EP1: Companies Who Make Money: Virtualmin
Written on September 1, 2008 – 1:12 pm
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
All too often we hear that so and so has secured x.000,000.00 of financing in round (x). What we don’t hear much about are quiet little companies who make niche products that people are actually willing to pay for, built by small teams and who are actually profitable and largely grow organically.
A new weekly series
Therefor I am starting a series of weekly articles covering companies ‘who actually make money’. Given I’m an application developer, the companies I like will be nerdy techie types. If you have some tips for companies you particularly like (in other sectors maybe), please let me know in the comments.
Expensive web control panels
One such company that I am in love with is called Virtualmin. Virtualmin is a web control panel on Apache for system admins. Built on top of the Webmin platform, Virtualmin allows complete control over (and the creation of) virtual servers.
If your asking ‘what is he going on about’, let me tell you the problem. Every web app / site sits on a server, but configuring servers is very complicated. Knowledge of Linux is needed along with an army of tools which are utilized through the command line. Control panels like Virtualmin help to sanitize the process by offering friendly user interfaces and doing much of the donkey work for you.
There are a few companies offering control panels (Cpanel, Plesk etc.) they can be expensive and while looking pretty, cost is very important to bootstrapped start ups (especially me) and this where the Virtualmin GPL (free) version excels.
When I had to move my own app up to a larger server, I found this wonderful company called Linode offering great deals for high quality / capacity services. Being a bargain hunter I signed up for a basic account then soon realized the catch. There was no control panel like on other virtual servers, in a nut shell, you had to know Linux. eerk.
Did I really need to learn how to use Linux?
The first response I had was to run, did I need the headache of learning all this when all I wanted was a bigger server? Hanging around for the duration turns out to have been one of the better decisions I have made along this windy unlit road.
Having control over every aspect of your own set up is overwhelmingly powerful, there are too many benefits to list but the breadth of tools I now have available make all the difference between a site that fly’s and one that grinds to a halt.
Companies who are looking for scalable and cost effective solutions to hosting their apps with 1 million visitors per month etc. would do very well to sign up for a Linode and install Virtualmin. The support on Linode has been exceptional and coupled with Virtualmin I think the combination is the best hosting solution on the market today.
I hope you like that post!
Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
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By Geoffrey McCaleb on Sep 1, 2008
Big fan of Joe and everyone at the Virtualmin team. Not only do they make a great product, but they also have stellar support.
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By Viktor on Sep 1, 2008
Hi guys. This is great. I like this and Friday flashbacks idea a lot.
Keep doing a great job :)
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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Sep 1, 2008
Nice new series! I have a few recommendations too…
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By Krzysztof Kowalczyk on Sep 1, 2008
This was supposed to be about companies that make money.
You failed to say how much money does Virtualmin makes. Do you even know if they make money?
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Howdy Krzysztof,
We do, in fact, make money. I’m not cruisin’ in a mega-yacht (yet), but we have about 1400 paying customers, and the number is climbing at a reasonable pace. We’re also nearing public launch on our new cloud computing management control panel, which is a market with far fewer competitors and nothing that provides the capabilities we’ll be launching with, at any price.
We’re obviously extremely enthusiastic about the future of Virtualmin, (the company, the product, and the project).
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Hi Joe,
The cloud computing management control panel sounds interesting, how could I drop you a line to know more about it? I am currently running a couple of instances in EC2 using virtualmin free GPL and am exploring a management console for scaling and automatic backup of instances.
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Howdy Alvin,
Drop me an email (joe at the obvious domain) and I’ll forward along more information. I think we have an EC2 instance of it available already for beta testers.
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By Joe Cooper on Sep 1, 2008
Thanks for the kind words, Steven! We’re happy to hear you’re enjoying using Virtualmin. And, if you have any problems or requests, be sure to let us know.
We’ve been hearing from a lot of folks using Virtualmin on Linode, lately. I think I should probably talk to them about getting some sort of official Linode install option available for their users…it might ease the process of getting up and running a little bit, particularly for folks without a lot of experience at the command line.
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Hey Joe, Caker is the man to speak to at Linode. I just the other day mentioned the same idea to him, one click install for VM.
I think its a good idea too, I think some there prefer people who are self sufficient to a degree and know linux.
Good luck and keep up the great work.
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By globalhost on Sep 2, 2008
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http://www.globalhostcenter.com.
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By Luca F. on Sep 2, 2008
nice tip… looking forward to the next ones…
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By Gonzagye on Sep 5, 2008
oh thats cool i’m using Webmin at the moment, this looks like a good upgrade :-)
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