obihill's comments

This has a very straightforward and straight-to-the-point proposition: Forms for your website for $15/year. No pricing page, just a single, simple offer. I much prefer this [with priced addons when you have them] than the usual multi-offer pages where much time [I assume] is spent trying to make a decision on which one is the right offer.

Also, it might be helpful to have a video showing how to set it up as the source code screenshot seems overly targeted to developers.

Finally, your page still says 2017... It may make sense to use a script like this instead:

<p>Copyright &copy; 2017 — <script type="text/javascript">var dt = new Date(); var d = dt.getFullYear(); document.write(d);</script> Nivel Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.</p>

This way, you don't have to keep manually updating your web pages once a year.

It appears that you already have some tech skills [in C/C++]. This is more than a lot of people can say. What you should consider doing is finding some meaningful work around that area of skill to get yourself back on track.

Here are a few questions you could ask yourself to get at an answer:

- Are there any challenges that C/C++ developers have that I can solve with a product I can create within a short period of time?

- Are there any problems that I see around me, problems experienced by others that I can resolve with a C/C++ powered solution?

- Are there any technologies similar to C/C++ that I can learn to help me build something that someone may find useful and pay for, or make a transition to another job opportunity that is not specifically C/C++?

- Can I teach or tutor someone [or a small group] C/C++ and earn something to keep me going?

Maybe the next phase for you isn't a new job. I would encourage you to ask yourself questions about how you can use what you know [and are good at] to impact someone else positively and eventually earn a living doing so.

I've read quite a few good suggestions in this post and I would urge you to stay on-board. Storms don't last that long, but you will be changed for the better if you can make it through them.

Thanks so much for your detailed response. And thanks for your contribution to the space with VirtualMin.

It appears it would be unwise to just build a direct competitor to CPanel, Plesk, etc. Not only would that be short-sighted (given the competitiveness you've highlighted), it would be unnecessary (because control panels don't appear to be required tooling for the people buying cloud infrastructure).

According to Gartner, Cloud IaaS revenue was $90B in 2021, but the combined revenues of CPanel and Plesk in the same year couldn't break $100M (according to data from Datanyze and ZoomInfo). This is a clear signal that those who are buying cloud infrastructure from Amazon, Microsoft, et al. don't have an essential need for these tools. And even at the smaller providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. you'd have to be unreasonable to pay $20 per month for a license to manage a $5 per month droplet; the panel won't even install on a $10 droplet.

It's kind of funny, because the things that can be done on that single droplet/server are incredible. What can't you build? Unfortunately, control panels as they are setup (and have been setup for ages) can't cater to aspirations. People need user-friendly tools they can use to build things on servers; by themselves and/or with others.

You're right about the innovator's dilemma though. Your customers aren't going to tell you what could be, only how 'what currently is' could be a little different. It's going to take some kind of leap, but the companies seemingly thriving in this space may have become too comfortable collecting license fees to make it. Maybe they've seen it (or something like it), but the refactoring cost and mental paradigm shift constitutes too much inertia to overcome their comfort zone without a looming existential calamity staring at them in the face.

'Going to take a crack at it. I have a few ideas I think could work, but I'll never know unless I test them out. There'll be a server management aspect to it, but that's not going to be the main. And I don't think 10 months is too optimistic for an MVP. Again, it's not going to be a CPanel clone; not that many folks really need that.

Is it ok to check in with you later in the process and perhaps bounce a few ideas off?

Note that I mentioned that I used to be in the business; just have a few clients I'm working with now.

7 to 10 months seems doable for an MVP, but we'll see. I'm looking to have something that a CPanel/Plesk client would be comfortable using.

Thanks for the feedback.

Could you share what it was in the four you looked at that didn't meet your expectations? What were you looking for specifically?

Thanks for the feedback. 'Had this same problem [not with Hostinger]. It stopped when I started registering domains with privacy. Looks like spammers pull the email address from WHOIS.

Thanks. It looks like I have to buy into a Hostinger plan to use the panel? If so, then that's what I'm trying to avoid.

Also, the problem with this is that it's going to be a massive hassle when you want to move to another hosting provider.

This has a simpler interface, yes. But, it took me a while to get comfortable with regular expressions, so the explanations of what was going on was like a built-in tutor, and apps like this definitely need this to be useful to learners.

I use regex101.com, which has a really great explanation feature, but it's not really built for 'search and replace'. You might want to take a look at it and see how you match up against it.

I guess it would depend on what you're using it to build. If you're using it via Ionic framework to build an appstore-bound app, then maybe not so much. However, if your focus is a Progressive Web App for universal use, then it's definitely a problem.

I'd actually like to know what impact that TypeScript has on all this?

@rosiesherry Thanks for this, and congrats on the business. I wish you all the best going forward in your industry (which I had never heard much of before now).

It's incredible looking at the revenue breakdown just how much 'training courses and events' were bringing in compared to the actual 'testing services'.

I'm launching 2 free and open-source toolkits for Web designers/developers next month and your revenue breakdown has convinced me that my initial plan of monetizing on training is probably the way to go.

Do you have any specific tips on how you built up that initial community (besides setting up the forum)? What were some of the specific tactics you used to draw those initial users in?

Author here. We just redesigned the restive.js website. We've built a new toolkit called rScript to replace restive.js in the coming months, but we felt a change was in order. Comments welcome.

"Built to Last", by James Collins and Jerry Porras. Great book that goes into the principles of how to build enduring businesses.

How is this different from using an Array.filter method?!

Never liked Samsung phones (Google Nexus 5 user still), but this is really annoying for their customers. I'm even sadder for those who buy these expensive phones unsubsidized.

Looks interesting. How does it compare to a tool like Ansible?

Great! Another thing to worry about. So happy I don't use them. I'm hoping we [as in the Web community] finds a better way to make mobile-friendly/responsive happen, and soon, because it's things like this that drive people crazy. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the feedback. I think the safe answer is that your website is considered mobile-friendly if it passes Google's mobile-friendly test. Regarding popups, I guess most of them are built for desktop browser environment so they don't exactly adapt well for mobile. Popups suck regardless, but they do suck more on mobile.

Author here: We did some research on enterprise websites, using the Fortune 1000 as our main cohort, and we found that only 13% of them were mobile-friendly and fast. This is in stark contrast to the number that are mobile-friendly (60%).

We're not exactly sure why performance lags so far behind mobile-friendliness, but we'd like to get some thoughts on this.

Definitely a problem that needs solving, but we run the risk of implementing too many 'bite-size' libraries with code that could probably serve better as helper extensions to already existing toolkits e.g. jQuery, underscore, etc.