In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 9 & 10:

11 – Bend the rules

This is no call for cheating. Yet if you register that high speed Internet connection as a private individual you receive five times the speed at a third of the cost compared to a company registration. So go for the private plan and save big bucks.

In case you make it as a company you anyway will want to upgrade to a speedier connection at some point and go for a company account at that very moment. In case you don’t make it, you saved a great deal of money.

The same goes for a number of other services. And anyhow, you are at the start of your company life. You are in a difficult transition phase from this being your totally private idea to the infant stages of a company. And infants need a lot of leeway. A bit of bending the rules helps.

12 – Forget tapes, do online backups

“Yesterday all my backups seemed so far away…” Backups are important. Full stop. Or you may suffer a fate similar to Magnolia, a once acclaimed social bookmarking service, rivalling Delicious. Data corruption plus no backups doomed the service for good.

Today backups is no longer that nightmarish tape box, difficult to setup and difficult to maintain. A number of nifty online backup options do exist. We here at Memonic made good experiences with vendors such as Jungle Disk. A number of similar services do exist.

Basically it’s cloud computing again, as in fact you backup your data to an online storage (Amazon or Rackspace in the case of Jungle Disk) with the vendor providing the software to do the backups and in case required restore the backups. Bonus tip: Test your backups.