Hi there,
Predominantly, I use Directadmin for my shared servers to host people on, mainly because it's incredibly well priced and extremely functional (I haven't looked into Virtualmin that much to be frank).
However, I'm all for choice and want to be able to offer my customers the option to purchase Virtualmin Pro licenses - particularly for their VPS instances as I use Cloudmin to manage my VPS infrastructure and I understand that they integrate nicely with each other.
Am I right in assuming you do not offer monthly license payments? Can I become a reseller/partner of Virtualmin/Cloudmin products - does this give me more flexibility with licensing and the ability to offer keen pricing for customers?
On a pricing point of view based on what I can see in your shop at the moment, I don't think I have even a remote chance of swaying any of my customers from whatever control panel they like to Virtualmin Pro, so if I am going to be reselling it, I'd ideally like the best price you can offer so I have a chance of selling it to those who have not used it before.
I may come across the very occasional individual who prefers Virtualmin, but then in that case, they'll probably opt for the GPL edition. Nobody that I know uses Virtualmin Pro, and from where I'm standing, it looks a very good product, but value-wise, it doesn't stand up to the competition in my opinion - particularly with concern to Directadmin where they offer $5/mo VPS licenses for unlimited domains to resellers.
Hope you can understand where I'm coming from and that we can come to some arrangement as with my experience with Cloudmin, I believe you all to be very competent.
Many thanks, Ricky Burgin
Comments
I use Cloudmin to manage my VPS infrastructure and I understand that they integrate nicely with each other.
Yes, there are some benefits to having the full stack, in terms of available resource usage data, moving sites between servers, etc. Though we're working on making all of the resource usage stuff available regardless (you would just need a minimal Webmin installed in the virtual to act as an agent to gather and distribute the data). So, while there are some benefits, we're working pretty hard to make sure that the most important stuff is always available, regardless of whether Virtualmin is installed...we don't want folks to feel like they should only use Cloudmin if they already use Virtualmin.
Am I right in assuming you do not offer monthly license payments? Can I become a reseller/partner of Virtualmin/Cloudmin products - does this give me more flexibility with licensing and the ability to offer keen pricing for customers?
No, resellers can buy licenses on monthly terms. And yes, if you'll be buying in any reasonable quantity (roughly five licenses per year is the minimum), you can become a reseller. And it does give you more flexibility, and discounts on all of our products.
I may come across the very occasional individual who prefers Virtualmin, but then in that case, they'll probably opt for the GPL edition. Nobody that I know uses Virtualmin Pro, and from where I'm standing, it looks a very good product, but value-wise, it doesn't stand up to the competition in my opinion - particularly with concern to Directadmin where they offer $5/mo VPS licenses for unlimited domains to resellers.
We aren't competing with DirectAdmin. The products simply aren't comparable. Virtualmin GPL is pretty comparable (though more powerful in several regards), and costs a lot less than DirectAdmin. ;-)
Our pricing is extremely competitive with our competition from cPanel and Plesk. Discounts available to resellers run from 22% and up, depending on quantity.
We are aware that our brand awareness is still quite a bit lower than cPanel and Plesk, and even DirectAdmin in some circles. But, our goal is to build the most powerful product in this space, and have no desire to compete solely on price. If price is a customers primary concern, we will lose every time to our own free products. ;-)
We certainly encourage you to offer Virtualmin GPL alongside other options. We've found that folks who try Virtualmin GPL very frequently end up buying later. This is a good upsell opportunity for you, as a hosting provider...you may not get the control panel sale on day one, but with Virtualmin you get a new opportunity every day to upgrade that customer (which isn't really possible with any other control panel). We encourage resellers to offer to install Virtualmin GPL, by default. It's mostly harmless if folks don't want to use it, but it gives you a chance to make a control panel sale in the future, even if the customer was feeling stingy (or tightly constrained by budget) when they setup the server.
Anyway, we're confident that once you spend some time with Virtualmin (GPL or Professional), you'll choose it over any other option on the market. We understand that for some deployments cost is the primary concern...and for those deployments, we offer Virtualmin GPL.. You can't beat the price of free. ;-)