Services and Pricing

Hosted Web Sites

This is our primary type of service, as all of our clients to date have wanted simply to use our sites, not run them. Here we handle:

  • Design and implementation of client customizations to the Epimetrics Epicenter platform
  • Domain name service management
  • Server configuration at a VPS vendor
  • Full application stack deployment and configuration
  • Customization of the Epicenter technologies to meet specific client needs
  • Deployment of site updates
  • Monitoring of site performance and use
  • Full nightly backups
  • Webmaster support to users
  • Technical support to client admins
  • Additional functional enhancements on a contract basis

Pricing depends on various factors:

  • Degree of customization — particularly if new functional components need to be designed, implemented, and tested
  • Degree of operational support — particularly the degree of content management support needed
  • Nature of client organization — we provide pro bono services to deserving minimally-funded non-profits and underwrite this by revenues from industry clients

Because of this variability, we can at best provide a range of likely costs:

  • Initial deployment: $10-35K
  • Annual operations: $10-40K

Client Site Installations

To date, no client has desired to run their own servers on their own networks, but we are open to this alternative. The necessary precondition is that the server be configurable with our required Linux-based application stack; we cannot function and have no interest in Microsoft environments. This approach would involve all of our standard services except those related to the basic plumbing of the site — DNS, network connections, backups, etc. We would handle:

  • Design and implementation of client customizations to the Epimetrics Epicenter platform
  • Full application stack deployment and configuration
  • Customization of the Epicenter technologies to meet specific client needs
  • Deployment of site updates
  • Monitoring of site performance and use
  • Webmaster support to users
  • Technical support to client admins
  • Additional functional enhancements on a contract basis

Pricing would depend on the various factors listed above, but would be somewhat (but probably not significantly) lower reflecting the lack of ongoing VPS/ISP expenses and client assumption of all hardware and bandwidth responsibilities.

Open Source

We are considering opening up components of the Epimetrics Epicenter platform to the open source community. This would allow developers at client organizations to deploy sites based on our platform in their own settings — in return for their contributing all developed enhancements back to the shared code base. The Epimetrics Group would derive its revenues from consulting help with such deployments and managed hosting.

There are many precedents for this strategy producing a robust developer community that benefits all. This approach works for clients who have their own programmers and designers on staff. However, most organizations we have encountered in our domains of interest do not want to be technology developers; they want to be technology users. So we are uncertain at this point how valuable this open source strategy might be.

Created: October 09, 2009 22:52
Last updated: December 10, 2009 23:39


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