Our offering of Soholaunch Pro was very much an accident - one day, it showed up in Fantastico. We had assumed that all software in Fantastico would be open source (and free to use), and it was not actually open source or free to use if you wanted to make the most of it so upon install, our clients were a little confused. It was relatively inexpensive at the time, and after a client asked about it, we licensed it for the servers.

Over the last few years, we’ve gone from just having it as a side offering to one of our featured offerings, and it went from a really tiny part of our business to the content management system of 7% of all sites hosted at DrakNet. (Currently, the number stands at 131 sites and is steadily rising.) In addition to bringing in new clients, we have converted a number of our current clients over to the system.

If you want to know what it does, we have a plethora of information available on the site for you to peruse. If you want to know why people are using it, you can visit the Soholaunch forums and find some very passionate people about the software (including yours truly, who is an opinionated volunteer moderator). If you want to know what the sales and marketing information doesn’t tell you, read on…

Soholaunch Pro is used to run your entire site, and essentially takes it over. If you have a current site and think you might want to switch, it will take some planning on your part and our part to do it - we recommend downloading your current site, installing Soholaunch Pro, and then re-uploading your old site over the Soholaunch installation as long as they are straight HTML pages, as this will allow both to exist simultaneously OR installing another full account to built it on and then switching the site over. All activity to manage your site for the most part is done through your browser, and its compatible with the most popular ones on Windows, Macs, and Linux Desktops (though I am not sure the Linux Desktop support is official - we have been able to manage the site on a Mint install).

So, why choose it? Well, for one, its commercial software - as much as we support open source software, the fact is the “newbies” just entering into the market may not have time for the “do it yourself” approach to web site technology and support, and we simply don’t have the time (or the inclination) to become familiar with every single open source solution out there and since we can’t, the help that we can give you is limited. Having a company actually stand behind the software is beneficial for those that want a quicker response than some open source CMS’s are capable of, and Soholaunch has it. Since we have a guaranteed direct line of support to the company with our license, we support the software and it is, in fact, the only CMS that we do directly support fully.

Two, it really is a two-sided machine. One of the most brilliant aspects of the Soholaunch product is that it is expandable and customizable if you are a programmer, and if you’re not, it’s expandable and customizable (though you may pay a small fee for that by way of a plugin). It is rapidly improved on both by the company itself, and the developers that favor it in the form of plugins.

The drawback, of course, is that its $149 for a license and that license is assigned to one domain name. The plus of hosting here is that we pay that licensing fee for you - there are an awful lot of hosting companies that claim they offer Soholaunch, but they simply have the free trial in Fantastico that everybody, their dog, and their Aunt Sally gets. Not for nothing, but any schmuck with Fantastico can offer that - here at DrakNet, Soholaunch, Inc. yanks a few thousand dollars out of our bank account a year so that no one here pays for the software as long as they’re here. Period. Ever. The end.

As a bonus, you get some Viastep templates because we snagged ‘em way back when, before server licensing templates became prohibitively expensive.

You really can get up and running in an hour, and if you use one of the templates names above, you can get a pretty slick looking site in that time - and that’s really the draw. Up, fast, configurable, and slick looking without having to go through the twists and turns of learning how to do all this “design stuff”.

Tags: soholaunch

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 7:39 am and is filed under DrakNet Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.