Hosting pricing plan

Posts you want to find years later go here.
Post Reply
Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Hosting pricing plan

Post by Peijen »

If you were to run a hosting service, how would you price your plans?

It seems to be there are two major method used, by usage and flat fee.

Flat fee is pretty simple, $xx / user or $xx / account or some combination of both. It doesn't matter how much resource you use up you pay the same amount. Internet access and most MMOG are priced this way.

By usage in my eye split into two catagory tier and pay as you go. Most of web hosting and paid email account are tiered, i.e. $xx for Y space and Z bandwidth. Pay as you go is pretty simple to understand, 1992's internet access and metered mainframe/cluster usage are some example of it.

Are there other type of pricing plans? Is there money to be made for flat fee services in B2B world?

Jonathan
Grand Pooh-Bah
Posts: 6722
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:45 pm
Location: Portland, OR
Contact:

Post by Jonathan »

What are your costs and competition? Do your costs scale by users or by usage? Is usage a normal distribution, a power law distribution, or something else?

There's pricing based on number of employees of the user: low cost for personal use, expensive for business, super expensive for large business. Basically, you change the fee according to the users ability to pay. There's also free but charge for support or customization or feature addition. You often see websites like that, such as LJ.

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »

Here is the rough idea I have, all the services are delivered through web I guess. Let's say you develop a few business services that can stand as an individual services but they are related to each other. Say timesheet, payroll, and invoices (for consulting services). Business can buy each individual services or they can buy a combination of them. Each component is obviously related to each other.

You charge per user fee, say $50 / user / services, and maybe some sort of bundle like 5% discount for 2 services and 10% discount for all 3.

Take that idea and build a few hundred services and allow companies to buy as much or as little as they want.

Competition will be high for some services and low for some of the more niche services. Cost will probably be high though. Haven't thought of how the cost and usage will scale.

Jonathan
Grand Pooh-Bah
Posts: 6722
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:45 pm
Location: Portland, OR
Contact:

Post by Jonathan »

Is there money to be made? Depends. If you mean, could I make a living, yeah I think you could do alright. I don't think you could make a hojillion dollars, but what do I know? Salesforce.com is worth about a hojillion dollars.

While you're at it, make me an AJAX bboard with no page load for replying or spell check.

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »

Dwindlehop wrote:While you're at it, make me an AJAX bboard with no page load for replying or spell check.
You want me to learn JavaScript just so you can save a few seconds?

Jonathan
Grand Pooh-Bah
Posts: 6722
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:45 pm
Location: Portland, OR
Contact:

Post by Jonathan »

Sounds good!

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »

On the subject of AJAX. I have been thinking about it for a few months. But aren't we suppose to move away from JavaScript for security reason? If we are going to do that why not use activeX controls? We all remember how much security problem that caused.

Jason
Veteran Doodler
Posts: 1520
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 12:53 am
Location: Fairfax, VA

Post by Jason »

Peijen wrote:On the subject of AJAX. I have been thinking about it for a few months. But aren't we suppose to move away from JavaScript for security reason? If we are going to do that why not use activeX controls? We all remember how much security problem that caused.
Actually, if I remember correctly javascript does not have the same problems that activex has since it never has access to anything outside of your browser, verses activex which can do almost anything it wants.

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »

true, but I found this in maps.google.com's code

Code: Select all

new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
Like I said I have been looking at it on and off for a few months now and I am not sure if I like it or not.

George
Veteran Doodler
Posts: 1267
Joined: Sun Jul 18, 2004 12:26 am
Location: Arlington, VA

Post by George »

Jason wrote:Actually, if I remember correctly javascript does not have the same problems that activex has since it never has access to anything outside of your browser, verses activex which can do almost anything it wants.
That was the theory. Java and Javascript are supposed to be confined to a "sandbox" directory on your harddrive. .Net has the same capability (called isolated storage, I think). However, in practice, the Javascript interpretters usually had (have?) exploitable holes like buffer overflows. So, while Javascript couldn't access the rest of your disk, it could load and execute arbitrary code that could.

Jonathan
Grand Pooh-Bah
Posts: 6722
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:45 pm
Location: Portland, OR
Contact:

Post by Jonathan »

Peijen wrote:But aren't we suppose to move away from JavaScript for security reason?

Do you surf with Javascript disabled?

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »

Dwindlehop wrote:
Peijen wrote:But aren't we suppose to move away from JavaScript for security reason?

Do you surf with Javascript disabled?
I use to, but I haven't bothered to look into it since last reinstall.

George
Veteran Doodler
Posts: 1267
Joined: Sun Jul 18, 2004 12:26 am
Location: Arlington, VA

Post by George »

Yeah, I just discovered the NoScript extension. I haven't decided if the added safety is worth the annoyance of having to reenable javascript on the pages that need it.
I feel like I just beat a kitten to death... with a bag of puppies.

quantus
Tenth Dan Procrastinator
Posts: 4891
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 3:09 am
Location: San Jose, CA

Post by quantus »

In my experience, it is NOT worth the effort to re-enable javascript every time it's needed. Besides, javascript should be pretty safe at this point. I'm pretty sure that most of the major exploitable holes have been fixed by now. Basically, I figure the longer something is around, the more secure it becomes unless it's a MS product which continually makes new holes, or even re-opening old ones from time to time. Actually, I probably shouldn't blame MS so much, and instead blame feature creep in general. MS is like one giant feature creeper.
Have you clicked today? Check status, then: People, Jobs or Roads

George
Veteran Doodler
Posts: 1267
Joined: Sun Jul 18, 2004 12:26 am
Location: Arlington, VA

Post by George »

While I certainly can't defend most of MS's feature creep problems, their products really don't have significantly more security holes than others. They just happen to have the most users, so an MS security hole has a larger impact. Also, Unix security holes are often less exploitable because most Unix systems are administered by experts.

And one other thought. MS has a much larger portfolio of products than anyone else. OS, browser, enterprise servers, productivity, development, etc. So you hear MS's name come up a lot more than any competitor's, but if you looked only at one product category at a time I wonder if they are any worse.

Hmm, look at Firefox. It's already at 1.0.7. I didn't check the last couple of release notes, but the first couple did contain security fixes. If you broke out each of the Firefox security fixes into separate patches like MS has for IE, I wonder who would have more in the last year or so.

Edit: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/securit ... ities.html
I still think Firefox is safer, but it's mostly just because it's not as big a target.

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »

George wrote:While I certainly can't defend most of MS's feature creep problems, their products really don't have significantly more security holes than others. They just happen to have the most users, so an MS security hole has a larger impact. Also, Unix security holes are often less exploitable because most Unix systems are administered by experts.
Actually I think Widnows is not secure because it's not designed to be secure. The old days of Unix is probably worse than today's Widnows. MS has only start to make security part of it's OS design in the last few years, XP sp 2 is already a much better improvement from plain XP. When MS can dump the compatibility support for old Windows and design a new one from ground up it should be a lot more secure.

Jonathan
Grand Pooh-Bah
Posts: 6722
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:45 pm
Location: Portland, OR
Contact:

Post by Jonathan »

Peijen wrote:Actually I think Widnows is not secure because it's not designed to be secure.
This is true. Remember that Windows 3.1 didn't have a native TCP/IP stack. Windows 95 came out in 1995 and didn't come with Internet Explorer. Internet connectivity was an afterthought. They slapped the BSD TCP/IP in there and didn't think about the consequences. When they were battling it out with Netscape, they were killing themselves trying to gain market share, not worrying about security. Afterwards, it just didn't matter.
Peijen wrote:When MS can dump the compatibility support for old Windows and design a new one from ground up it should be a lot more secure.
This is bullshit. First, what precisely in DOS memory management or Win32 APIs is holding back Windows security? MS security holes don't crop up in legacy code, they show up in stuff they just shipped a year ago.

Second, a new design from the ground up is not necessary to produce a secure system. One can graft any feature, even security, onto an existing system. All it requires is dedicating resources to the problem. What you really meant to say is that when MS can charge money for a secure OS Windows should be a lot more secure.

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »

I guess you are right, what I wanted to say is if MS will be bothered to redesign some part of their OS, like services that require Admin rights to run, it might be more secure. Which they are not inclined to do unless there is money to be made.

Peijen
Minion to the Exalted Pooh-Bah
Posts: 2790
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:28 pm
Location: Irvine, CA

Post by Peijen »


Post Reply