Daniel Macyszyn from Sejmometr.pl posts about their approach to building an internet portal like theirs in the most effective way. He refers to three outsourced functionalities on the site used to make their work easier on a daily basis:

1. Hosting of documents on Scribd (free service),

2. Managing comments with help of paid (20$/month) disqus.com package,

3. Using Google Site Search as their main search engine (100$/year).

Now, why is that so important? Let me quote Daniel, who points out the benefits of this approach:

Effectiveness
We do not state that we can build a better commenting system than Disqus. We also do not state that we can build a better search engine than Google. What we do say is that we can build a pretty good portal presenting the work of parliament and this is what we focus on.

Lower costs
Thanks to the outsourcing of the above mentioned functionalities, we lighten the Sejmometr server’s load from the described tasks, while we maintain pretty low costs of hosting. Sejmometr still works on a very basic hosting service and we have no issues with its effectiveness whatsoever.

What do you think? Is this the right approach? Let us know!