Technology that works

My wife runs a small retail / hospitality business called The Deli Platter, located in the wonderful Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne. Go visit. They've got beautiful food and it's a great day out.
To help us run that business, and having a partner who's a techno-geek (i.e. me), of course we use technology. I've done a lot of work to try to come up with cost-effective and robust solutions for various day-to-day tasks, so I thought it would be useful to share some of the tools that we use. Since cost control is important, many of these tools are free. There are, of course, any number of paid services so being able to set up a whole bunch of IT solutions that don't have a heavy price tag attached is great. There are also some things that I've got no problem paying for.
The IT and software world is going more and more towards paying by the month for subscription services. The problem with this from a consumer point of view is, of course, that these costs start to mount up and they're on-going. So finding cheap or free alternatives that offer the functionality and robustness necessary to base business processes on them has been an interesting challenge.
OK, here goes...

• Domain name: every business these days needs it's own place on the 'net. I registered thedeliplatter.com.au using Cheaper Domains. At $35 for 2 years including DNS hosting, I haven't found anywhere cheaper for Australian domain names.
• Email: none other than Google for Business. Free, custom domain, mobile integration, plenty of storage. Just what you want. Oh, and calendars, contact lists etc.
• Web hosting. I spent a bunch of times trying to figure how to do this cheaply by creating a website from static files and serving them from an Amazon S3 bucket. But the better solution turned out to be much easier, and cheaper too. We use weebly.com to host www.thedeliplatter.com.au and it's been great so far. Nice templates, easy setup, fast. We don't do much eCommerce, so their free service is perfectly adequate for us. I've got no problem that the weebly logo is displayed at the bottom of the page.
• Social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Obvious really. And the Pages ipad app to keep these multiple locations fed and watered.
• Document management: Dropbox. Takes care of backups, version management, availability etc.
• Business processes: Zoho Creator. Rather than trying to juggle spreadsheets, Creator lets you create simple database apps through the browser with a drag-and-drop interface. And because it's all online, it can be accessed from PCs and mobile devices alike, again without the worry of managing backups, versions etc. Great, and free up to 1000 records (which is actually quite a lot).
• Monitoring the premises. Of course we have cloud-connected cameras monitoring the premises, in our case DLink day/night cameras were a good, inexpensive option. I did try sensr.net for image storage and playback but at $15 a month this seemed pretty steep for what it does.
  The other great development has been using Ninja Blocks. These cool devices from a Sydney-based start-up let you monitor and control devices wirelessly. In our case we have wireless thermometers in each main fridge. They send temperature and humidity records to the NinjaBlock website where rules run. If they detect that the temperature is too high during the evening or at night, I get an SMS, because it usually means that the fridge is playing up. Much better than finding ruined stock the next morning. Cheap to buy and easy to set up. 

Do you use other services that really tick the 'bang for buck' box? If so, leave a comment.