On Monday 01 Nov 2004 3:12 am, Timothy Tate wrote:
>
> I didn't consider the competing with customers part, though.
Some of their customers already had webbuilder reseller programs and that
didn't stop them ;)
Although this is I suspect a bigger channel conflict would arise.
> It could be a welcome relief from the headaches associated with maintaining
> your own servers or being in a shaky reseller situation. Nothing is worse
> that using a provider that is growing faster than their capabilities or
> with whom a reseller channel is simply an afterthought.
I think a difficult market, we sell vastly more of our web builder accounts,
than simple hosting, despite substantial price differences. Of course that
could be down to marketing.
But I think the market is mature enough that people want Plone hosting, or
Mambo hosting, or <insert favourite CMS| favourite Bulletin board>, or some
combination of Apache+{PHP| Perl| Python}+{MySQL| Postgres}, or {JSP+whatever
Java stuff}, or worse still {ASP|.NET}, any or all of these +/-{SSL}.
Interestingly the predecessor of the company I work for thought that component
webservices would be the thing, and one of the spin off companies does sell
some things like Bulletin Board, Guestbooks etc. Although I fear the market
didn't mature fast enough to make the venture capitalists happy.
If you decide, like one of my friends, that Plone is the way forward, you
discover there are already dedicated Plone hosting providers offering the
service at rockbottom prices. Free software makes for fierce competition on
value.
More obvious market to me would be end user "application service provider"
roles, such as email/calendaring/groupware, where there is less competition
at the moment, and a lot of mediocre overpriced offerings. Although maybe
there are some really good ones I haven't reviewed?!
People want just a bit more than Exchange without the hassle and expense, but
some of these companies are offering basically hosted Exchange server at
prices that make running your own look cheap. Probably require big initial
investment thought.
