logers

This is my first post to these forums so your direction and compassion is greatly appreciated.

I am one of the co-founders of a hosting business that has clients across a broad spectrum of industries. My partner and I are looking at completely re-factoring our business to do more of what we love and excel at; working with design shops and association management firms.

I would desperately love feedback on my idea of the ideal hosting company for Designers specifically in meeting their needs with their clients. This is in no way a solicitation for anything other than honest feedback, and possibly an on-going relationship with a to-be mutual partner.

I see a great many designers frustrated that they can build the perfect new site for clients, but then they are stuck supporting it, or having a rocky hand-off to a separate hosting company and forcing the client to pay 3-ways: the design fees, the site maintenance fees, and the hosting fees.

My solution would be to provide a seamless solution for the designer or association manager to create a hosting account on their own, brand a user interface for their clients to manage their site info on their own - billing, user accounts, email perhaps - and to receive a healthy percentage of the monthly hosting fees. The designer would also have an open channel of communication with us via phone/email, while their clients would have a robust ticketing system that would allow support inquiries to be escalated through the design firm to us, or selectively handled by the design firm themselves.

This would NOT be a bargain-bin 3-buck-chuck hosting solution, rather a very robust tiered solution that went from mini-sites to fully clustered rails/python application servers.

The main points are that it would be a service that is ONLY available through design firms and association managers, and provide elite support for design gurus that matched the eliteness of their organizations and the quality of sites that they build.

We have experience building cutting edge Ruby on Rails (and previously PHP) applications for large organizations including 1200 bed hospitals and mega-churches, and we want to build a business where we can support like-minded designers who desperately need a full-service solution that doesn't cause them stress or any added expense. With this plan, partners can actually charge in excess of our base-prices to provide greater hands-on support to their clients and be compensated for it. And the merchant details are taken care of completely on our side with surplus money transferred as monthly payments, unless you prefer to bill clients directly each month (which most people loathe).

We can build the applications around this in approx 4 months with the tools and expertise that we have on hand. My question is whether or not this is appealing or seductive to you as a Designer, or to your design firm to offload the Hosting hassles to a partner you can trust?

Please comment; I will not divulge my company, nor try and recruit any services, this is purely for feedback on the concept! We may be interested in a mutual partner following IBM's 'First Customer' design approach. Thank you very much.

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-Nick-

That is an excellent idea and I think you will get lots of clients. I did had some ideas along this lines. But then my personal experiences with some clients were not so good. They wanted it their way and they had no knowledge of anything that goes online.

So that is the frustrating part of keeping them all happy on larger scale.

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logers

Certainly, how it really works in practice is the real heart of the discussion. I'll offer up a use case of adding a new client. If any of this sounds like hand-waving please ask me to clarify. We have some technologies already in use, and some is still on napkin-diagrams, but all of it is feasible.

ACME design firm won a contract to build a new interactive website for an Event Planning company (Eventus) in PHP. After design discussions they've mocked up an event-planning site that has 4 layouts, 35 static pages, and an additional integrated Event Planning application that allows clients to interactively configure and request pricing for events that Eventus would coordinate.

ACME design firm is partnered with us, and logs into our 'Vendor Admin Console'. They first add a 'New Client', Eventus, and an Admin User from Eventus (first name, last name, email). From there, the system emails the Admin user and allows them to login to our ACME branded site to activate their account, enter in their company info, and manage their own users/permissions.

Next ACME adds a 'New Site' to the Eventus client for the event-planning website. They choose the site type (micro, small, medium, large, dedicated virtual, dedicated, cluster), the billing term (monthly, quarterly, annually), and the price they wish to charge Eventus. They must charge at least our base price, but can add whatever additional margin they wish. After 2x our base price however, we would switch to a flat percentage.

ACME could choose to invoice Eventus directly (not recommended, but some clients insist on paying via check/invoice only), or they could let us handle the automatic recurring billing via CC or eCheck. If we bill Eventus, their site admin receives an email branded from ACME with a link to enter in their billing info/cc/echeck/etc automatically. Every month, we electronically transfer the margin $$$ from all client sites to ACME, and debit any invoice $$$ for client sites that they are invoicing manually. We handle 2nd/3rd notices, account suspensions for non-paying clients automatically as well, but are not responsible for any profits lost from non-paying clients.

ACME can create/review/update/delete Eventus' event-planner website at will, and even add multiple other websites for Eventus. The real goal is for ACME to not ever think about the logistics of Eventus' operations, just to reap the margin rewards, or just the benefit of being a one-stop shop for their clients ongoing needs.

Support is handled through our branded ticketing system. Both ACME and we receive a copy of all support communications with Eventus, and ACME is welcome to field the answers they wish to tackle, while leaving the day-to-day 'how to configure email' questions to us.

Ongoing maintenance/content management for websites will be another optional source of revenue and client-touch for ACME by integrating existing platforms such as the Osmos CMS. We can also leverage other 3rd party tools with APIs for ecommerce -- Shopify, form-building -- WuFoo, basically anything that we can mashup into the site that will provide value to ACME.

The (small,medium,large) sites would be immediately provisioned and available by proprietary tools we're developing using Amazon EC2 scaling, while the dedicated virtual, dedicated, and cluster/load balanced large application sites would be custom built by our build teams.

The bottom line is that it would live in the shadow of any designer, design firm, or even hosting companies that wanted to seamlessly refer certain types of clients but still get a share in the sales.

Does that begin to answer your questions enough to provide additional feedback?