I see Host Gator is going to a new billing system for many compelling reasons. Will VOIPo.com be using the same new billing package when you launch and begin charging?
Printable View
I see Host Gator is going to a new billing system for many compelling reasons. Will VOIPo.com be using the same new billing package when you launch and begin charging?
One of probably the most valuable things we have right now is the experience from HostGator's growth in the last 2 years and especially the last 6 months or so. In a way I kinda feel like maybe this was the bigger reason for all our technical delays with VOIPo...so we could go through everything with HG and have that experience to build on.Quote:
Originally Posted by usa2k
We really learned the hard way what works and doesn't work when you're going from a small company to a very large company. We all remember the sheer chaos that SunRocket's collapse caused for ViaTalk and most all other voip providers. My understanding is VT picked up roughly 4x the number of customers that they had TOTAL prior in that one month. When I left, we had 6K customers at VT and 12K at HostRocket. That's obviously a big big challenge to grow that fast.
We had kind of the same thing with HostGator and had to learn to deal with it. When you have a big hit like that where you can 30K customers or so in a month it could be chaos and it was for us last year, but now it's just normal monthly growth.
We've had to develop a lot of processes and tweak how we operate and do everything. Now we know first hand what's in store for us with VOIPo and can apply the same systems and processes.
Billing has been a big challenge for HG primarily because with the growth we had, we just outgrew basically all the commerical solutions geared towards hosting. We also learned that with 300 employees, you have to simplify things in order to be able to train/have duplication and that security is a big priority internally because with that many people, you'll have blackmail, people setting other people up, and endless drama.
The new platform for HG is called "Gator" and is billing, helpdesk and live chat all integrated into one. We actually purchased the domain gator.com for it (yes, this domain has a bad history, but it's in our name so we wanted it). The thing is the new system is 110% geared towards HostGator. We originally intended to make something that we could sell because everything billing wise on the market is garbage. What we found though and learned is that it's better to make it very very very specific for us instead of more flexibility for lots of situations. That way it works exactly how we want and is very tightly integrated into our processes and what we offer.
With that in mind, it's not a system that will work well for VOIPo because it's too specific to hosting and HostGator. We're going to initially launch VOIPo on a proven commerical billing software that we've used for HG until we outgrew it. This will be a solid solution for the time being.
We expect that as the new Gator platform is rolled out for HG, we'll find more problem areas and it'll be improved some once it's in real-world use. At the same time, we'll also identify more VOIPo specific problem areas and needs once we are billing in real-time with the commerical solution. At that point, we'll be able to take the VOIPo specific things we've learned and the more broad/general things we've learned with our new HG platform in use there and combined the two into a set of plans for a VOIPo system that uses the core of the Gator system, but is made very specific for what we need for VOIPo. This is something we plan to have in place for VOIPo by the end of the year. That way we have it in place before it becomes a problem.
Kind of a long answer, but hopefully makes sense as to why we're approaching things this way.
That is a good forward-thinking answer :)