Re: [cobalt-users] IROOT & IMANAGER

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tony,

You make some extremely good points... please let me comment throughout
your text, below...

Tony wrote:

> Competition is coming for Cobalt and hopefully it will make their products
> better.

I agree, wholeheartedly.

> My pet peeve about the Raq line is that supposedly Cobalt designed it for
> ISP's with
> ISP's feedback. Which ISP's? The clueless droids that run the monster
> national ISP's?
> Seems like the only important feature that national ISP's care about is how
> much rack
> space the units take up and how many of their support engineers they can lay
> off because
> they think they can just plop a customer on a Raq and be done with them.

The big nationals are trying to do one thing and do it well, and that is
to operate with a low customer-support budget.  The RaQ allows them to
do it; give the customer complete control over what he/she sets up, and
charge extra when they mess it up.

> How about surveying the Raq owners right now. How many of us are small
> hosting operations
> selling and servicing virtual hosting accounts to small business owners who
> actually
> talk to our customers on a daily basis?

For those of us who want to control how many users we have vs how many
forwards we have, to give just one example, the RaQ falls woefully
short.  For those of us want to control our logon names, the RaQ falls
woefully short.

> Has Cobalt asked you what YOUR customers want in hosting services?
> Radical idea huh? Something only a heretic would consider. Imagine that...
> ask the customer what they need or want! Cobalt, if your listening go to one
> of the dozen web hosting guide sites. Go look at the feature list of the
> $19.95-$29.95
> a month virtual web hosting accounts from the top ten hosting outfits.
> Better yet shell out the few bucks and actually sign up for several of these
> accounts, get your
> user name and go use it. Build and manage a test web site.
> Then build ALL of those features into the Raq4 ready to run out of the box
> so that a hosting outfit
> could offer the same features to their customers right off the bat instead
> of toiling away in a telnet
> window endlessly tweaking and installing 'unsupported' software packages.

I'd like to see a RaQ software package that would allow me to use the
more standard ISP model, wherein the logon name for the software is
completely independent of login names for any email, where admin cannot
delete the user names I've set up and install his own, where I can set
up true 5 megabyte mailboxes without worrying about the fact that the
admin might delete some users to get more webspace, etc., usw.

Maybe I'll even write a new interface some day.  But I doubt it.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
nobaloney.net
P. O. Box 52672
Riverside, CA  92517
voice: (909) 787-8589  *  fax: (909) 782-0205