Sitepak Offers a Better Way to Host a Web Site

For telcos and ISPs, Web hosting is a low-margin, highly competitive market. To wring profits out of the small and medium-size enterprise (SME) sector, automation and efficiency are key.

Looking to help large telcos and ISPs achieve those goals, Sitepak, a Montreal-based software provider that specializes in Web hosting services, today announced the release of Onsite Hosting Controller (OHC), an automated provisioning, management and support platform.

“Small businesses like to have all their services from one provider,” Eileen Goldfarb, Sitepak’s CEO told ASPnews. OHC is designed to allow telcos and ISPs to provide that, but more importantly, Goldfarb said, it lowers the overhead costs so service providers can make a profit from shared Web hosting.

OHC’s control panels are designed to delegate routine tasks to end-users and lower-level hosting support staff. As a result, OHC helps hosting service providers eliminate provisioning costs, cut management and support costs and optimize internal resources to enroll and support more SME customers. For example, Goldfarb said, using the self-service portal, “users can view bill, pay bills and upgrade services.” This allows telcos and ISPs to reduce the number and the length of support calls, Sitepak reports.

The Multiple Reseller Control panel is designed to help telcos and ISP attract other hosting providers to their data centers. Each reseller has its own hosting packages, resource usage details, and billing integration so that they can quickly and begin their own virtual hosting operation.

OHC runs off a central service in the telco’s or ISP’s data center and is based on an open standards-based architecture. This single point of integration is designed to eliminate the need to migrate hosted customers and associated e-mail, e-commerce and other end-user and infrastructure applications. “We can support any service seamlessly,” SitePak’s chief technology officer Francois Belanger told ASPnews. OHC offers “front end integration based on SOAP. Telcos and ISPs have large billing systems, for example. The last thing they want is another system to deal with.”

OHC is sold in blocks of site licenses, a site being defined as one hosting customer account, which may have multiple domains and users.

The site licenses are available in three categories:

• Complete, which includes unlimited users, contacts,
  and groups (i.e., everything required for a complete business internet
  presence). Available for as low as $15 per license depending on volume with a
  minimum of 1,000 licenses.
• Bundle-ready: Developed to be bundled with other service provider
  offerings (DSL, Broadband and so on), and are available for e-mail only, or
  for both email and Web services. Prices start at $10 per
  license depending on volume with a minimum 1000 licenses.
• Personal: Described as a scaled down subset of OHC tools and
  offered to service providers who have already purchased complete
  licenses. Minimum purchase is 5,000 personal licenses. For a few
  dollars per site license, SitePak said, service providers can automate provisioning
  of these sites, and cut down on their support requests.

SitePak cites IDC research that reports that SMEs will represent 62 percent of the $18 billion hosting market within the next two years.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or the ASP industry in general? Speak out in the ASP Discussion Forum.