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What is the market for A5 hosting?

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    What is the market for A5 hosting?

    My company is going to start Alpha Five WAS hosting in January. This is for my own customers, and hosting clients at large. I have a good idea from my own customer what to expect, but can any of you help define what the potential is for a remote hosting service? If you were to use a remote hosting service, what would you need or expect in terms of features, support, tools, services, 3rd party tools (Perl, CGI, frontpage extensions, etc.).
    Steve Wood
    See my profile on IADN


    #2
    Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

    Steve,

    A good start good be to ask existing hosting companies for their SLA (Service Level Agreements) with their customers. Bandwidth, Performance and Availability is a main item in most of those agreements. Also service support / help desk and Incident control, with service level windows you can support...You would need a good Incident tool to keep track of customer issues and resolutions. All in all marginal business.. Think twice before you expect this to be profitable..With the right amount of customers it can create a modest but steady income.. Just need to have enough support people available to make it around the service hours...Unless you don't mind to work around the clock.

    Regards, Ron
    Last edited by rleunis; 12-16-2006, 04:00 PM.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

      From the quantity of questions he answers on this board, and the varying time of day of each answer - I'd say he works 'round the clock right now!!!


      Good Luck Steve
      Sergeant Richard Hartnett
      Hyattsville City Police Department
      Maryland

      Comment


        #4
        Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

        <<varying time of day of each answer.>> Twin toddlers at home.

        I'm not positive I can make money by hosting A5 applications. I know there is an expanding need based on conversations with my own clients, not sure about the 'at-large' part. It would round out my services, but its a big committment to service level.

        I also think that Alpha needs to be available on multiple hosting situations to be a viable web solution. The fact that there is essentially only one remote hosting source, causes clients some distress. You can host a PHP application with almost every hosting service.
        Steve Wood
        See my profile on IADN

        Comment


          #5
          Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

          Steve, which is the "one" hosting service available currently? I can't find it.
          Peter
          AlphaBase Solutions, LLC

          [email protected]
          https://www.alphabasesolutions.com


          Comment


            #6
            Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

            Peter - that say's it all!

            FirmSupport.com is the one hosting service.

            Alpha's website, under Hosting, says "we are not accepting any new customers at this time", with no acknowledgement of alternate hosting available at FirmSupport.
            Steve Wood
            See my profile on IADN

            Comment


              #7
              Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

              Originally posted by Steve Wood View Post
              Peter - that say's it all!

              FirmSupport.com is the one hosting service.
              Steve,

              A couple of months ago I sent an email to firm support and never got a response!
              Peter
              AlphaBase Solutions, LLC

              [email protected]
              https://www.alphabasesolutions.com


              Comment


                #8
                Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                I wasn't going to say, but that was my experience also.

                So, again, what is the market for offering A5 Hosting? Interesting question as the current options seem to be invisible and no one is shouting about it.
                Steve Wood
                See my profile on IADN

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                  Originally posted by Steve Wood View Post
                  I wasn't going to say, but that was my experience also.

                  So, again, what is the market for offering A5 Hosting? Interesting question as the current options seem to be invisible and no one is shouting about it.
                  Apparently Alpha doesn't support it.
                  Apparently FirmSupport doesn't support it.
                  That leaves us with the WAS.
                  Peter
                  AlphaBase Solutions, LLC

                  [email protected]
                  https://www.alphabasesolutions.com


                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                    Knowing that PHP and MySQL are on practically every hosting company's servers, why can't PHP pages interacting with MySQL be built with the ease of development that Alpha pages can be? Why is it that they must be hand coded?

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                      Hi Steve,


                      There are only a few A5 WAS hosting services, with Firm Support being the big leader.

                      Some other services:
                      http://www.nationalitservices.com/ although I haven't talked with them about service and price.

                      http://www.webhosthero.com/ only offers A5 v6 WAS and has no plans to upgrade. Here is the response I received from Web Host Hero:
                      Code:
                      Hello Dan. We offer hosting of Alpha 5 Version 6. We have no plans to upgrade.
                       
                      If you purchase any of our hosting plans from Webhosthero.com all you need to do is email [email protected] with your order number and let u know you would like Alpha 5 support and we will set it up. There is no extra charge for the Alpha 5 unless you expect to have a tremedous amount of traffic in which case let us know what you need and we will give you a quote. 
                       
                      This is operating on the assumption you do not have your own copy of the WAS and wish to share ours. 
                       
                      Let me know if you have any questions.
                       
                      Thanks,
                       
                      Shawn White
                      IT Manager
                      And Lastly, that I know of is Innovator Computer Solutions site: http://www.icsoc.com/contactUs.php This is managed by Kevin Tucker. He has a resale package where an ISP company manages the server and backups. He has very little maintenance to do, as the company pretty much handles "services" on his behalf. I host one of my sites here, and do testing with new clients through this site. For the most part the server has been up 95% of the time over the last 2 years. He has been responsive when it has been down. The site also been updated from A5v6 WAS to A5v7 WAS. I also know from talking with Kevin, that he has plans to update to A5v8 WAS when it becomes available.

                      I also who have two clients who have purchased a WAS license and use their own server. I helped them get set up and they are running without any problem. A third client is about to go live with their WAS license as well.

                      So what is the Market?? Who knows. There was some excitement in the beginning, but it has faded. Those that want A5 on the web are pretty much doing it on their own. With enough push (marketing), good service, reasonable price, it could be very strong. However, it is going to be an uphill battle. More and more people are going to the web, however, speed and set up costs are seem to be a deterrent right now.

                      Have Fun
                      Dan

                      Dan Blank builds Databases
                      Skype: danblank

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                        Are companies doing their own hosting, then? Like Steve Working's app he showed for I think a cable company.

                        The first major problem, I see, is the 24/7 issue, which could eat you alive. The second would be the cost of initially setting it up.

                        If you are hosting one of your clients, you apparently have already endured a lot of this. Do you at least break even hosting your own client(s)?
                        Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
                        972 524 8714
                        [email protected]

                        ____________________
                        "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                          Hi All

                          Here In the U.K. I have a server that is managed by a ISP in a big data center in London. I have remote access to this system via terminal services and the cost of this is just under $2000.00 Per year. I have loaded the WAS on to this system and we currently hosting 5 company web sites on this system bringing in around $600 per month. only 2 of these companies are using the WAS at the moment but I believe all of them will be using the WAS by next summer.

                          My point is that I do not have to manage the server for down time security, updates and the like, the hosting company do this for us, so we do not have to be available 24/7. is there nobody that does this kind of services in the U.S.? I am sure there must be

                          I have not advertised this service in the U.K yet but hope to start Feb/March Next year

                          Andy

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                            Hi All

                            I have one of my sites and sample data hosted by http://www.alpha5-hosting.co.uk This is a very inexpensive hosting service and I have had compliments on the speed of my applications.

                            Please visit my site http://www.khdb.co.uk and see the Links page.

                            I would recommend this service to every one in the UK.
                            Last edited by Keith Hubert; 12-18-2006, 10:10 AM. Reason: spelling error
                            Regards
                            Keith Hubert
                            Alpha Guild Member
                            London.
                            KHDB Management Systems
                            Skype = keith.hubert


                            For your day-to-day Needs, you Need an Alpha Database!

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: What is the market for A5 hosting?

                              Steve,

                              We had quite a journey with A5 hosting this year.

                              Our first experience was with A5 Online (slow and lots of downtime)

                              Our second was Firm Support (speed was good, the support was very good, downtime wasn't rare but it did happen)

                              Our third was with EasyCGI.com on a virtual windows server (slower than Firm Support and it wasn't very reliable)

                              We learned that we have to zero tolerance for downtime and even less tolerance waiting for anwsers when our clients are calling about the system.

                              Currently, we have Alpha on two identical dedicated servers hosted by two different providers. The servers share traffic 50% and they failover to each other automatically. We use EasyDNS for this service (this setup is extremely fast, affordable and we have 100% uptime!) These servers only run WAS.

                              We have other servers to manage our html pages, security, frontpage, subdomains, etc which are for us is more difficult and time consuming than Alpha5 is to setup. We have hope for Version Eight's new security capabilities.

                              If you decide to provide shared hosting like Firm Support I would only host WAS and do it extremely well. It is my opinion that anyone running anything important to them on Alpha will utimately decide to go with dedicated servers and you may want to keep them as your customer.

                              Jim Gocek
                              LMRPManager, LLC
                              www.lmrpmanager.com
                              [email protected]

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