Located in the United States, we are a team of two developers and system administrators.
We have experience in the hosting industry for over 9 years now and are involved in hsphere for 6 years.
The Hosting Automation Software H-Sphere written by PSOFT offers since version 2.4 an interface for integrating custom H-Sphere Addons, H-Sphere Packages and Plugins. These H-Sphere Addons, provide new or override default HSphere functionality.
There are different types of plugins that can be created for H-Sphere. At this point we are working in two of those hsphere plugin categories.
- EasyApp Plugins
- 3rd Party Plugins
One type of Addon is utilizing the EasyApp Engine, an Interface written to enable 3rd party vendors to integrate Web based Applications so they can be easily installed from within the HSphere Hosting control Panel by their end-users.
This allows your End User to install a Web Application with the click of a button from his HSphere Hosting Control Panel. No need for the h-sphere end user to fight with FTP access, Binary/Ascii upload, Unix Permissions or Creating MySQL Databases. Less Customer Support for you since our install prevents all the common issues you experience when customers try to do the install by hand. Our bundles do all this for your end-user. Our Predefined values are chosen sensitive to security and some, like Database parameters, are hidden from the customer. (in some cases we could create a more secure install then the Vendors installer itself). Secondly, our experience with these applications will ensure a high quality experience for your end user. (setting permissions on upload directories for example!)
Last, we are trying hard to only include high quality Applications. Examples at the moment are Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Serendipity and ZenCart to just name a few. More EasyApps are added over time.
The second type we are involved in are 3rdparty Hsphere Plugins like our Postini Plugin.
These plugins are only using the HSphere Control Panel Framwork, but not a dedicated SDK like easyapp does.
It has the advantage of being more flexible and allowing us to basically incorporate any feature imagineable in Hsphere.
Why a Subscription model?
We are committed to be there for you and deliver high quality updates to you for many years to come.
Our Team is highly qualified and experienced and this just costs money. To keep this team and to be able to pay attention to all the little details as well as keep up with the constant new releases, we decided to offer a subscription to our EasyApp Product. This ensures that we have an income that will keep the team motivated to produce the quality EasyApps and other addons that we are producing right now.
We are here to stay!
H-Sphere Plugins provides different types oft EasyApp packages to enable you, the Hosting Company, to offer more value to your customers.
Right now there are GPL Software Applications included in these Plugins (Commercial packages are coming soon). We are working with commercial vendors to also offer you commercial software bundles in the future. (Anything special you are looking for? just post in our Forum.)
So if it is all GPL, what are you paying for? Simple, we do not charge for the Applications included but for the time that we put into this project to bundle everything into easy to install packages that are integrated into H-Sphere without further afford.
We have to custom create the install bundle, create the possibility for your end user to change settings on his preinstalled script from within the Control Panel, create custom SQL scripts and make endless tests to ensure the functionality of the installed Application. Secondly, we offer updates as soon as possible after the release of a patch if possible your customer will be able to upgrade his application again, from inside the Hosting Control Panel which requires us to convert the Vendor provided upgrade into EasyApp transactions applied to your end-users install. Hence the monthly subscription fee.
This enables you to offer your customers very popular applications like Joomla, Zencart, Wordpress, phpOpenChat and much more installed in minutes.
Our packages are done by professional developers to achieve a very high quality level to reduce YOUR support. Just think how much less support issues you will have to deal with since your customer gets a perfect install with the click of a button. Secondly, when an update is released we will integrate it into our package and once you upgraded the package on the control panel, the customer will see an "Upgrade" button that they can use to upgrade the application. This helps to keep your hosting environment safer.
As you noticed, we are charging a monthly reoccuring fee. This enables us to produce upgrades/patches to Applications within the shortest time possible. This is esp. Important when a Project releases a security patch.
We will raise the Subscription Fee for NEW SUBSCRIPTIONS everytime we add an application. If you are already subscribed, you will keep the original subscription price! as long as you stay subscribed.
This "update subscription" is a per Company subscription.
So, on how many H-Sphere clusters can I install these packages now?
Simply, on any cluster that belongs to your company.
So, if you for example are using one cluster for your end-users, one for your resellers and one for Developement, you only need ONE subscription.
What if you are a System Administrator working for multiple companies?
You need to purchase one license per company BUT, contact us first we might just have a very interesting offer for you!
The same is true if you have multiple companies that you would like to resell to, let us know we will have a sweet deal waiting for you.