Kentico CMS Licensing for Cloud Hosting

To Anthony:

We do plan to support Azure. We will focus on Azure support after we finish the development phase of version 5.0 later this year. Until then, I cannot provide you with technical details since we haven't tested Azure thoroughly yet (some parts of the Azure platform haven't been available yet when we were exploring this platform). If our support says "we are considering it in one of the next versions", they are serious :) The only issue is that we have 1000+ requirements and we are not able to implement them all at once. However, Azure has a big priority for us.

OK Petr thanks for clarification. This way I simply need to hire someone to take control over the servers so I don't control directly the "numbers" and it will be considered as a cloud - nice solution, why not after all:o)

As for the Azure I am surprised!
I was asking you support few months ago whether you will ever support multiple SQL servers for scalability purposes and the answer was: "We are considering it in one of the next version". I thought this is "we don't care go away" kind of answer but I was wrong sorry for that.
Could you post some more details how do you handle this SQL Azure stuff and what standard scale-out practices will be available for standard MSSQL implementation?

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your message and for your kind words. Yes, we plan to support Azure later this year.

Regards,

Petr Palas, Kentico

Hi Petr,

I’m wondering if you are looking into running KenticoCMS on Azure. I've had some success (with help from Kentico support) running on Mosso/Rackspace but there are a few minor bugs with Mosso - mainly how they handle IIS host headdress- that makes running multiple sites inconvenient.

Azure seems like an obvious choice since you are Micorsoft Partners, develop on a Microsoft platform and Azure integrates with Microsoft development tools already.

Also I’d like to say we have been quite satisfied with our choice to use Kentico and I personally feel like the product is priced extremely fairly. Anyone who thinks it should be free should develop their own CMS from scratch and give it away to fill the void.

Best Regards,
Michael Miller

Anthony, thank you for your comment and I'm sorry for my mistake. So it seems that tsohost.co.uk is also a cloud.

It seems we will go into many troubles with defining what a cloud is and how it works. Obviously, the issue is in the very basic model: the traditional software (such as Kentico CMS) is typicaly licensed per computer/server/CPU/etc. or per user which allows sofware companies to charge more for big deployments while keeping the price small for common-size deployments.

In the cloud world, the typical schema is "pay per use", so the model for Kentico CMS would be something like "$0.01 per page view" or "$0.01 per document in the Kentico database" which looks ridiculous today as much as the per server licensing may look ridiculous in 10 years :)

With our new license option, we try to bridge the gap while not loosing our income from customers who use cloud hosting instead or running their own web farm for large deployments.

It seems the most fair pricing model (at least for cloud hosting) would be charging customers per page view or based on the number of pages. However, since we are not Software-as-a-Service vendor and our clients run their sites themselves, we cannot do that.

For our licensing needs, we would define cloud as a web hosting service that runs on an unspecified number of servers that the client cannot control. In such cloud, you can use the cloud license.

If you have a control over the number of servers (you have your own web farm or even some kind of hosted virtual web farm of servers whose number you can control), you should purchase a license for every server.

I will appreciate any feedback and suggestions (except for making Kentico CMS completely free ;)

Regards,

Petr Palas, Kentico

Great news! But Petr: I disagree with you. I would say cloud is nothing but a bunch of computers running the same hence webfarm have to be a kind of cloud.
According to wikipedia "Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet." there's actually no difference between webfarm and cloud.

Well, you learn something everyday. I always thought it was cloud hosting, guess that explains the cheaper price

Enterprise edition is a bit out of my league at the moment as it's only for my personal projects so I'm starting out with the free edition, I can switch to standard Windows hosting for that. I do plan on buying a full licence when funds allow though.

Sorry this has veered a little bit off the original topic. Thanks for checking it out Petr. :-)

We haven't tested it yet, but it seems to be actually a web farm, not a cloud, so you would need to use the Enterprise Edition with web farm support so that Kentico CMS works correctly there. Kentico CMS keeps many settings in memory for a better performance and these settings, as well as uploaded files (if you store them on disk), need to be kept up-to-date on all servers.

Hi Petr. Yeah no problem > http://www.tsohost.co.uk/clustered-hosting.php

I havent built any Kentico sites on it yet but I plan to in the near future. I'd be interested to know if you do test it.

Hi Darren, could you please post here which cloud hosting you're using? We've tested Kentico CMS only with Mosso cloud hosting so far. Thank you.

I use cloud hosting for my own personal projects and don't pay anywhere near that amount. £9.99 a month to be precise, and I use it more for the flexibilty of having both PHP and Windows capabilities all in one package, although the load balancing thing is nice to have as well.

But this is irrelevant anyway as I couldn't afford a licence for my own personal use BEFORE this price increase let alone now. ;-)