Why hosted (SaaS) Services over conventional websites
So you have a business plan and want to implement it quickly. Start a website and deploy a CMS or hire a web developer to build your site then you come across libmaker type hosted services used on rented basis. Here a question can pop that whether it is wise going for hosted solution instead owning a personal portal. This article throws some light why in today's cloud computing world SaaS model solutions are not seen exactly as the way they were few years ;back
Hosted Apps vs Custom Development
If you go for a traditional option like website development there will be minimum 4 steps to go; hire a web programmer, hire a web designer, rent a hosting service and spend huge amount of time giving direction to these peoples what you want. Of course this is a time consuming activity and very expensive, a typical web designer will charge anywhere between 200 to 500$ or more based on quality of work then programmers are nightmare to pocket supposed to come for minimum of 10$ per hour and project lasts for several months, these problems are absent in case of hosted apps as they are ready for use
Hosted Apps vs CMS
Open source CMS like Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal and some Ecommerce Applications are free of charge if you have experience in CMS installation. Now the limitation of these CMS pose are they tend to be very generic and not designed for specific business needs for example if plan is to run bookstore website you end up with ZenCart or Magento, their modules are made to support a generic product you will have attributes like images, title and price etc but not all.
Upgrading is Forever
When you get your application built from either of two sources after a while there is need for enhancement or upgrading the application, this will need technical assistance or call back to your programmer guy, in case of readymade CMS making any changes are not easy what you are left with is using available plugins released from community. In hosted apps like libmaker all security, usability and feature related enhancement are automatically added just like Gmail. Any request from customer that seeks possibility of improvement are given high importance. as it adds to all sites
Your freelance buddy
Finding reliable and trusted freelancer is difficult on web, there are peoples who want quick money by finishing the work ASAP, there are peoples who will simply take away your money without any trace, there are peoples who work inconsistently.
Data ownership concerns
Concern among potential entrepreneurs and organizations that "what will happen if SaaS vendor company closes it operation, what will happen if vendor suddenly demands higher price which I cant afford my site is lost..! all my content my users that I accumulated over years is lost!" Now this concern is not entirely baseless but there is shift in web world on looking over such services, you now check the companies history and how long it has been there, There are options in our services like downloading your content in the form of spreadsheet moreover as time passes web services tends to be cheap due to low capital investment by vendors so in future these services become more affordable instead of rates going high. If a SaaS vendor interested in more profit he will offer additional optional features instead of changing base price
