June 29, 2010 at 10:50SaaS for Hosters
One of the not too often mentioned, but no less critical problems of Russian hostingthere are a lot of customers who don’t have decent sites and don’t know how to make money on the Internet. Now I see that the majority of customers are at lower rates and do not use in full even their capabilities. On the one hand, it’s good - the attendance of client sites is low, the volume is small, resources are spent poorly, you can keep a lot of accounts on the server. On the other hand, customers pay lower pennies at lower rates, and most of these pennies go to questions that are completely unrelated to the main service - contracts, acts and other formalities that are dead weight hanging on the price tag and killing margin (at cost, following the requirements of domestic law often amounts to almost the main part).
In order for customers to switch to higher tariffs for shared hosting and, moreover, to VDS and colocation, they must have sites that are consistently profitable . Then it’s not a pity to spend money on maintenance and development, including paying for decent hosting. At the same time, the number of developers who build truly working solutions is not so large, and those who do it for a reasonable price are disappearingly few. Those. the threshold for entering the world of high-quality sites is not so low.
It seems to me that the most logical way out of this situation is cheap, but high-quality replicated solutions. I have long advocated the idea of a quick and cheap start:Having worked for several years as a project manager for the development of heavy and expensive solutions , I came to the belief that in the vast majority of cases, the client at the very beginning simply does not know what he needs and, more importantly, what his clients need . Moreover, having received an expensive but not effective project due to this ignorance, he is often disappointed on the Internet. From here come the endless groans "for our industry, this does not work." In such cases, it is much more important to launch a small solution that is already working here and now, than to get involved immediately in a long development and implementation, based on your ideas about an ideal world. Getting Real , so to speak.
So why am I doing this, and what have the hosters to do with it? You can consider the current state of affairs as a problem, or you can consider it as an opportunity, potential for growth and increase in profits: hosting providers have a ready-made customer base that needs such solutions (albeit in a rather narrow niche). Moreover, the hosters have extensive experience in the service mode, with regular small payments that provide profit due to the number of customers. What model does this tell us? Sorry for the banality, but SaaS.
However, SaaS in its pure form is not optimal: customers building solutions that are the basis of their business want to be able to collect their data and, moreover, a working solution with this data. What it turns into on some classic site builder in the spirit of the peopleor more sophisticated ucoz , it’s not difficult to guess: the need to create a new site. Accordingly, decisions should have not only a low initial price and the ability to quickly start, but also give the client everything to later “leave the communal apartment” and develop his project “in an adult way”, with individual development, dedicated servers, etc. Those. not so much even SaaS as S + S (Software + Service).
In order for such a development to be possible not only theoretically, it is necessary that developers can work with this dedicated system, while not too specific. That is, roughly speaking, so that the CMS is well-known and affordable. What does this tell us in our Russian conditions? That's right, UMI and Bitrix. With all reservations, these are the main systems with which a huge number of partners work. The good news is that companies are moving in this direction - look at UMI.Host, suddenly renamed to UMI.Cloud and the rental version of the Bitrix Corporate Portal and aspirations for the development of replicated solutions. Another question is that the product from Yumi is still too crude, and Bitrix officially just does not have a rental version of Site Management.
Why is it the same UMI and Bitrix? The new market and the ability to still remain a development company without building the infrastructure necessary for working with end customers. Why is it for hosters? The ability to increase revenue, increase customer income, move to a more marginal market. After all, everyone is pleased to read about the income of SaaS leaders!
In order for customers to switch to higher tariffs for shared hosting and, moreover, to VDS and colocation, they must have sites that are consistently profitable . Then it’s not a pity to spend money on maintenance and development, including paying for decent hosting. At the same time, the number of developers who build truly working solutions is not so large, and those who do it for a reasonable price are disappearingly few. Those. the threshold for entering the world of high-quality sites is not so low.
It seems to me that the most logical way out of this situation is cheap, but high-quality replicated solutions. I have long advocated the idea of a quick and cheap start:Having worked for several years as a project manager for the development of heavy and expensive solutions , I came to the belief that in the vast majority of cases, the client at the very beginning simply does not know what he needs and, more importantly, what his clients need . Moreover, having received an expensive but not effective project due to this ignorance, he is often disappointed on the Internet. From here come the endless groans "for our industry, this does not work." In such cases, it is much more important to launch a small solution that is already working here and now, than to get involved immediately in a long development and implementation, based on your ideas about an ideal world. Getting Real , so to speak.
So why am I doing this, and what have the hosters to do with it? You can consider the current state of affairs as a problem, or you can consider it as an opportunity, potential for growth and increase in profits: hosting providers have a ready-made customer base that needs such solutions (albeit in a rather narrow niche). Moreover, the hosters have extensive experience in the service mode, with regular small payments that provide profit due to the number of customers. What model does this tell us? Sorry for the banality, but SaaS.
However, SaaS in its pure form is not optimal: customers building solutions that are the basis of their business want to be able to collect their data and, moreover, a working solution with this data. What it turns into on some classic site builder in the spirit of the peopleor more sophisticated ucoz , it’s not difficult to guess: the need to create a new site. Accordingly, decisions should have not only a low initial price and the ability to quickly start, but also give the client everything to later “leave the communal apartment” and develop his project “in an adult way”, with individual development, dedicated servers, etc. Those. not so much even SaaS as S + S (Software + Service).
In order for such a development to be possible not only theoretically, it is necessary that developers can work with this dedicated system, while not too specific. That is, roughly speaking, so that the CMS is well-known and affordable. What does this tell us in our Russian conditions? That's right, UMI and Bitrix. With all reservations, these are the main systems with which a huge number of partners work. The good news is that companies are moving in this direction - look at UMI.Host, suddenly renamed to UMI.Cloud and the rental version of the Bitrix Corporate Portal and aspirations for the development of replicated solutions. Another question is that the product from Yumi is still too crude, and Bitrix officially just does not have a rental version of Site Management.
Why is it the same UMI and Bitrix? The new market and the ability to still remain a development company without building the infrastructure necessary for working with end customers. Why is it for hosters? The ability to increase revenue, increase customer income, move to a more marginal market. After all, everyone is pleased to read about the income of SaaS leaders!