I’ve been looking forward to writing this for a long time, and
to finally be announcing what we are up to and have been up to
recently. What is more, why the work we are doing will be saving
many of our customers’ businesses as the industry changes.
Helm 3 is now over five and a half years old and Helm 4 is just
reaching its first birthday. For the last three months, we’ve
carried out the colossal task of putting forth the next major phase
of Helm slightly ahead of originally planned, mainly because the
changes in the hosting industry are becoming more exponential than
we predicted around three and a half years ago.
We have always talked about the modular side of Helm 4, the way
hosts can utilise this unique platform in order to maximise their
product and service offerings to their customers, and to help them
push ahead of their competitors. With the incredible, yet scary
growth of SaaS and free professional web hosting from the big
giants such as Microsoft, Google, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn,
Flickr and commercial services such as NetSuite, GroupSpark and
Intermedia to name but a few, it leaves small and medium hosts with
a bleak future ahead of them.
It is strongly believed that the limitations of any host have
two key contributors. Firstly the owner, whom has the sole
responsibility of deciding how the business should go forward, and
secondly, the software and infrastructure, which dictates the
technical limitations for the services that the business can
provide.
No doubt, as a hosting business owner, you want to continually
drive your profits up, offering more new services to your clients,
and attracting new customers with unique services that others do
not, or cannot. This leaves the software that you use to be
essential to the success of your goals, and this is exactly where
our drive to step further and further away from the conventional
control panel comes from. We know that if we do not push forward
with our own unique developments, our customers can not either.
Our first phase has been our modular capabilities offering an
important part of the overall solution, allowing hosts to link into
any, hosted domain based, product or service, and offer it to their
customers with minimal development costs. We are the first, and
still, the only control system company to offer a platform which
has this capability, but it does not stop there.
We have now finished the first part of our next phase which is
why we have been super busy hiding away in our development labs
over the last three months, and now we have finally released this
in the latest version of Helm 4.0.17.
So what is it? And what does it mean?
If we were to look at any conventional hosting control panel, be
it Class 1, 2 or 3, we would see a very high level architecture
looking something like this:
This is a highly simplified point of view, however, different
control panels will disguise this architecture in many different
ways in their interfaces, but whichever way you look at it, it all
boils down to the same base ideals and architecture.
The differences you will find between a conventional control
panel and a modular control panel like Helm 4, is that the concepts
of websites, email accounts, FTP accounts etc, are not specified
within the product design itself, but are delivered by the
description and behaviour of the individual module. This is why the
potential scope of the modular control panel extends far further
than that of the conventional. However, it still has limited scope
by the fact it’s based upon the key top level architecture
described above.
If you are a small or medium sized hosting business, and want to
survive the changes occurring right now, then this means that being
a conventional hosting business has to change, and that means that
using a conventional control panel has to as well.
Now, in Helm 4 this is where we have added the brand new concept
of Online Services. This means that, by using the Helm 4 control
system, the choices you make about your business are to be the only
limiting factor to its growth and success.
What we have done, were to take the current base conventional
architecture and totally turned it on its head. Whereas Helm did
not need to understand the concept of websites and emails etc
within itself, it now doesn’t need to understand the concepts of
Domains either. This means that the previous abilities of Helm as a
hosting control system can now be reused and shaped in a manor to
fit entirely new markets for your business.
So the base architecture now looks considerably different.
Although it is able to perform the same operation as it has always
done, now that the limitations of the “hosting” has been removed,
you can have an architecture as follows.
What is important to note here, is that any of the types of
Online Service is not part of the base system. This means that
adding new classes of Online Service is dynamic, allowing
individual companies to hit very niche markets based upon a highly
functional control panel. You can sell any of the other Online
Services in exactly the same manner as you can sell hosting
services in Helm today. Moreover, is that you can mix and match the
Online Services based upon your business as well. For example, if
you want to only offer domain hosting and virtual servers, then you
can do so through a single unified control system, mix and matching
each of the service offerings through single hosting plans. Or, if
you only want to offer a SaaS based portal system of some kind,
then the control panel will simply feel as if it was purpose built
for that product, whilst still offering the same user management,
reseller modelling and billing systems etc.
What this means for you, is that you are given the ability to
hit completely new markets rapidly, whilst still keeping that new
business based upon the same central control system, offering the
same amount high levels of automation and targeting your current
client base without the need of significant re-education.
By using the latest version of Helm 4 today, you will be putting
your business on the road to new levels of potential, and we look
forward to including a number of new Online Services along with our
development partners over the upcoming months.
Adam Saunders
Founder and CTO