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Does a shared hosting market require a new affordable hosting panel?
vielendank
Member
in General
Coming from cpanel price hikes, we are developing our own custom control panel based on hub and spoke model. In central, there is a tower node that has separated servers of dns, mysql, mail and web servers attached. As control panels like cpanel/directadmin are made of monolithic design, we thought of building a control panel which will allow us to use individual server for maintaining DNS records, mailboxes, hosting php sites and databases.
If we think of offering it to the general public under SaaS model, would it make a sense of generating a revenue if unlimited customers/resellers are provided at $50 a month?
Cheers
Comments
I can only speak for myself, but I would not be interested in a SaaS model.
Make it selfhosted, and I would atleast give it a try.
why not in saas model?
Just guessing, I don't sell servers...
Yes, if you have 50000 customers. No, if you have 50 customers.
And the people with more than a few thousand customers all seem to have their own custom panels anyway, so probably it'll be a tough market to break into.
I wonder whether those custom panel providers have considered turning their custom panels into marketable products that they could sell to other providers? It could turn into another revenue stream for them.
My initial thought is that the market is too small to make it worth the effort to productize their panels, and the best ones treat them as a proprietary advantage. Just a feeling.
Like @ralf, I am a customer, not a provider.
do you mean it is a diminishing market?
No. What I meant was that the market may be too small to be profitable.
A company going into the business must productize their control panel and add more development discipline, QA, customer support, sales/marketing infrastructure, etc.
Furthermore, they must compete against the established companies already in the market. That may include the cost to develop tools that help customers migrate from what they use now to their new product.
It could also turn into a support nightmare, especially if you end up adding features for the wider user population which are not really in demand with your core users. If your company is the only one using the software you can constrain the installation environments and feature set considerably without people pissing & moaning at much as the wider public might when you don't include or otherwise support their favourite tool/feature/script.
Also keeping the code internal offers a little security through obscurity (it is surprising how alluring this can be, despite good security practise directly recommending against relying on it at all).
Also there is more reputational risk: fuck up big time if your panel is used by millions and your name may not recover easily.
That all needs to be weighed against the potential revenue stream.
How about turning it to an open source solution with optional paid support and plugins?
The hosting market needs an open-source panel. Licenses become a burden.
Agreed but never seen any hosting service provider using any of them.
Also I wonder how does a team behind a control panel like ispconfig generate revenue?
If a company develops their own control panel and open sources it, their main differentiator would be by having really good customer service on the machines they sell. Additionally, if everyone knows that it's their control panel, that alone will probably drive some traffic to their main business.
if you are developing your own panel, how about open sourcing it by doing GPL license for example and then allowing a hosted SAAS version for anyone not willing to keep up with updates/backup/security?
Lack of control.
Every case I've seen where someone uses SaaS, they have been left dead in the water due to a version upgrade or a change in API somewhere or the provider decides to remove a certain function or something similar.
I can only answer for myself, but I would never build a business that is so totally dependent on someone else if I could avoid it.
Isn't that technically, what Keyhelp has been doing. They are developing their own panel and even offer it for free + Pro version for others
DirectAdmin had almost the same model(Internal almost free licenses and a Pro pack for direct paid customers with support). But unfortunately, they are killing internal licenses altogether!