H-Sphere, reseller hosting and EIRCA
August 22nd, 2005, EIRCA signed a no-compete agreement with the new directors of DIYHosting that disallowed EIRCA from offering H-Sphere reseller accounts in the future. Circumstances change and per clearance from our solicitors, H-Sphere lovers rejoice; we’re back.
On Friday June 9th, 2006, due to several major contract breaches by the new DIYHosting directors all parts of the contractual agreement, excepting monetary compensation, were declared null and void. Specifically, this gives us complete legal clearance to re-enter the H-Sphere reseller hosting market; a market that EIRCA helped propel to global acceptance from 2003 to late 2005.
EIRCA’s influence on the H-Sphere market makes the company an undoubted leader, with a rock-solid reputation and an unwillingness to offer mere “out of the box” solutions, EIRCA as a company will be once again looking to dominate, revolutionise and invigorate the H-Sphere reseller market.
The H-Sphere reseller environment has changed somewhat since August 2005. It seems that the change in ownership at DIYHosting almost ended the huge push many H-Sphere reseller providers were on. We hope that our re-entry reinvigorates those providers to make the market a more bustling, open and competitive market.
So the date has been set for the H-Sphere offering: August 15th, 2006.
We’ve been beta and feature testing H-Sphere constantly since August 2005, for our dedicated server customers, which makes our re-entry somewhat easier (no surprises). We will however be taking two months to get ready for the influx of customers which will no doubt occur. Readying for our re-entry began a few months ago (when the first major breach of contract occured) and we are laying plans for how the re-entry will occur and also how we will combat the black-marking a few competitors will no doubt attempt.
The general outlook as of right now is as follows:
What we will offer:
- Linux hosting
- Windows 2003 hosting
- Coldfusion hosting
- MSSQL, MySQL, PGSQL
- Fully clustered environment*
- H-Sphere 2.5
- email hosting
- Custom expansions on H-Sphere platform
- Domain reseller capabilities ($6.95 per domain)
- SSL reseller capabilities (price not yet set)
- Reseller Suite expanded for H-Sphere
- All in one reseller solution. Sell Windows and Linux solutions from one account.
* A fully clustered environment means that all services are on seperate servers, communicating with one another through a central platform. Clustered services allows better email, dns and dns performance and greater protection for customers when pertaining to outages.
The first 100 accounts on the new EIRCA platform will be issued three free months. Yes, this is a customer grab, yes this will be frowned upon by some of our competitors, yes this is the desired effect and yes we fully expect those 100 accounts to go within the first month.
H-Sphere is a platform that our technical and development staff absolutely love. When I informed some of them that myself and Callum had ok’d the H-Sphere offering it was met with 100% satisfaction. As hosting industry professionals they want to be the best they can be and want the same for the company. In our case that means we must be offering H-Sphere and it must be in a reseller environment. The last 3+ years have played out that way and you can not argue with results.
Personally I can’t wait for August 15th, but I will.
Tags: diyhosting, EIRCA, hosting
December 7th, 2006 at 10:11 am
Hi Simon,
Hopefully this finds you well and doing well.
Going to your http://www.eirca.net Web site, I find Cpanel, but not H-Sphere reseller hosting. It also appears you are entering into the retail hosting market, which means you would be competing against the reseller, correct? What URL is needed to find your H-Sphere reseller hosting?
Roger
December 7th, 2006 at 10:24 am
Hi Roger,
Right now, the H-Sphere hosting is on hold because of the lawsuit filed against DIYHosting by EIRCA; we are hoping to get DIYHosting back, which would put us back in to the H-Sphere market.
You can view more on that here: http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/120606_EIRCA_Disputes_DIYHosting_Sale.cfm
There’s around 300 sites that have so far picked up syndication, I expect more will follow soon, which should give you a general idea of how big a deal that whole thing is.
I’ll be posting some related articles over the weekend, but the general gist of it is that we’re going to wait for a decision on DIY before going forward with EIRCA’s H-Sphere offering (or not, whichever the case may be).
With regards to competing against resellers: One of the reasons we held off for so long was discussions with the current resellers regarding this [possible] issue. It was decided by all involved that EIRCA offering high-end application hosting was in no way competing with resellers; resellers couldn’t offer the same type of hosting because it is very intensive both on the server resources (hence the insanely high powered servers) and on the support side.
The solutions being offered by This Is Hosting, it is safe to say, won’t compete with our resellers on any level.