SohoLaunch license

[Chuck]

I was looking at another hosting company that offered Soholaunch on their reseller program. It was explained that each of my clients I host under the reseller program would have their own Soho license. This is necessary as Soho limits it's license to one domain name. Is your offer the same, can each domain under the reseller package has a legitimate license? I am assuming you purchased server licenses so the answer would be yes, but need to ensure before purchase.
Thanks.

[Matt]

Hi Chuck,

Every site receives a standard edition Soholaunch license, that includes our reseller's resold sites.

[Chuck]

Matt,

Thanks for the reply. Your response seems to indicate that your resellers cannot offer your professional grade hosting as they include the Pro Edition. Is this true?

Secondly, What if I decide to go with the Professional 5 Star.... It allows for 10 domains, Does this mean all 10 on that package would be the Pro edition. If so, how much would you charge to add additional domains on the Professional 5 Star program. I want to make sure I can get my clients onto Pro if necessary.

[Matt]

Hi Chuck.

You are welcome.

Actually, that might be the only difference. The reseller servers are the same server specification as our Pro hosting packages.

Problem is the Pro licenses run about $100 a pop and if we had a reseller with 100 sites, paying us $24.95/month we would have paid $10,000 in licensing fees for that reseller. At $24.95/mo that would take us 401 months just to break even. In other words, 33 years!

There are also logistics problems because the pro licenses are issued directly on the soholaunch.com website. If a reseller deletes an account we'd never know about it since it doesn't integrate with WHM, so the licenses could never be re-used.

Best thing for you to do is get a reseller account then a partner account with soholaunch and buy a bulk pack of licenses, and then you can apply pro licenses to the sites that you have arranged to receive pro licenses.

As for your question about the pro 5 star, same problem as above. You can receive one free licence of soholaunch pro per hosting account. See the link below for options should you decide to go shared instead of reseller.

Additional soholaunch license pricing

[Chuck]

Matt,

I can see the pricing issue as you've explained. However, when I read the licensing, as you directed, it would appear that the advanced features are as low as 50 cents per Pro license. (See Soho Comparison). As I read this, the Pro Server 300 allows for unlimited ProBase Installs and 300 Advanced Feature installs (see the bottom of the feature list). The Pro 300 is $149 per month and at 300 Pro licenses that is 50 cents per install (Even the $99 monthly option includes 100 or $1 per month) . Even still I recognize you need to make a profit. Also, being that you are already a partners it appears that you can buy additional items that we outsiders can't see. Perhaps there are packages with similiar pricing. Anyway, couple questions....

1) Couldn't you allow your re-sellers to sell upgrades as needed on a per unit basis? According to their license you can "distribute (advance licenses) however you see fit". Something like $5 per month per upgrade, this would allow you to profit $1,351 per ProServer 300 license, per month, on just the license.

2) If not, is there any bulk package available to a Partner. The only public bulk license I see is 10 for $900. Perhaps there is a package allowing you to purchase additional ProServer which you could pass along to your Resellers?

3) I would not be opposed to purchasing the ProServer 300 and having you guys guys host it. But, I only have use for about 10 license right now. But can't justify the added expense right now. However, if I am understanding the license correctly and you do get Pro licenses for 50 cents a piece, and since it is based on a server then maybe other options exist. Do you have any other clients that you could put on the same server and share the license expense? If you had a few others that wanted Pro licenses for their clients, we could share the license (like 6 people paying $25 monthly + your fee) and get 50 licenses each. As somebody grows to 30 clients or so they could migrate to their own server (now cost effective if they chage accordingly) freeing up the licenses they just abandon.

Sorry for the long post but I have read good things about you guys on different reviews boards and would like to work with you. So I am trying to make that happen.

[Matt]

Well IMHO $149/mo is a bit ridiculous since only about 1% of the number of users on the server historically use Soholaunch.

So to give you some numbers if an average server here has 300 users on it and 3 of the users use soholaunch and these users are paying maybe $5 to $25 per month for their shared hosting plan. If we had their $149/mo 300 license option, those 3 users would cost us $50/mo for the soho license alone. Then figure in the cPanel license and electricity and bandwith, server support agents, etc and again their license model does not work, at least not for us.

1) Yes, we already do this. It is $4.00/mo
2) I cannot find the pricing on their site but that sounds right. it is 10 license blocks for anywhere from $750 to $1000. We prefer those because the licenses are owned and do not recur for billing like all their other licenses.
3) If you want to buy proserver 300 @ $149/mo why not get the bulk 10 pack???

You said its $900 total. If you are ready to pay $149/mo for something then look at these numbers.:

After 6 months your 10 pack costs you nothing assuming you look at it as paying $149/mo

$150/mo * 6 months = $900
12 months = free for you
24 months = free for you

And your 300 pack costs you $149 every month for ever and ever.

$150/mo * 6 months = $900
$150/mo * 12 months = $1800
$150/mo * 24 months = $3600

If you need 10 more licenses at some point then just add them as you go. You have to have some serious marketing dollars and have them be highly targeted to fill up a server fast enough to make it worth those 100 and 300 lic packs.

It might seem like you are going to end up paying more with 10 pack licenses, but its not the case historically. FYI all of our owned licenses have paid for themselves now and are showing a ROI.

Your target market might be a lot different than ours though. We try to target intermediate to advanced site owners and they typically do not need something like soholaunch. Your target may be novice users who must have it. But in all cases, over the long run the 10 packs are going to save you money because eventually they will have paid for themselves and become straight profit unlike the recurring licenses which always cost you money.

[Chuck]

Thanks for the reply. Since you offer the ability to purchase upgrades as needed at $4.00 per month then the rest is a mute point. I guess I should have been more clear in the first thread that all I needed was the ability as a reseller to purchase the Pro Full licenses on an as needed basis. I also didn't recognize the minimal usage of Soho. This brings up a different question.

To give a little background, you hit the nail on the head. We do service small clients with no technical experience. 7 years ago we wrote our own CMS (in VB and ASP) which is very easy for our clients to update their site through. I no longer want to service the code and handle our servers (for a number of reasons). That is why I started looking for a CMS I could use.

It sounds as though Soho is not that popular and maybe for good reason. In your opinion, is there a better and easier solution you would recommend that offers similar capabilities? I simply need the ability to allow my clients to access/modify their content, carts, faq, etc. and want to be able to plug in add-ons as needed. In recent years I have turned away business and lost clients as I did not want to develop anymore.

(By the way I currently pay $200 a month and I have to do everything on the server, hopefully that explains the rationale behind the previous thread.)

[Matt]

We have used them all and I think Soholaunch is the most requested and integrates the best with cPanel. Developers like it because they can tweak the code.

So I don't think that the numbers are due to a problem in Soholaunch, I think those numbers are pretty consistent among many hosts in this market segment.