looks pretty pleasing to my eye. Also, the pages are much better organized now with one click access to all our new features - flight, train, bus and hotel search.

Please do comment with your valuable feedback for the same.

That is all the time I can spend on this blog right now. You can catch me on twitter for more frequent updates. And tomorrow is an important day in my fiancee's life, so I better get prepared for that ;-)

Losing Status

This is that part of the life which everyone knows is coming and no one knows why. Well I did have some sadistic reasons to people who asked me why in the past, but now I would need permission to publish them. So much for freedom of speech :D

I have lost my bachelor status, as I am now officially engaged to Ankita.

Engagement Pics

Bobby, PK, Lapy, Mama, Lalka, Sid A, Karan, Gaurav, Aman and Priyanka - thanks for coming. You are the best. Hope you all and everyone else would be there for the moral support on D-Day.

25 Random Things about me

I recently wrote a list of 25 things about me on facebook. Reproducing the same here:

• I would be surprised if I am able to write 25 things about myself.
  
• My college nickname Shakti went on to become my alter ego.
  
• I am not a geek in the true sense. I am an entrepreneurial geek. And I know less than most people think I know.
  
• I have reverse aged. Most things that people do in college, I did after it. And I still feel around 5 years older than I actually am.
  
• I am one of the earliest adopters of most web 2.0 services you see today. Gmail, Orkut, delicious, flickr etc
  
• I started blogging in 2004 out of boredom at work. It is one of the best things I have done and continuing.
  
• I discovered my fascination for amateur photography during my Kashmir trip.
  
• I started my first entrepreneur venture mustseeindia.com last year.
  
• I am a risk taker in general and I love adventure sports. I have done rafting, skiing, paragliding. I wish to do sky diving.
  
• I am one hell of a procrastinator.
  
• I am a good teacher. I wish to teach a class just for fun.
  
• I love snow and the Himalayas.
  
• My first kiss was on my bday. My first breakup was on my bday too.
  
• I changed so much during college that a college senior who saw me after 2 years couldn't recognize me.
  
• Quite a few of my friends take my advice in their personal matters.
  
• Biggest compliment I ever got was - It would be really difficult to find a guy who would say bad things about Sanjay.
  
• My only ever purchase of Internet services (except for web hosting for my company) is buying storage on Picasa for storing photos.
  
• Given enough time, I am a good judge of people. I used to do MBTI personality test on willing friends.
  
• I used to have serious aversion to girls till end of college. Now, few of my best friends are girls.
  
• I love gadgets. I used to be a mobile phone freak too until I bought the iPhone. I have become totally uninterested in other phones ever since.
  
• I love music (even though that seems like a cliche). I own a pair of bose headphones for the same.
  
• I am a bad bad singer but I really like to sing. That made me the most popular cacophonist during college.
  
• I have been decent in sports. My biggest achievement in sports is winning a silver medal for my hostel in Volleyball.
  
• I was the surprise Carrom Champion in my final year at college. It was incidently my debut at the championship. I also loved the Munnabhai MBBS carrom sequence, the only place ever where carrom has been glorified.
  
• I have surprised myself. Wrote 25 items and still can think of a few more to write.
  

Which Web Hosting should I take?

Thats the most frequent query that I see in most startup forums. No wonder it is, as setting up a domain is the first thing that any tech startup needs to tackle. Hence I decided to write a post on this, giving my answers. This post will help you with the following:

• Registering a domain.
• Understanding different types of web hosting.
• Setting up email

Registering the Domain
While many hosting providers provide free domains, I believe it is always better to buy your primary domain individually rather than tied to any hosting plan. That ways even if you have to switch your hosting provider anytime, you need not worry about the domain. And with domains costing around $10/year, this is a pretty cheap investment.
There is not much of customer service needed from any Domain Registrar, so I simply looked for the cheapest I could find and registered the domains I needed. I used www.domainsearchindia.com, and while the website looks unprofessional and I had to call them to get things done, it got the job done at pretty much the cheapest prices I have seen so far. Lots of registrars would offer you Email Forwarding or Managed DNS hosting services, but you would not need them. The only thing you need after buying the domain name is an ability to change its nameserver to point to your hosting provider, and that comes for free.

Web Hosting
Web Hosting is a different beast. Here you need reliable servers, high uptime, good customer service and cheap prices on top of that. My first advice is to look for hosting in US. 2 reasons for that - first, bandwidth is cheaper in US and hence you can find a cheaper deal. Second, in general the reliability of US hosting providers and their customer care is better than the Indian ones.
There are 3 kinds of hosting - Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers.

Shared Hosting - The cheapest option available and is around $5-10 per month. Basically the server hardware on which your website would reside would also have 400-500 other websites hosted. Such a setup is in general used for hosting blogs or simple sites with low traffic. The hosting provider would offer huge bandwidth and harddisk, however there would be no promises on website loading speed. You can start with this for initial testing as well as till your traffic is low. A lot of people recommend Dreamhost for this. We used Lunarpages, and their service wasn't all that great but it was kind of okay. One piece of advice - look for SSH access. The web admin interface they provide isn't meant for techies.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting - The server hardware is sliced into 4-5 virtual servers using a virtualization software. So effectively you have your own machine with root access. Internally all the slices still use the same hardware but there are some gurantees on your share of CPU and memory. My friend Prateek suggested an excellent VPS hosting provider VpsFarm. Check out his blog post on why he recommends it. This type of hosting costs around $40 per month and works of medium traffic. A lot of people recommend buying multiple VPS slices for horizontal scaling as your traffic grows.

Dedicated Hosting - You own the whole server hardware. Costs start around $160. We have been using SoftLayer and have been pretty satisfied with that. We moved directly from Shared hosting to Dedicated hosting, primarily because I didn't know abt VPS hosting at that time. My website on Indian Tourism serves quite a lot of static content and VPS may have worked out well for us.

Another advice - Most US sites give out discount coupons/special offers from time to time. Do look out for offers and you may be able to get a good deal.

Setting up Email
Use Google Apps for your domain. Thats free and simplest way to setup your own email@domain-name. You would need to put some CNAME records and MX records in the DNS entries of the Web Hosting provider. If you are on shared hosting, you would need to ask the customer support to do the same for you.

This should solve some of the basic pains of setting up your own domain. One thing to notice is that cost of initial setup is pretty low. A domain name with shared hosting would set you back around Rs. 3000 for an year. That would give you enough time to test your new idea :-)