Page 1 of 1

How many clients do you manage?

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 5:28 pm
by alex.barylski
Do you manage everything from design, development and hosting? In order to meet exact requirements do you use various tools and hosting providers?

If so, how do you keep on top of which clients are running which software on which server and when to update, charge, etc?

This is my own supplemental income business strategy, I'm curious how others work (either full or part).

Do you subscribe to various RSS feeds or newsletters to keep informed of security updates for the products you run for your clients?

The reason I ask, is I'm thinking of maybe working on a ERP style project designed for web developers, designers, etc like myself...would like to get a feel for the reception I would get if I released something like this as a service (SaaS) similar to 37Signals and basecamp do, offering a limited free account, charging for upgrades.

Opinions, suggestions, etc???

Re: How many clients do you manage?

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 6:13 pm
by Eran
My startup is about providing such a platform for freelancers and small businesses. You can read about it at http://www.octabox.com. By the way, we're about a month from private beta :)

Re: How many clients do you manage?

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 7:50 pm
by Kieran Huggins
We customize the approach on a per-client basis.

Some have in-house design, sometimes I do it myself, and sometimes a freelance designer needs to be hired.

Often we'll set clients up with a slicehost to give them control and ownership over the hosting. It's a cornerstone of our work philosophy that clients own their own server and all the code we write so they have the freedom to take their app elsewhere, should that be the right decision for them.

Aptitude takes care of the important security updates, and designing / developing with best practices takes care of the rest.

As for the number of clients, we have one large client for whom we manage more than a dozen properties & apps, and a handful of smaller one-off applications we do from time to time. We're focusing mostly on in-house apps at the moment, with plans to go the SaaS route.

If you're building an app to help this work flow, I'd strongly suggest developing "small, loosely-typed" tools. People all work just differently enough to make anything more strict an awkward fit.

Re: How many clients do you manage?

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 9:53 pm
by alex.barylski
Some have in-house design, sometimes I do it myself, and sometimes a freelance designer needs to be hired.
Thats pretty much how I roll too.
Aptitude takes care of the important security updates, and designing / developing with best practices takes care of the rest.
Hmmmm...so if I use typolight CMS for one client and Drupal and CMSMS for another and Wordpress for yet another, Aptitude will update those for me?
If you're building an app to help this work flow, I'd strongly suggest developing "small, loosely-typed" tools. People all work just differently enough to make anything more strict an awkward fit.
I wasn't really thinking workflow, so much as a centralized system/database to track which applications you have installed on various shared servers, etc.

For me, it's a PITA to keep track of which versions of which software I have installed and most PHP software (especially open source) is always having holes exploited. It would be nice to be notifed via email or whatever informing me that application A has been updated to fix this bug and I need to apply the update to servers X, Y and Z.

But I'm curious to know how many people work like I do where they don't directly offer hosting, but setup accounts on other shared hosting companies and use existing open source CMS especially.

See where I'm going with this? :D

Re: How many clients do you manage?

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 10:25 pm
by Kieran Huggins
phpBB is the only 3rd party software I use in production, the rest is all custom. phpBB has a nice update notifier... so that ind of thing doesn't really apply to me.

Tried Drupal a few years back for a few clients, but it just wasn't worth it, IMO. Now everything I do is custom built.

I guess the exception is frameworks. I use merb, datamapper and jQuery. I'll upgrade those gems/files manually if there's a problem, but it's pretty easy to keep on top of news in those spaces.

Re: How many clients do you manage?

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 10:32 pm
by alex.barylski
I would prefer to go the custom route, but initially I start clients off with something free and work with it as a prototype almost, until they learn what it is they really need and don't need. Ideally the plan is to change their minds and drop the money for custom solutions. :D

I suppose if you only use phpBB you would have little need for any kind of third party service like this. :)