Just recently, Zonat S.A. agreed to join us in a brief chat, and spilled some beans on what it’s like to work with ModulesGarden for almost half a decade. Have a compelling reading!

ModulesGarden: Why did you choose ModulesGarden?

Zonat S.A.: We use ModulesGarden because using existing and tested tools makes life much easier for us. Instead of spending time planning and developing digital tools, we simply use one of yours – especially since you offer a 7-day free trial!

ModulesGarden: Which of our products would you say have helped you the most in your business?

Zonat S.A.: We regularly acquire other hosting businesses using WHMCS, so we like using Multibrand For WHMCS from ModulesGarden. It works like a charm and makes it easy for use to integrate different brands under one umbrella. Our sales team also loves the CRM For WHMCS from ModulesGarden because it makes following up with leads and potentials very easy. In the past, we used to use other CRM systems, but the direct integration in WHMCS is definitely an advantage.

ModulesGarden: Multibrand For WHMCS is our flagship product for companies that oversee lots of different brands. How exactly do you use it to grow your business?

Zonat S.A.: We use Multibrand to group all our websites like http://luxhosting.lu or http://www.hosting.co.uk so we can manage them all from one platform. WHMCS has been a gamechanger for the hosting industry, but when we first started using it, we didn’t have Multibrand. That meant we had to have separate domains for payment, and it was more difficult to build custom products for each brand. Now that we have Multibrand, we can have a similar domain for payment for all our brands, and we can easily create custom products. This speeds up the innovation process, and it’s been a huge relief to be able to quickly bring more of our ideas to life.

ModulesGarden: Does Multibrand For WHMCS help with your customer support process?

Zonat S.A.: Multibrand has streamlined our customer support system, and it’s a huge part of the reason we’ve been able to keep our clients so happy. If you’re in charge of multiple brands, you know how difficult it can be to keep track of everything you’re doing for each brand, and when you add customers to the mix, things can get downright unwieldy. But because we use Multibrand, our customer support ticketing system is completely centralised. All the messages come in under one dashboard, and we can clearly see which brand the customer is contacting us from. This makes things a lot easier, because none of our customers get left behind, and we can quickly address issues before they end up snowballing and costing us our reputation.

ModulesGarden: And how has Mulitbrand For WHMCS helped with your emailing process?

Zonat S.A.: We actually use Multibrand’s emailing features almost daily. Zonat S.A. is constantly acquiring new brands, and it’s really important to us that we don’t lose productivity and efficiency as we get bigger. The Multibrand feature from ModulesGarden makes it really easy to send emails from multiple brands. We love that when we’re sending an email, there’s actually a field called “Brands” that brings up all our brands when we click on it. That way, we can send a mass email from all our brands at the same time. This feature saves so much time, because without it, we’d be forced to send emails from one brand at a time, or we’d need several licenses for all our brands.

ModulesGarden: Earlier in our conversation, you said you also love using our CRM For WHMCS tool. What’s your favorite thing about it?

Zonat S.A.: We love how much control we have over it. It’s so flexible and easy to tailor to our needs. Your company updates the tool constantly, and every change that’s made to it always makes sense. The change log makes it easy to keep track of all the changes, as well. And because it’s open source, if we notice that there’s some feature from which our team would benefit, we can mention it in the forum, and your team will get right on it. Or if we’re so inclined, we can even have our development team work on something and then share it with you. Making your CRM open source was truly an inspired move, and it makes it so much easier to innovate.

ModulesGarden: In general, what’s been your experience working with ModulesGarden?

Zonat S.A.: At Zonat, we’re big on innovation and growth. We’re in tech, so we can’t afford to stay in the same place, or we’ll quickly get left behind by newer, hungrier companies. So, we really appreciate working with a company that values innovation and progress as well. It’s easy to work with you because our values are so well aligned. At ModulesGarden, you’re constantly creating new software for billing and management. And you have such a large offering of products that whenever we want software with a special feature that will make our business run more smoothly, we always check ModulesGarden first, because chances are, you’ve already developed it. And your team responds really quickly to requests, so on the off chance that we want something you haven’t gotten around to creating yet, all we have to do is ask. And having that kind of safety net helps our company feel more confident as we soar to higher heights.

ModulesGarden: Thanks for meeting with us.
Zonat S.A.: Always a pleasure.

And there you have it!

Zonat S.A. is a fast-growing, innovative company that manages multiple brands with the help of the modules we create here at ModulesGarden, hand in hand with EasyDCIM’s data center management panel and MetricsCube’s advanced reporting tool. Think of how much time your company could save using such a productivity boosting equipment! Don’t waste time making new software from scratch if you can check out our products first. You might be surprised to find that we’ve already created the perfect piece of software to take your company to the next level!

First of all, you have to realize that monitoring of your regular income on a month-to-month basis will not give you a full picture.

Taking this into account, if you want your web hosting company to grow and succeed, you need to:

• Increase your MRR – it does not always mean immediate growth of the NET income!
• Increase the value of your users – in both the short and long run,
• Reduce churn – not only the revenue churn, but also the subscription and customer churn.

In order to make proper decisions about the above factors, you need to keep track of multiple metrics. It is also extremely important to compare the results in custom time intervals (e.g. quarter to quarter), as well as be able to filter them by products or customer groups. Below you will find the key measures, which, in my opinion, you should trace on a daily basis.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR is a report that indicates how much money you can expect from your active subscriptions. Typically, if your client base increases, or the value of an individual customer does, the MRR metric strongly and steadily grows. However, generating new sales is not the only method to increase MRR. Acquiring new clients is thought to be more expensive than maintaining the existing ones, so you may consider increasing the income of your current customers instead!

An example of a steady and stable growth of MRR. The higher it is, the better condition of a company and the higher its value.

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

ARPU defines how much revenue you get from one active client on average. Customers having only free trial, one-time or free products do not impact ARPU, so it’s related to the subscription model only. Usually, ARPU increases if your clients buy new services or make upgrades. Furthermore, ARPU can be used to figure out if the new changes in your offer turned out to be right. For instance, when you introduce a new service for your customers or modify the pricing scheme, ARPU will increase if your clients liked it!

An example of successful VAS introduced in June! ARPU grew, which means that the existing client base pays you more on average.

Lifetime Value

LTV is used to define a total profit from one customer through your entire business relationship with them. In other words, it is an indicator of how much money a single client brings to your company on average. It is very often applied to calculate the profitability of marketing campaigns by comparing it to Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). Obviously, you need to get more money from a user than it costs you to acquire them. It is not just a metric, it also gives a business owner the general impression about the quality of their services – the longer your clients stay and the more money they spend, the better your service quality!

An example of decline in customer loyalty for the company. As you can see on the trendline (the grey line), the value slowly decreases. This company needs to find the reason behind it, and then, perhaps consider extra discounts for existing clients?

Churn – Three reports on how your business is losing

“Churn” is an ominous word that makes every owner of a subscription-based business shake in their boots. Putting it simply, the higher the churn, the more revenue you lose from the already acquired client base. There are, however, three churn reports that you can monitor to gain the full view:

• Subscription Churn – it doesn’t necessarily translate into the loss of a customer, as they can still have other active subscriptions with you,
• Revenue Churn – it is the value of all lost subscriptions and downgrades,
• Customer Churn – it means that a cancelled customer has no more active subscriptions.

If your customers have multiple services, the Customer Churn will be slightly different and smaller than the Subscription Churn. In the above example, you can notice the huge churn increase in May. It was probably due to some major network problems with the hosting services.

The Revenue Churn may also have a different shape than the Customer/Subscription Churn, because, typically, pricing of services varies. In addition, the Revenue Churn includes downgrades that are not considered by the Subscription Churn report.

Where can I learn more? Where can I get these reports for my company?

If you would like to have a tool that allows you to browse all discussed reports or if you’re simply interested in these topics, I strongly suggest that you subscribe to the MetricsCube Newsletter. I will be providing much more detailed materials about them on the MetricsCube Blog, starting on July, and everyone subscribed will be up to date with new publications.

Subscribe!

For more details about my MetricsCube project, please visit the website: www.metricscube.io

cPanel Dispatcher is a bespoke system that has been created based on the ultra-innovative Antares platform with a central aim of enabling the resellers of XXL Webhosting to manage their accounts on multiple cPanel servers from a single place. Owing to the purpose-built programming interface that mirrors the API of cPanel, all resellers who previously used their own integrations, e.g. cPanel Extended For WHMCS module, could easily switch to a new solution, making zero alterations to their current infrastructure.

The gravity of change that cPanel Dispatcher has brought about for XXL Webhosting cannot be fully realized without getting the hang of limitations that the company was struggling with before they have turned to ModulesGarden. As a shared hoster with about 60 cPanel servers, they came across a formidable obstacle blocking the path of professional growth and client acquisition. „The biggest pain was that our resellers were bound to a single server only. All the accounts they created were located on the same server”. It is not difficult to envisage how this might turn out troublesome. The server could have been easily overloaded or in the worse-case scenario, even malfunctioning. „We needed something more scalable and flexible, yet allowing our resellers to still use the tools with standard cPanel integrations”, Sander explains. „A solution that presents all our cPanel servers as one big server to the outside world, but integrated with our own dashboard and standard billing solutions like WHMCS and WeFact. Basically, a big proxy layer located between our servers, resellers, customers, and tools”.

It quickly became apparent that none of the available platforms comes with a full set of appropriate functionalities. „WHMCS does not have all the necessary tools and is not intelligent enough. We do not want to sell shared hosting accounts only, we aim to sell additional servers on top of those accounts as well. WHMCS is not capable of choosing which server should be used to place a new account on, which is a crucial requirement”. But this one is not the only limitation that held Sander and his team back from using ready-made systems. „Neither WHMCS nor Blesta provide the support for cPanel API which means our resellers could no longer use their tools with standard cPanel integrations, and that is something we could not let happen”.

That explains the choice of custom software development services, but one still may wonder: why building a standalone application when the same goal could be achieved with just a custom WHMCS module? Sander notes, „We have already built our custom dashboard, and our resellers already have used their own tools and integrations on top of cPanel API. As you might imagine, they would not want to change all their routines and start using some kind of a standard module instead, all because we decided to no longer support cPanel API. We sought something that would just fit in the current landscape, and work out of the box, not only with regard to our own systems but also our resellers’“.

At this point, we had all the information we needed to help XXL Webhosting rise beyond the obstacle in a way that is profound and lasting. To enhance the entire experience even further, the development of cPanel Dispatcher has been based on the advanced management platform – Antares. „What I like the most about it” – says Sander about this open source project – „is the level of its efficiency driven by the modular, scalable nature. It offers a number of building blocks packed with tons of assorted functionalities that can be used immediately. Also, it comes with the ready, modern framework – nothing I needed to pay extra for!”.

XXL Webhosting Founder gives a vote of confidence for Antares and encourages other companies facing a similar dilemma to go for the professionally tailored software gear: „If default solutions are not an option or a simple plugin will not do the trick for your business, you should definitely consider custom software development. But then, of course, you should not start from scratch as it is better to use the ready frameworks like the one in Antares with a lot of useful components at hand”. Having your infrastructure shaped by skilled developers has one extra advantage. „They help you understand how things work, how common integrations are built, like those with cPanel that are a big part of our custom project. ModulesGarden has a profound knowledge of cPanel, so we did not really have to explain much. We also very appreciate the recommendations the team made throughout the entire development process, based on their own experience. They showed us how to set up individual components differently so that they all work better together”.

cPanel Dispatcher has been already put into action on a production environment. „We are talking about 30 000 domains, those are all managed by the central system and it works perfectly well”, Sander notes. „The best part of this customization is that it did not require us to make any changes to the infrastructure, e.g. to our billing system”. The new opportunities the custom solution offers to the resellers cannot be overestimated either. „We have a network of around 500 resellers and they are all using cPanel Dispatcher without a single complaint. They are happy they are not limited to the old-fashioned reseller accounts anymore. They can now scale more easily and expand the circle of customers across our whole server park and most importantly, they are no longer limited to one server only. Finally, they can boost their businesses and increase the revenue by offering not only shared hosting but also additional servers”.

Having a remarkable chance to explore and fulfill the real needs of real companies, like the success-ready XXL Webhosting, is no doubt the facet of our business voyage that we derive the purest pleasure from. But, being able to build complex systems entirely from scratch using ingenious platforms for software developers all the while? It makes this worthy mission all the more satisfying!

Companies equipped to grasp new opportunities today will become unstoppable tomorrow. ModulesGarden can work wonders with the help of Antares to create complete systems and web applications that will fit your dream software. Ready to follow the only right way forward towards the future?

Call On Antares Innovation!

We invited for interview Mike Jung – Product Development Manager at Liquid Web.

What did we have ModulesGarden create?

Liquid Web wanted to create a plugin for WHMCS that uses the Liquid Web API to automatically provision Storm VPS, SSD VPS and Bare-Metal instances for reseller’s customers. We wanted to quickly provide this to our customers, which is exactly what ModulesGarden was able to do.

The plugin provides a new level of control and automation for resellers by allowing them to customize instance types and give their customers control over the Storm Firewall, IP allocation and monitoring of services for their server.

Why did we have this created?

There was a very strong need for a solution like this on our uservoice page. Many resellers expressed the need for more automation when it comes to reselling our Storm VPS servers. Liquid Web feels that it is very important to listen to our clients, which exactly why we had ModulesGarden create the plugin. We really wanted to make it easy to resell Liquid Web products as it is a win-win situation for Liquid Web and our clients.

How did ModulesGarden help Liquid Web?

ModulesGarden made it easy for us to offer the plugin free of charge to our customers. They were able to quickly outline the plugin’s features and began to work on developing the plugin right away. ModulesGarden stands behind their work and they continue to provide updates and support for the plugin, which is very important to us since we are contantly updating our own API.

What type of impact has this had on our customers?

Many of our Resellers are currently using the plugin and the overall reaction has been very positive. We really wanted to help automate as much of the reselling experience as possible so that our clients can focus on other efforts such as growing their business and building relations with their own customers.

The plugin is free of charge and is easily accessible on ModulesGarden’s site, which makes it very easy to try out. Liquid Web offers support for the plugin as well, and we are happy to help with installation of the plugin. ModulesGarden was a large part of the positive reaction around the WHMCS plugin, and we will certainly work with them again to provide more solutions for our clients.