What would you pay a premium for?

[jhadley]

As part of a recently registered SaaS company (the umbrella company for Billr and other apps we're developing), we're considering offering two additional services:

- Technical consultancy

- Bespoke hosting

I want to hear people's opinions on the bespoke hosting. We will be using our own equipment in our own racks (in the UK), and selling and supporting it with our own software. Everything will be made to measure and I imagine a lot will be based on OnApp, but we won't be too expensive either.

Given that we won't be appealing to the LEB market, my main question is what would you pay a premium for? What features would tempt you to rethink your low end servers?

 

[drmike]

I need to look at Bespoke.  This isn't the first time in the past week someone was kicking around the Bespoke solution idea.

Your post seems fragmented.

...won't be too expensive vs. pay a premium vs. rethink... low end servers..

Plus ....

... consulting ... Bespoke hosting ... Billr ... existing services ....

Seems like you are spreading yourself very thin and all sorts of directions.

 

[jhadley]

I need to look at Bespoke.  This isn't the first time in the past week someone was kicking around the Bespoke solution idea.

Your post seems fragmented.

...won't be too expensive vs. pay a premium vs. rethink... low end servers..

Plus ....

... consulting ... Bespoke hosting ... Billr ... existing services ....

Seems like you are spreading yourself very thin and all sorts of directions.

Thanks for the comments. Pricing would start at about £15/month for a small VPS, so somewhere in between LEB and "woah".

The aim from a business perspective is to take advantage of the economies of scale that come from hosting the SaaS apps ourselves

 

[drmike]

Ahh, cool.

The lowend is woah   Not many folks able to afford to even buy lunch from low end income.

Some things that I'd pay for:

1. Multiple locations.

2. Ability to self migrate.

3. Resource pooling.

4. On demand account increases (self administered)

5. Access via panel and especially API to other value added services (ex: CDN, Anycast DNS, etc.)

6. Auto provisioned ISOs of "common" boxed solutions

These are some of the things the next generation hybrid of cloud meets VPS will be more commonly facilitating.

You said OnApp?  Good luck there with their blown delivery dates and waiting in limbo.

 

[wlanboy]

I want to add a view words to buffalooed's words:

1. Multiple locations
    - at least a second different datacenter in the UK
2. Ability to self migrate.
     - quite important - as important as a local LAN for load balancing

3. Resource pooling
     - as in "bespoke services"

4. On demand account increases (self administered)
     - yup you need a defined limit of resources you can add at once without the need to fill out Paypal forms

5. Access via panel and especially API to other value added services (ex: CDN, Anycast DNS, etc.)
    - nice to have but an API is the absolute minimum. to create service watchers that can automatically adjust resources.
    - would be a nice second market to build up tools to ensure that these bespoke services are self aware

6. Auto provisioned ISOs of "common" boxed solutions
   - Yup one click installs for common services.
   - Just thinking about the idea that a "watcher" sees the need of an additional MySQL* server. (* or any other service)
      The watcher calls the API to create a new vps with a MySQL server that is automatically added to the MySQL cluster.

7. Virtual routers
    - Just to play with load balancing, filtering, and to route external IPs to internal IPs. If I have something like a real cloud service I don't want to hassle with eth0 configs. All vps do have internal IP addresses and someone is doing the routing. Would be nice to have an API for that.

As buffalooed said. Next generation vps hosting. All pieces are available but their is no unified API to controll all of them - to build something more worth than the sum of its parts.

Which would be the premium - the thing jhadley would like to sell.

 

[lv-matt]

When I google Billr this is what I get up: http://billr.me/

 

[jhadley]

When I google Billr this is what I get up: http://billr.me/

The site is/was http://billr.io/, though it's going under a new umbrella company and will be listed on that company's website rather than its own. No one else is using the umbrella name for anything, so I think we'll be safe.

 

[Reece-DM]

The site is/was http://billr.io/, though it's going under a new umbrella company and will be listed on that company's website rather than its own. No one else is using the umbrella name for anything, so I think we'll be safe.

You can't resist constantly changing domains/names can you.

I would guess changing names, won't get you much like with branding.

 

[jhadley]

You can't resist constantly changing domains/names can you.

I would guess changing names, won't get you much like with branding.

Billr has been a massive learning curve for me, both in terms of development techniques and business management. Throughout the process I've kept notes on what I've learned. I've also had the chance to speak to a few friends and beta testers and kept notes on that.

This group of changes will obviously fix the "Billr's already a thing" problem, but will also mean a much lower barrier to entry, harder to copy products, a range of interoperable products, something that generally hasn't been done before and hopefully a very profitable company with a future.

Some of the "new" features in the pipeline include a very unique and low-priced support desk, a removal of unwanted features for different business types, an overall lower price, and an absolutely killer dashboard that brings it all together, along with key metrics from external services and is mobile-friendly.

The name also represents this extremely well.