So Your Hosting Plan Includes a Site Builder? What About an App Builder?
Frank Zamani, who's the CEO of Caspio, turned an Excel spreadsheet into a searchable, editable, password protected online database while we chatted on the phone. It looked easy; there was no coding involved. GE uses his app building service (which is hosted at Verio), as do Sara Lee, Toshiba, the American Red Cross... Frank says it empowers non-programmers to create event registration forms, staff directories, product inventory databases, etc, all by themselves.
Caspio has been around since 2000 and powers over 40,000 apps, but now competition is heating up. Coghead announced its beta last week, and Teqlo has gotten lots of press since announcing former SAP strategist Jeff Nolan as its new CEO. Wufoo falls in the same category as well. There's also Ning, where I was able to clone somebody else's music ratings app in 30 seconds flat.
App builders are the new black - and there's a reason for that. Just about every hosting provider I've spoken to recently has complained about churn. And "service not in use" is the #1 reason customers give for closing their accounts. Unfortunately, static brochure-ware websites typically aren't part of customers' workflows. They're seen as non-mission-critical marketing initiatives. Interactive web-apps, on the other hand, have the potential of playing central roles in customers' daily operations.
Last night I did a quick survey of a dozen or so shared hosting providers, and it looks like 1&1 is the only company that offers an app building tool. Everybody else has some catching up to do...
One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers.
Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)
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Comment by Anonymous on Monday, October 16, 2006
Lots of interesting, cool tools here. The thing that has me curious is to what extent the capabilities of an application builder overlap with the needs of a shared hosting customer. I'd almost think that part of the reason some of these shared hosting services are "not in use" is because basic Web hosting (as opposed to, say, a certain hosted application) is so open ended that it almost requires a certain amount of creativity or inspiration to put it to use - kind of like the difference between a sandbox and a board game. I suppose If the app building tool let customers use each other's apps, that might provide enough linear uses for the service, along with generally being pretty awesome.
Comment by Anonymous on Monday, October 16, 2006
That's my biggest complaint about shared hosting plans - they're too sandbox-like. I've had dozens of "we've got all that!" conversations with different hosting providers. Everybody says that their hosting plans include blogging and forum and photo organizing software. And plenty of space for backing up files. And unlimited databases. And huge collections of free scripts. But most customers don't use any of those features. Instead, they spend more money on less bandwidth/disk space at Flickr and TypePad and Box.net because they can't be bothered to activate/install/configure anything.
I think the app building services I listed above represent a middle ground - they're like sandboxes with buckets, shovels and photos of sand castles that other kids have built (ie starter apps that users can customize). If such tools were more pervasive, maybe people would change their work habits and put lists of customers and products and employee contact info online instead of emailing outdated Excel spreadsheets back and forth? It'd be more efficient - and they'd be stickier web hosting customers.