News

Today we released a new feature for our Online Stores system. Following up on the recent releases of the Account Panel for end clients, and the Clients interface allowing you to group services under a single Client entity, we are now releasing the Account Panel for Clients in an Online Store.

In the following paragraphs we will give a short overview of the ICDSoft Online Stores system and its components.

A quick overview of the ICDSoft Online Stores system

As a hosting provider focused on resellers, developers, and agencies, one of the major projects at ICDSoft has been our Online Stores system. It allows any registered reseller/partner to create hosting stores with their own pricing structure for the purpose of reselling ICDSoft's services to end customers. The Online Stores system has several major components:

Online Stores

The online stores functionality is the major building block of the system. It allows you to manage the services you wish to offer to your end clients, set your own prices, and configure your branding.

Account Panel for your clients

The Account Panel for end clients allows your clients to manage their services from a single interface, order and renew services at your prices, etc.

Clients

This is the component that gives your services a name. It allows you to create customer profiles (Clients) and assign purchased services to them. Each client gets their own Account Panel where all assigned services can be managed.

Hosted Storefront

The hosted storefront is a functionality allowing you to quickly build an online hosting store in order to attract new customers to your brand. With this option you no longer need a website or hosting as we host and provide the entire solution for you.

WordPress plugin, Widget, API Endpoint

These three features allow you to build your own custom hosting shop. If you want to build a more advanced website, this is the recommended method. We have a detailed tutorial on the building of a fully working online hosting website from the ground up with our WordPress plugin and Elementor:

How to Start Your Own Hosting Company At Home – the Complete Guide

With today's release, we mark the completion of the major components for our Online Store system.

The Economy hosting plan in the US data center, which is one of our most popular solutions, has received a significant resource upgrade. The new and improved plan specifications are already in place, and customers on this plan can now take advantage of the new resources. The resource upgrade also brings a small bump in the base price for this plan.

What exactly is changing?

We would like to point out that the changes affect only the Economy plan in the US data center. The price of the Economy plan in the EU data center will not be changed.

The most important changes for the Economy plan in the US data center are:

- A disk quota upgrade from 1 GB to 10 GB.
- A max mailbox quota upgrade from 1 GB to 10 GB.
- Resources such as FTP users, subdomains, database slots, domain parking slots, and mailing lists have been doubled.
- A base price change from $6.00 USD/mo to $8.00 USD/mo.

All existing customers always take advantage of significant discounts off the base price - at least 40% off for new shared hosting accounts, and at least 20% off for shared hosting renewals. For example, for customers with one account, the renewal price increase will be from $4.80 USD/mo to $6.40 USD/mo. For customers with seven or more accounts, the renewal price increase will be from $3.00 USD/mo to $4.00 USD/mo.

Why is this change made now?

One of the most common issues our clients encounter is running out of disk space. With 1 GB of disk allowance, this is no surprise. In 2020, 1 GB simply isn't enough anymore. 1 GB mailboxes are also a thing of the past. Users have started using their mailboxes as a sort of personal archives, never deleting anything.

We knew that we had to increase these resources, but we couldn't because we didn't want to change the price. We made lots of calculations trying to justify a resource upgrade without raising the prices but, unfortunately, we couldn't make the numbers work. The US Economy plan has been operating at a loss for many years now, and no resource upgrade could be justified if we didn't touch the prices. With this slight increase in price, we are able to increase the disk space allowance of the plan tenfold, double most of its other resources, and bring it back in line with the needs of our customers.

Can't you keep the legacy plan and prices?

We understand that some of our clients may not need the increased resources, and for them the small price increase may seem unjustified.

Our Economy plan was designed back in 2006 and this is when its resources and price were configured. The price hasn't been increased since then and, sadly, due to this price pinning, we weren't able to increase the Economy plan's resources in any meaningful way.

As a quality hosting provider with over 20 years of experience (and serving 59,000+ customers), we need to maintain a healthy and sustainable business model in order to ensure the stable operation and growth of the company. We have always offered quality services, not necessarily cheap, so we have never taken the cheapest offers on the market, be it for hardware or personnel - we choose the best, always.

Over the years, all these expenses increased constantly, but this was never reflected in the price of the US Economy plan. This year, the feedback we got from our clients, combined with the plan's no longer sustainable price, made us take the final step we had postponed until now - significantly increase the plan's resources and adjust its cost with a small price bump.

Thank you!

The recent introduction of the Account Panel for clients was just the first step towards our new client management model. It is now time for the second step that will further enhance the CRM-like experience for our partners and resellers. Meet our new Clients feature - an easier way to manage your end clients and their hosting services.

What is this Clients feature?

Simply put, it is an easy way to manage service ownership and group multiple services under a single owner called Client. You decide who pays for a specific service and how much it costs:

- Clients configured to use an online store will be able to purchase only services enabled in it at the prices set up in that store.

- Clients configured to use the ICDSoft store will have access to all services provided by ICDSoft; they will still take advantage of your reseller discounts.

You can create and remove Clients, change their usernames and details, associate services with Clients, as well as move services between existing Clients.

A Client example

If you have a friend using more than one hosting account with you, you can now easily associate these accounts with just one Client, and the Account Panel for clients will allow your friend to manage these accounts from a single interface. Each Client can purchase new services, upgrade existing ones, and manage all aspects of their account without having to go through you.

For example, if you associate a Client with the ICDSoft store, they will use your discounts and will interact with ICDSoft for their billing needs. If you have an online store and associate a Client with that store, this Client will buy from you directly at the prices you have defined in your store.