This week I spoke to a project manager from Boyd Tamney Cross, a full service marketing firm. They produce and manage Web sites for a variety of companies, including consumer goods and business services companies. Some of the sites are developed in home grown ASP.NET based content management systems, e-commerce applications and large databases. With these home grown site and application management solutions they are able to empower their customers to update portions of their sites, product descriptions and even special offers in the e-commerce stores.
It's the little features that count. With little prompting, the customer indicated that several of the proprietary and lesser known features of the Intermedia.NET Windows hosting control panel are very helpful in the quest to efficiently manage the Web applications. Features not often found on a shared Web hosting account such as Start/Stop/Restart the Web server, the ability to add "Web server" users, each with their own unique permissions, and the ability to back up an SQL 2005 server database were all mentioned as features that are not often seen at other hosting providers.
Most hosting providers provide a control panel that is either proprietary or provided by one of the great hosting control panel vendors like cPanel, Helm, SWsoft, Ensim or others. All provide a core feature-set and have a different look and feel. All need to be continually updated for compatibility with their specific implementations, hardware & networking architecture, Web server updates, databases, security, etc. The balance between maintainability, upgradeability and differentiated feature sets will always be widely discussed and is often the cause of heated discussion.
One of the most important concepts to consider when choosing a control panel vendor or new features to add to your proprietary control panel is the feature set. Continually listening to your customers and tracking their requests will help you prioritize the ever growing list. I listen to/read every request and the more I hear customers making the same request, the more priority that item is given.
-matt