SaaS for hosters

One of the not too often mentioned, but no less critical problems of Russian hosting providers (however, I suspect that not only Russian) is a huge number of customers who do not have decent sites and who do not know how to make money on the Internet. Now I see that the majority of clients are sitting on lower tariffs and are not taking full advantage of even their capabilities. On the one hand, this is 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 on lower rates pay a penny, and most of these kopecks go to questions that are completely unrelated to the basic service — contracts, acts, and other formalities that hang dead on the price tag and kill the margin (in the cost price, compliance with the requirements of domestic legislation often almost the main part).

In order for clients to switch to higher rates of virtual hosting and, even more so, to VDS and collocation, they must have websites that are consistently profitable . Then it is not a pity to spend money on maintenance and development, including paying for decent hosting. At the same time, the number of developers who are building really working solutions is not so great, and those who do it for reasonable money are vanishingly small. Those. the threshold of entry into the world of quality sites is not so low.

The most logical way out of this situation, it seems to me, are cheap, but quality replicable solutions. I’ve been advocating the idea of ​​a quick and cheap start for a long time: having worked for several years as a project manager for developing difficult and expensive solutions , I came to believe that in the overwhelming 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 because of this ignorance, he is often disappointed on the Internet. From here come the endless groans "for our industry it does not work." In such cases, it is much more important to launch a small, but already working here and now solution, than to get involved right away in a long development and implementation, based on your ideas about the ideal world. Getting Real , so to speak.
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So what am I doing this, and what’s the reason for hosters? You can consider the current state of affairs as a problem, or you can - as an opportunity, potential for growth and increase in profits: hosting providers have a ready base of customers who need such solutions (albeit in a fairly narrow niche). Moreover, hosters have extensive experience in the service mode, with regular small payments, providing a 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. It’s not hard to guess what this turns into on some classic website builder in the spirit of the people or a more sophisticated ucoz . Accordingly, the solutions should have not only a small initial price and the ability to quickly start, but also give the client everything in order to “leave the komunalki” and develop their project “adult-style”, with individual development, dedicated servers, etc. Those. not even SaaS as much as S + S (Software + Service).

In order for such a development to be possible not only theoretically, it is necessary that the developers, while not too specific, can work with this dedicated system. Ie, roughly speaking, so that CMS is known and accessible. What does this tell us in our Russian conditions? That's right, UMI and Bitrix. With all the 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 UMI.Cloud and the rental version of Bitriksovsky Corporate Portal and the aspirations to develop replicable solutions. Another question is that the product from Yumi is still too raw, while Bitrix officially does not have a rental version of Site Management.

Why is it the same UMI and Bitrix? A new market and the ability to still remain a developer company, without building the infrastructure necessary to work with end customers. Why is it hosters? The ability to increase revenues, increase revenue from customers, move to a more marginal market. Everyone is happy to read about the incomes of the SaaS leaders!