Aegir and ubercart integration -- we want your use cases

My use case is:

• Market one or more narrow vertical website applications.
• I would market the sites directly - ie don't want to sell a package of 50 sites to a reseller. I know that others have suggested that the product should be the client but I can't think that big (yet).
• Each site would be deployed from a specific installation profile based on a multi-site code base.
• Each vertical would have tiered subscriptions based on features and number of registered users. I'm not as focussed on bandwidth and disk space (maybe because I'm naive?)
• A two week free trial would be a great option to offer.
• It would be great to be able to let clients upgrade to add features ie go back to the shopping cart and check more boxes.
• I already use Authorize.net so would want to continue to use their APIs
• It would be useful to be able to allow month-to-month or annual subscriptions (the latter with lower monthly rates)

Hope this helps,

My primary use-case would be akin to a SaaS or ASP business model. Basically, this comes down to "one-click" sites that, in it's simplest form (from a customer stand-point) bypasses Aegir all together.

I envision an order/provision workflow something like:

1. After perusing the service catalog, the client decides on an Open Atrium site and adds it to her cart;
2. She then decides on some options, such as:
1. Extended features (e.g., the experimental OA Reader, in-house or 3rd party custom features, &c.);
2. Premium themes;
3. A quota on the number of users (more users likely mean more resources and support requirements);
3. She decides on a level of support (e.g., 8x5 vs. 24/7, phone vs. email vs. forum, &c.);
4. She pays;
5. She then receives her welcome email from her new Open Atrium site, where a user account has already been created for her and assigned the role of "manager".
6. Finally, based on her level of support (from step 3), she might be granted access to additional resources outside her site, such as the ability to submit support requests to the service providers issue-tracking system.

Things to note:

• The client never sees Aegir.
• She is not assigned UID 1.
• No doubt other options will also need to be made available such as:
• Level of security, possibly w/ bundled SSL certificates;
• use of a subdomain vs. new domain name registration.
• Service levels may not need to use uc_hosting or Aegir, per se. They could perhaps be handled by building product kits (i.e. Community/Business/Enterprise levels);
• As noted in step 6 above, access to additional resources (i.e., creating a user account and assigning a role on some other site) could be handled by some other mechanism. However, if this mechanism was implemented in or managed by uc_hosting/Aegir, it could allow for other interesting possibilities, such as a free/cheap/demo package that simply creates a group (in the context of OA) for the client, rather than a full site.

Hopefully this is still open to discussion.

I'm looking at a similar business model to Wordpress.com (although for a different market than blogs). Where users can get a site for free, but then when they need to:

1. purchase a domain;
2. start adding video and/or lots of images;
3. using a lot of bandwidth;
4. add many users;
5. edit their own theme;
6. do some other stuff I haven't thought of

they'll have to pay.

Most important for me is that it must be simple for the end user, my target market is not computer literate.

The list above is just a general idea of stuff the user will be able to do, not all of it will come under the purview of Ægir. This is a use case in itself though: Ægir must play well with other modules.

Thanks for putting out this request, very good of you to solicit feedback, I just hope mine isn't too late! :)

Webenabled offer the same quid of service and I don't feel they are hugley sucessfull.
THere was serious reliability problem.

They may have give to much emphasis on free account at the begining.
Not being very responsive to market differently in other langage.
And targeting mostly webbuilder and reseller.

It meand that at least we have to count them in.
Having some referal fees.
Having the posibility of free trial period.
Being able to offer other free software alternative like wordpress/Budypress joomla virtual mart/ Elgg etc...

Building a Aegir-based business model that is targeted specifically to the high-end professionals in the Film and TV industries in the US, Australia, UK, New Zealand and Canada. The commerce side of the proof of concept is much in line to where your project is heading:

A) Using Aegir LAMP. Running the whole administration/sales from one master server, clients each on their own remote nodes in the cloud under our control. That will need to be added to the bill, but we will have very limited choices on what those servers are and how they are configured. Elastic? Only a little.

C) Using 3rd party CDN/Video encoding solution as optional feature. That will need to take into account as part of the larger billing scheme. So we will need to take their billing side and integrate it into our billing side. We will not resell these services, simply pass the fees over to the client as part of their monthly totals.

D) Not targeted to the regular public, and in some instances it may be completely private or semi-private. Sort of like a B2B, expect those B's are all people rather than companies. Visitor traffic will be low but bandwidth will be high as the video quality will have to be the absolute best. In every way the opposite of YouTube. We may only get 30 visits a month, but those visits will consume the same bandwidth as 3000 visitors in YouTube.

E) Limited clients. We will not have more than to 250 accounts at any time as we have already established that part of the business. We actually have set a firm limit on this. In this model QUALITY far surpasses QUANTITY. Stability a must. These clients will be very demanding, very capricious and with little patience for error.

F) Automation of the sign up process is NOT a priority, though desirable. Flexibility and tracking of billing IS the priority: Recurring billing, ability to add/deduct fees on the fly, track CDN usage, Video encoding usage, features, etc. We definitely like to implement a "Pay-when-on, Free-when-off, always there" scheme.

G) Building our own custom platforms with features that can be added and remove at will by the client. Example: The client can add/remove a CDN + Video encoding at any time and as often as they please. All the fees that come with that will need to be added and tracked. Obviously the question we are trying to figure out now is how to implement this part: If we set pay-for-what-you-use, the whole billing system becomes a veritable cornucopia of variable fees. Maybe we go for bulk instead. So there is that part.

H) The "core" use of the site will need to be highly secure, some areas will be more public. One of our custom features will need to be so secure that it may require the client's lawyers/IT approval before they use it. This, of course, will also need to be considered in billing, though in this case is just a flat fee.

I) The clients will be either single individuals OR companies with the ability to create their own accounts for employees/clients/reps. Individuals will have one set of packages and fees, companies will have a different set. All of them will have the exact same features available to then, but company packages will allow their owners to add/remove sub-accounts on the fly. Those "sub-accounts" are still undefined to us: Could/Should they be individual platforms WITHIN a remote server? Or maybe we simply go the content way and create a "company-specific" platform that handles using some good old fashion Drupal administrative controls? Working on that concept as well.

So there it is.

Peace.