----- Original Message ----- From: "Simon Waters" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2004 9:05 AM
Subject: Re: Will TuCows ever offer reseller webhosting?
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?!
One thing I have come up against this week is the need for a new helpdesk system.
If someoen offered a remotely hosted helpdesk under a subdomain of our domain and with email piping
I would definitely be interested.
Provided the supplier was likely to be a round for a long time.
There used to be one (who'se name escapes me) but they were bought by Microsoft and then the service was dropped.
The advantage of having it remotely hosted is that it would keep working even if all your other systems were down so you could still communicate with customers.
There is definitely a market for hosted services but they do need to to be reliable, which is something Tucows does seem to be good at.
Regards
Gordon Hudson Hostroute.com Ltd www.hostroute.net
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