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If operations/systems is a second class citizen in your company, then you just live with that fact, minimize the headaches and maximize your other incomes. Whe
by txutxu 12y ago
If operations/systems is a second class citizen in your company, then you just live with that fact, minimize the headaches and maximize your other incomes.
When you offer "hosting"... do you offer intelligent systems? advanced low level networking? CDN? anycast DNS? disaster recovery plan? peak resistance? awesome monitoring system with 24/7/365 support of the solution? 0day level security solutions? nanosecond performance? 99.999% SLA? penetration testing as proactive maintenance? multidevice testing of every change or patch? development, staging, validation and production environments? storage engineers? database tuning? project road-map with weekly (or daily) reports and meetings of a team of engineers analyzing infrastructure usage, logs, new threats, proposals and evolutions? an awesome web interface for ALL customer facing controls? a problem free experience?
Or are we talking about cheapo domain+cert+shared resources "online presence"? If yes, than maybe just stick to one provider and seek for a "reseller plan", to minimize costs, and as said in other comments, start offering a "maintenance package" as part of the products/solutions to get some recurring revenue.
When you get a great team of operations and support engineers with outstanding knowledge and passion for "systems", they stay motivated, and they are not mismanaged, you will be able to monetize them (and their "toys") with "hosting", "cloud", "online presence", "services" or whatever name, in team with the rest of the solutions you sell.
Infrastructure is a complex and expensive topic. If you do it properly, you can move money. You just need more customers wanting your system solutions/team, than the cost of it.
Otherwise, there is many competence and "third party" services, and the average position is to re-sell that, and focus on the ego of "i'm a designer/coder, systems is a second class stuff I cannot convince you to payme more for that".
- gaadd33 12y agoAre there any hosting providers that are "moving money"? Most of them seem to have pretty minimal profit margins and low valuations by the financial community. I believe Voxel sold to Internap for only $30M.
- txutxu 12y agoA few (about 3) years ago, the company where I was (in Europe) did make money doing hosting over housed space. We did hosting (dedicated and virtualized servers), managed services, and re-housing, this is, rent again the racks/power/IPs which we did rent on different providers. If I'm true, I think it did work very well because the company did get very big projects, because the company management did have great agreements and contacts with high environments (local government, local banks, football teams, newspapers, etc). That is, I as a technical person, do not see myself starting from zero the same AND getting the local customers we did use to get. And much less global customers. I can assure the systems part of the project budgets, did make great money. Even more profitable on maintenance status. The worse on the company was sometimes, the development team's estimation and execution balance.
- gaadd33 12y agoRight but there's making "great money" which for anything that has fixed overhead is probably like 2-3x cost vs "great money" for software which implies you have 80%+ margins.