Everything listed below are services that I personally use and pay for or have paid for. They are still valuable resources that will help you achieve your goals in levelling up your development skills and getting higher-paid work!

***** Disclaimer *****

Most if not all the links below are affiliate links which means I will receive a small amount in compensation for recommending these products. This has not influenced me in any way in my recommendation as it would be silly to recommend something that is bad because it would break the trust you have placed in me.

The trust I have built is far more valuable to me than recommending something that isn’t good for you because you’d never listen to me again and I’d lose out in the long term.

Hostinger

I use Hostinger as my website provider for anything PHP-based.

Whether it's WordPress, Laravel or some simple PHP, Hostinger are my go-to choice!

Why?

They offer great support (which I've used many times).

A reasonable, long-term price, you will often find companies will lure you in with a cheap price only to 5x the price when it comes to renewal. Hostinger is more transparent about it and although their signup price is cheaper than a long-term price, it's only usually double.

Yearly I'm currently paying £79 which I think is very reasonable seeing as I host around 20 websites.

Plus all my premium email accounts like this one, hey@codewithross.com, are hosted by them, all included in the yearly package.

Nord VPN

Having a VPN is a debatable topic, some argue it’s unnecessary, and others say it’s vital.

But me personally, having that peace of mind when I’m sitting in Starbucks writing code and often working with highly sensitive data.

Especially when Starbucks is public Wi-Fi and sometimes not encrypted.

I like having a VPN.

That’s why I use Nord VPN, they’re not only cheap but have reliably good speeds and thousands of servers to pick from, in many different countries.

Not to mention the fact that most countries apply some sort of geo-restriction, Netflix and Amazon Prime just to name a few.

Another surprising fact, most companies offer different prices for different countries, just change your location to another country and see for yourself!

Uptime Robot

Knowing your services are running 24/7 is critical, it would be awful if you built your wonderful website only for it to be offline at the most important moment when that important client visits and... BOOM it's down.

Not only is this embarrassing, it can cost you money because the client won't think positively about it.
It'll likely cost you that job.

And if your clients pay anything like what mine do, that's a lot of money down the drain.

So how do you prevent it?

Uptime Robot will monitor your websites every 1 minute and tell you immediately when it's detected offline.
You can install an app on your iPhone / Android which will tell you instantly, or send you emails.
Uptime Robot has a long list of available notification methods to pick from.

GitHub

When you write code, you need a safe place to store your code. You also need a place to show off your best code when applying for jobs and acquiring clients.

GitHub is the perfect place for this.

You can create private/public repositories so that sensitive code you need to keep secret can stay hidden whilst those amazing portfolio projects you want to show can be public for the whole world to see your amazing code!
Especially those juicy clients!

GitHub also gives you a nice punch card which is essentially evidence that you actually write code on a daily basis.

This is very important because many clients will ask you if you can provide evidence that you actually wrote the code.

As someone who has interviewed people... More than 50% of applicants have had some form of help with the code and didn't write it all themselves.
You can catch them out with tricky questions but it's much nicer to know up front by having a fleshed-out GitHub account with lots of evidence.