My stack

DinoRANK is the SEO suite I use every day with almost all of my clients. I picked it because the balance between price and features is hard to beat, even against much more expensive tools, and it covers most of my daily work in one place: keyword research, technical audits, and a content writer I use often to put together first drafts before editing them by hand and adjusting the tone for each client. I never rely only on its keyword data. I always cross-check it against other sources before locking in a strategy, because no single tool gets it right every time. What convinces me the least is its keyword-research AI, which often just returns no results at all, and the local SEO map, which can take a long time to generate whenever I need the data quickly for a client meeting.

I use DataForSEO for bulk keyword research, when I need data on hundreds or thousands of terms at once and doing it tool by tool by hand just doesn't make sense. With its API I built several internal apps that pull my clients' keyword data straight into my own database, so I can build strategy on top of that instead of exporting one-off reports from an interface. It's the piece that lets me automate research I used to do manually. What I value most is that the tokens never expire, so I can top up whenever it makes sense without feeling pressure to spend them before some deadline. The real friction is the minimum recharge of 50 dollars, which feels a bit steep for small one-off research, though at the volume I normally work with it still pays off.

Hostinger is the hosting I recommend to clients by default, and where I end up hosting most of my own projects too. I picked it because the balance between speed and price is among the best I've tested, and because it doesn't lock down server functionality the way cheaper shared hosts often do, which matters a lot when I need to configure something specific for a client project without asking permission or upgrading a plan just to unlock a basic option. The configuration is genuinely open: I can go in, adjust what I need, and keep working instead of fighting a panel that hides real control of the server. So far I don't have a real complaint to report. I've used it across projects of very different sizes and it hasn't given me a reason to stop recommending it.

I turn to DigitalOcean when a client needs a specific VPS, without the extra layers a managed host usually adds. I use it mostly on personal projects where I want full control of the server from scratch, instead of depending on a panel that decides how something gets configured. Spinning up a new droplet takes minutes, and once it's up it responds fast for what I usually need: standing up an API, running a background process, or testing something before moving it to a more permanent environment. What limits me a bit is the number of available data centers, which is smaller than other providers, so latency to certain regions sometimes ends up a little worse than I'd like. I don't have a public case study with DigitalOcean because the use has mostly been on personal projects, not delivered client work.

I use Kinsta for three specific things: hosting the databases of my main personal projects, hosting WordPress sites when a client specifically asks for it, and spinning up temporary hosting for university projects that only need to stay up for a few weeks. It runs on Google Cloud infrastructure, and it shows: it's one of the fastest hosts I've tried, and it comes with staging environments included, so I can test changes before touching the production site without setting up anything extra. What weighs on me is the price, which is high compared to other options doing something similar, and specifically with WordPress it feels fairly limited in what you can touch on the server side. I also don't have a public case study with Kinsta, since the use has been on personal or university projects, not client deliveries.

Payload is my alternative to WordPress whenever I build a site from scratch, and it's literally what runs behind this very site. I picked it because it lets me optimize every part of the site to the max, something that in WordPress usually ends up fighting against plugins and layers you don't fully control. The speed of juan-tech.com is the most direct proof: I can touch the code of the whole application, not just the content, and that translates into a site that's genuinely fast, not just fast on paper. The tradeoff is a steeper learning curve for clients or users coming from a WordPress-style world, where everything gets edited from an interface. Maintenance here happens at the code level, so if a client wants to change something structural, they need someone who can actually program, not just log into the admin panel.

Cloudinary is where I store and edit the site's images, and it's the piece that generates the OG images you see when someone shares a page from juan-tech.com on social media. What I use the most is on-the-fly editing: I can request a cropped, resized, or text-overlaid version of an image just by changing the URL, without opening an editor or generating duplicate files by hand. That saves me a good amount of time whenever I need several variants of the same image for different formats or languages. So far I don't have a real complaint to report. I've used it across several projects, personal and client work alike, and it hasn't given me a reason to consider switching to something else.

Resend is what I use for the site's transactional email, and so far the free tier has been more than enough for the volume I handle. What I value most is how easy it was to set up: within a short time I had reliable email sending working, with good delivery speed and none of the usual headaches of configuring SMTP by hand or fighting older providers. It just works, and for an email service that's worth more than it sounds. What I haven't explored yet are its automations for building a full email marketing flow directly from there, something I'm interested in trying eventually but that stays outside my daily workflow for now.

I use Ahrefs mainly at the start of new client projects, to get a clear picture of where the site stands before touching anything. It gives me a fairly complete view of how a project starts and how it scales over time, which I use to justify decisions to the client with concrete data instead of just intuition. That view of progress is what I value most about the tool: I can clearly show what changed between month one and month six of a strategy. The problem is the price. It's one of the most expensive tools in my stack, which means it isn't always the first option for a small project, where I end up reaching for more affordable alternatives instead.