nemiah

I have no need for doing sales pitches anymore :D

Thanks :)

Everything important is backed up on the usb stick. The application can be set up on XAMPP or any other webserver with it.

I'll actually be sending out emails if there are more than 14 consecutive backups on the usb stick to remind the customer to switch them ;)

I've written about the technical details somewhere here in the comments. Just search for "websocket", it should be in here…

The user accesses it with a small desktop application which finds the box in the same network by itself and opens open3A.

No, wasn't me. I actually decided against posting the link here.

Nope, I did not ;)

Actually I am, thank you! Having quite some fun now :D

I don't see that happening. They would have to offer support for the new product and most of my marketing is word of mouth nowadays. Should work out just fine ;)

Sometimes a client sends me some code to put in my version for future updates. But other than that, I don't work with contributions.

It's more the feeling for me, yes :)

Yes, the extensions are AGPL also.

The management works like this:

Every open3ABox has an open websocket connection to my server. I do the monitoring over this connection and for updates and support I tell the box over the websocket connection to forward a port via ssh to my server. The port will be automatically closed by the open3ABox after three hours.

This means no constantly open port and an encrypted connection where only my server is allowed to do a remote function execution (get monitoring values, open port, etc.) on the box.

I offer open3ABox this way for the customers that have fewer technical abilities and don't want a cloud service.

They usually use the Windows version but don't do backups and if something fails it's a nightmare to support.

Funny to see you do that on my website :D

My intention with this blog post was only to write down my story. No marketing intended :)

I do this because I'm in it for the long run. Sure, maybe it won't pay off, but my "first directive" is, to get people to use my open3A. If they've put all their data in it and miss some feature in the future it is more probable that they will just buy it from me instead of going through the hassle of moving to another solution. If they have a good support experience that just gives them a better feeling with my software.

Yes, I could do that, but I could not support the users of e.g. a spanish version because my spanish is quite poor. This is why I settled for the german speaking market. That's Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Still enough money to earn :)

You can take a look: https://www.open3a.de The software is mostly in German, so I'm not sure if it's a fit ;)

I create and sell business software for writing invoices and managing customers. It is also available for rent and I use the following stack for my own cloud:

Debian, KVM, Apache, MySQL (with Percona for clustering), GlusterFS, rSync, HAProxy, PHP, jQuery

I actually own 3 servers :) I know, it's super boring, but this stack has only failed me once in about five years.

Yes, in my opinion this stack has helped me a lot in earning a living with my company because it just works and saves me time to do other things that earn money.