Advice on setting up a pay-for hosted service.

Question

Does anybody here have experience of setting up a pay-for hosted service? Without giving too much away I have a web-app (nearing completion) which will be offered as a free download to install on a personal webserver. In the future, I'd also like to host it too and charge (a nominal fee) for access.

I wondered if anybody knew of links to resources and the like. Google is not being friendly to me today.

Though I've not sat down and hammered out a system I can see a number of technical possibilities (i.e. ways to administer sign-up, payment and so on), but there might be easier ways of handling all that than me building a system from scratch. Contracts and SLAs are something I need to look into too.

If any of you have any comment or advice to chip-in on any aspect of charging for a hosted service I'd be very grateful. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Google created the "google solutions marketplace" to let you do this. If you host your application on AppEngine then you can make your app available to people using google apps for domains.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

Answer 2

Check out the various reseller plans many providers have in stock. Those usually give you all the freedom to set up and configure customer packages as you please, but you don't have to deal with actually running the web server, applying patches and updates, providing 24/7 on-call service and so on.

Answer 3

I've typically seen companies offering a couple different options.

The free download version has certain features removed from the product. People are invited to use it as they will.

The next step is a downloadable version that has more features and has a price attached to it. They pay the bill and are sent a download link.

The top level is fully hosted with a simple sign up where they provide their credit card information.

In the hosted version, you want this as automated as possible. However, due to the myriad of ways the app might have been developed it may be difficult. For example, did you use a multi-tenant architecture? If so, then adding more customers should be as simple as adding a couple records to a table...

If not, then you will need to make sure your deployment scripts work flawlessly. From setting up the website to deploying the database.

Again, because of the differing requirements from one app to another there's not a way (that I know of) for doing this without building your sign up from scratch. The difficultly is going to depend entirely on your architecture.