Hosted CMS with DotNetNuke or eZPublish Hosting
There are lot of open source and free CMS web applications available to download and install on the web server. One of the best in Microsoft .NET technology is DotNetNuke and the best one in PHP technology is eZ Publish. These CMS applications like DotNetNuke and eZ Publish let you run many web sites with different UI run from single installation. And that’s the key. All the web sites will get basic functionality modules like Forums, File Management, Skinning, Events, Announcements, Articles, Contact Us and many other by default.
If we assume your web site is called hostedwebcms.net(fictious), the subscriber’s web site would be called subscriberselectedname.hostedwebcms.net or hostedwebcms.net/subscriberselectedname.
If you are a tech geek yourself or you can hire one geek to manage one of this CMS for you, you can launch a hosted CMS service. Install one of these web application ( e.g. DotNetNuke or eZ Publish) and let users create their web sites on top of it.
In terms of Business or money making there are 2 modes you can run this web application in. 1) Paid Subscription 2) Free
1) Paid Hosted CMS Service
That’s pretty straight forward that you install the application on your server and let users create web site on top of it and change them to have this site created and hosted monthly or yearly.
2) Free Hosted CMS Service
Again the technical requirements remains the same but you would generate revenue through advertisements on your web application. So, whenever your subscribers(customers) or their web site visitors are on the web server, they see these advertisements.
The Advertisements can come from various sources. One of them is Google AdSense. You can also try and find various vendors in the same technology and services to be their affiliate and place their links on your site to earn affiliate revenue. You can also have direct contact clients to place their banners on your application.
What needs to be setup to get this going?
Whichever CMS you may use, but it needs to support multiple sites in the same single installation.
Need to have a functionality/page, where user can register onto your CMS and create a new web site.
The user becomes the administrator of his part of the web site. It’s upto you to restrict some particular functionality access. You may choose to provide skinning functionality, but that needs to be secure enough so that the subscriber can not steal data from your database by uploading any files as part of his skin files.
You may like to turn off few features which you are not sure whether they can breach security or not.
We have to take care of web site policies and rules and regulations on the site. For example, you may like to continuously moderate the kind of web sites being created on your hosted space.
There you go, you are all set as such.
Few tips:
Find a good web host(a dedicated server is recommended for such kind of service), but we should be looking for high amount of bandwidth and database space etc.
Always make sure about security by investigating every feature that you are allowing on your web site.
We should try to make things automated as much as possible but moderation is a good practice for certain actions.
If you are a tech geek and have time to look after all of this operation, that’s cool. Otherwise, It is highly recommended to have a software professional look after this hosted CMS installation at least for part-time basis.
I hope these notes helps. Any questions are most welcome. And any corrections or updates are higly appreciated.
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