I agree with this. I was also once a hosting provider which was
ancillary to a business that I used to operate which required me to
offer hosting. I added E-mail because I was sick of dealing with my
customer's ISP's for their E-mail problems (lost passwords, poorly
performing services, bad technical support, etc.). Then after several
years of doing E-mail I ran into a problem where my customers were
frequently getting infected by viruses and their virus infections were
preventing them from exploiting the benefits of their Web presence...so
I purchased Declude. Spam wasn't much of an issue then. Then a year
later spam started becoming more of an issue and I started tweaking my
Declude configs to try to block more, and I started running into the
issues of false positives, plus although I was blocking more, the
increase in volume was causing more to leak so my customers were
complaining more and more. I bared down and eventually became an
expert, and I decided then that instead of this being a cost to me (no
one paid me for E-mail, just Web hosting and other services), I decided
to turn it into a business.
My largest source of revenue from this business just so happens to be
from another Declude user who operates a Web hosting company. He was in
the same place as I was, but he didn't have the patience or
understanding to fix all of his issues, and I showed him how we could
both profit from upselling the service and I fixed his false positive
issues and made his server more manageable to boot. He still uses
Declude and it is still free for his customers (who generally don't even
know it is there), but many customers do want more and are willing to
pay. Without offering this alternative, he would lose not just the
revenue from MailPure that he shares, but also some of the customers
that were unsatisfied with his standard Declude protection.
I have four hosting providers that I work with now that resell my
service, and two of those are current Declude customers. One tells me
that he picks up customers because other customers tell their friends to
come to his service because they have MailPure. Many of these guys are
technically capable of doing better on their own, but they got into the
business to host and or design Web sites and not to deal with spam and
viruses just like me, and it is not easy to turn a profit from an
expensive ancillary service offering without making a major change in
focus (or skipping all of that and partnering with someone like me).
CommTouch has zero possibility of generating revenue for businesses like
my own even though I profit from offering the service unlike most
service providers. This is why a revenue share with Declude is out of
the question. The suggestions are that CommTouch will make experts out
of novices in this game and allow some to become spam blocking
businesses by simply adding better detection, but spam blocking
businesses don't come packaged for people to plug-n-play. For most,
spam and virus blocking will remain a cost center. Approaching this
market with a revenue share licensing for a software add-on is
overwhelming evidence of not understanding the market.
With that said, as an add-on in the same regard as things like Sniffer,
CommTouch might be a good solution (if it performs well) for those that
can pay the $195/year, however it still irks me that after two years and
lots of promises, these things are being added at an extra expense and
not available to people like me under reasonable terms.
Matt
Paul Navarre wrote:
***
Question to thoes that are saying that spam/virus protestion is a lost
leader/not a revenue builder.
If it does not generate revenue then why don't you stop offering spam/virus
protection?
***
Is this a serious question?
If you don't offer spam and virus filtering, you won't have any customers.
In most markets the local competition offers it for free. The national
competition certainly does (yahoo, google, earthlink etc).
Many of us are fighting against low-priced inferior competition. The problem
is that the average customer doesn't know that they are inferior. They *do*
know how much they charge, and if they offer spam/virus protection and you
don't it doesn't matter how poor the other guy's service is. They will
leave. Sure, they will find out later how much the other guys suck, but how
much time/effort/money will it cost to get them back? Chances are they'll
try the next cut rate place instead of coming back to us anyway.
Paul Navarre
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