New Message: Re: Who can be hosted on Frontier and Manila

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$1032

By: Scott Young (scott at userland.com)

There still seems to be some confusion about UserLand's general license. I thought a reply would help. Simply put, we have two different licensing arrangements to fit two different use cases:

Case 1: the general "click if you agree" license designed to cover the majority of our customers (schools and businesses etc.) that provide websites / weblogs to their employees, students, suppliers, customers.. - you get the idea. There are no restrictions on the number of websites or people using those sites.

Case 2: the "I'm in business of reselling Manila sites to paying customers" - for this we offer a VAR/Resellers license. We ask that you contact us to see if you fit this category. If its necessary we can structure an agreement to meet your specific needs as we have done in a number of cases.

Why do we offer two licenses?

Our goal is to better understand the composition of our customer base and how they are using the product. Companies in the Manila hosting business have a different set of priorities (performance, support costs, multi-site admin functionality, stats etc.) then say a school or business with several hundred blogs looking for an easy to implement low-cost tool. Yes, there are overlaps, but it can have an impact everything from how you structure the company to feature / functionality decisions at the product level. When we took over the company there was not much data on the customer base, so we have tried to balance both sets of needs. I think you will see that in Manila 9.5. In addition, we felt there was a need to protect UserLand from a ReallyBigCo buying a bunch of licenses and giving away thousands of sites for free. A VAR/Reseller agreement is a simple way to manage that possibility.

Why do we ask you to contact us?

Its the most simple way to figure things out, chat about any specific needs, and discuss product benefits. This would also seem to be a pretty common practice. Our interest is in making sure you have the right kind of license in the first place and offering you the kind of support you need to be successful.

Is there a difference in pricing between the two licenses?

No, currently UserLand's pricing for a commercial license is $1099 per server for both the General and VAR/Reseller license with no limitation on the number of sites.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to contact me if you have additional questions.

This is a Manila site.. http://manila.userland.com/.