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A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
Hi all,
I’m putting together a plan for a Textpattern hosting service and I’d like to get a discussion going with the Textpattern community about what you would like to see in the ideal Textpattern host. The idea here is to provide a hosting service tuned specifically and exclusively for hosting Textpattern sites, and I would like to engage the entire Textpattern community in defining the service.
Here’s a list of some of the high points of what I am envisioning:
The service is designed and tuned exclusively for Textpattern-based sites. The servers as well as the software will be fully managed – right down to the installation of Textpattern itself. You will never need to install or upgrade Textpattern manually. This will be fully automated (or at most, a single button click away). Many popular plugins will come pre-installed and ready to use out-of-the-box.
First (and I realize all hosts claim this), reliability and performance are absolute priorities. This will not be a run-of-the-mill cheapo “unlimited space and bandwidth for two bucks” service that goes down 5 times a day. This will be a premium service designed for clients who need their sites to be up and running 24/7. All customer sites will be hosted in a fully clustered load-balanced environment with no single point of failure, including multiple-datacenter geographic redundancy. Page caching functionality will be built-in to maximize site performance.
Built-in staging server functionality. Test changes to your site before taking them live. Test upgrade to newer version of Textpattern before applying it to your live production site.
Full site backups (files/images/css/database) available on demand.
Optional integration with Amazon S3 for offloading of static file serving.
Moderate storage (1-5 GB) and bandwidth (10-20 GB) allocations. The idea here is to provide resources appropriate to 99% of web sites out there. If you fall in the 1% (because you stream high-def videos 24/7), then this is not the service for you. Of course, additional static file storage (and associated bandwidth) can be offloaded to S3 or a similar service if necessary.
Additional functionality geared towards Textpattern designers who create Textpattern-based sites for their clients and who also may perform ongoing maintenance of those sites as well (e.g. single login account to access all the client sites that you manage).
How much will this cost? I want the service to be affordable, but the reliability/performance goals stated above will dictate pricing more than anything. My best guess estimate at this stage of planning is that pricing will be somewhere in the range of $20-$30 per month.
Please tell me what you think. Would you like to see a service like this? Would you use it? Would you refer clients to it? How much would you pay for it? Which of the above features is most important to you and why? What other features would you like to see? What plugins should come pre-installed? Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated.
Also, if you would like to become involved in this project in some way, please let me know. For example, would you like to build the service’s corporate site (in Textpattern of course!)? Perhaps we can work out a trade (eg. hosting for site design). I also need a name for the service, a domain, a logo, etc. Would welcome any and all assistance in moving this project from vision to reality.
Thanks for reading – I look forward to hearing your ideas.
Sam
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
20 to 30 is too much. You’ll find that competing with other places like MT’s GS service (20/mo) will put you out quickly. MT has 1-click installs of blogging software and more features in a single GS account than you’ll be able to offer.
You should target a bit lower, I think….
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#3 2008-06-23 05:18:51
- net-carver
- Archived Plugin Author
- Registered: 2006-03-08
- Posts: 1,648
Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
artagesw wrote:
Also, if you would like to become involved in this project in some way, please let me know. For example, would you like to build the service’s corporate site (in Textpattern of course!)? Perhaps we can work out a trade (eg. hosting for site design). I also need a name for the service, a domain, a logo, etc. Would welcome any and all assistance in moving this project from vision to reality.
Sam, just a thought re. logo: check out LogoSauce. If you like what you see then you could start your own competition and see what you get — there are some good logo artists hanging out there.
— Steve
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
Walker wrote:
20 to 30 is too much. You’ll find that competing with other places like MT’s GS service (20/mo) will put you out quickly. MT has 1-click installs of blogging software and more features in a single GS account than you’ll be able to offer. You should target a bit lower, I think….
Actually, I’m glad you brought up MT. Their $20 grid service has more downtime than I can count. I know I can do better. Much better. The problem with services like MT is that they try to be too general – and this leads to many of the service failures that their customers experience. By tuning our service specifically to a single application – Textpattern in this case – we can exert a much greater degree of control over the service and ensure a much higher degree of reliability. Plus, if you look over the feature set I described in my original post, you will find several features that MT just cannot offer. (A “one button” Textpattern install just doesn’t cut it.)
Granted, I can’t match MT’s storage and bandwidth offering. But that’s pure illusion anyway – the product of massive overselling, which is one of the other factors that leads to performance and reliability problems. I’m sure MT has their loyal fans, but there are many detractors as well.
If my price is equal to or a bit higher than MT’s, I believe it will be justified by the Textpattern-centric feature set, not to mention the multi-datacenter redundancy (which MT does not offer, to my knowledge). Hopefully, that will be something customers find worth paying for. If not, better to learn that now – before embarking down this path.
Please keep the feedback coming!
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
net-carver wrote:
Sam, just a thought re. logo: check out LogoSauce. If you like what you see then you could start your own competition and see what you get — there are some good logo artists hanging out there.
Thanks for the tip.
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
artagesw wrote:
If my price is equal to or a bit higher than MT’s, I believe it will be justified by the Textpattern-centric feature set
fwiw, I think this is the right way to go. I’m a firm believer in cornering a specific market and charging a slightly higher price for “specialist” knowledge. Higher price = more perceived value, yahde yahde. As long as you can deliver (and it certainly sounds like you know what you’re doing!) and market to these strengths then word of mouth and good SEO will help enormously.
The only thing against you in terms of dollar return is the (currently) relatively small TextPattern user base. But then if your reliability is greater than most hosts out there and your specialist knowledge and support get you a name for yourself, there’s no reason on earth it won’t work for you.
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
artagesw wrote:
Actually, I’m glad you brought up MT. Their $20 grid service has more downtime than I can count. I know I can do better. Much better.
I haven’t experienced “more downtime than I can count,” but every couple of weeks someone appears to fill the grid with molasses. So, yes, I would pay more than $20 ($25? $30?) for a service tuned to Txp that is consistently snappy in response.
However, I would also note this has been tried before. It was called Textdrive. And it evolved rapidly into something other than “Textpattern hosting.” So I’m just not sure how large a customer base you’ll be able to pull from.
TextPattern user since 04/04/04
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#8 2008-06-23 18:52:48
- masa
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- From: Asturias, Spain
- Registered: 2005-11-25
- Posts: 1,091
Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
Just a thought, but perhaps you could offer custom txp programming solutions, too.
I’m comfortable with html and css, but when it comes to custom php and js I usually need professional help. You could hook up with seasoned txp pros and offer that as a special service at reasonable hourly rates.
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
reid wrote:
I haven’t experienced “more downtime than I can count,” but every couple of weeks someone appears to fill the grid with molasses. So, yes, I would pay more than $20 ($25? $30?) for a service tuned to Txp that is consistently snappy in response.
However, I would also note this has been tried before. It was called Textdrive. And it evolved rapidly into something other than “Textpattern hosting.” So I’m just not sure how large a customer base you’ll be able to pull from.
Hi Reid, I’m glad to hear you’ve had better luck with MT. Regarding Textdrive, like you I am one of the fairly early “VC” customers. The desire to create this service stems at least in part from the fact that Textdrive did not end up sticking to its Textpattern roots (or even continuing to nourish them after expanding into other things). I have absolutely no desire to create a huge general hosting company, nor to merge with a provider of various and sundry web applications. I could envision expanding into other vertically hosted applications at some point. But if so, each hosted application would have its own dedicated cluster tuned specifically to that application’s needs. That said, I love Textpattern and the primary purpose here is and will always be to provide it with the best hosting support available.
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
masa wrote:
Just a thought, but perhaps you could offer custom txp programming solutions, too. I’m comfortable with html and css, but when it comes to custom php and js I usually need professional help. You could hook up with seasoned txp pros and offer that as a special service at reasonable hourly rates.
Yes, a fine idea and one I had been considering. At the very least, I would like to include a free “Textpattern Pros” directory listing on the main site to make it easier for folks to find seasoned Textpattern web designers.
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Re: A New Textpattern Hosting Service - Feedback Requested
Sam,
You have good ideas, though I think you’re talking about two different services.
A) You can cater to the do-it-yourselfer, we install and upgrade Textpattern for you, install plugins, themes, etc. A sort of contained environment, easier on the newbie, a light wp.com of sorts.
B) Then there’s the web developer, all he cares about is reliability, you don’t want the MySQL database going tits up on a Friday afternoon. He or she for the most part will be running SVN and have their own tweaks to the backend.
Option A requires a bit more hosted application work, hand holding, friendly support forum. While option B just requires a kick ass knowledge of available server technologies, as in when are you going to offer a VPS option.
I would say go for option B first, get the servers really humming and people who know Textpattern well to press the accelerator. Then, once you have reliability and you have more people on board for support, open it up for option A.
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