One of the most commonly asked questions by customers and other providers is in regards to our intent of licensing NodePanel or reselling the software with a white-label service.
The short answer is no; we have no plans of doing so.
The long answer is motivated by our core values as a company. We did not build our company to get rich overnight and continue to perpetuate the problems that the game server industry currently has. While a faster control panel with features from today's technology stack certainly is a step in the right direction, it is no where near the absolute solution.
The Problems
A brief look at our industry finds that the bulk of companies in the space continue to participate in what's commonly referred to as a "Race to the Bottom". This is referring to a business model that our competing services have which focus on driving lower prices for more features, and in return, added cost. This means that customers get more bang for their buck for the feature creep of a feature list that most of our customers will rarely ever use.
While this sounds ideal to customers, the result of participating in this isn't healthy for companies and usually results in a loss of quality in other aspects of that company. Typically, customer support and quality of hardware or network are the first things sacrificed and many large companies in our industry don't complete most of the support inquiries with real support agents; contracted workers are paid on the penny per commission and at this point, these agents are focused on quantity of replies to pay bills or their lunch, rather than taking care of the customer. We won't go into detail about low budget providers, as that's another blog post.
The result of this race leads companies to razor thin profit margins but more importantly, it leads many companies to find different outlets of generating profit from their customers and the results of that are terribly frustrating.
Many companies create artificial cost, by forcing branding on servers with a fee to remove it, others charge for features that have no added cost to their overhead and are essentially disabled in a database, and the more extreme cases will pack more customers per device than is sustainable for a quality service and we simply refuse to go there. We'd rather our customers pay for our service and not worry about extra fees stacking up.
The last and most important problem with most companies in our industry is the fact that very little actually have a technical background or any sysadmin/programming skills to bring to the table. The majority will use the same billing system, same support system, a similar livechat solution, and an identical control panel as their competitors. These companies have a difficult time identifying real problems within their service or create any innovation, which benefits the customer because all they know is an interface marked for administrators.
This is a recipe for customers to be taken advantage of, ensuing mistrust between these customers and their providers, and is overall, toxic. Our vision is to change that.
How does this relate to selling NodePanel?
Our control panel is simply the interface for our product. Alongside NodePanel is our customer support, the delivery of our service, its uptime, and the quality of that service rendered. If we don't raise the bar and make the existing services seem obsolete, there will never be any advancement or change in our industry. Making our control panel available to other companies will allow them to continue without any fundamental change in our industry - it'll just be another bullet point in the feature list. The people that have the most to lose in this situation are the customers.