Vanilla Open Source vs Hosted
Hi Vanilla - in a recent sales and marketing meeting, the topic of open source vs. hosted surfaced. While it is clear to us in sales what the big benefits are with having Vanilla host the solution in terms of cost, resources, security, it would be great to understand what are the real-life, day to day pains of managing open source software.
Thought it would be helpful to understand 2 main components of this decision for our prospects:
- What are the feature differences between open source and hosted? What features to they get and which do they need to build?
- IT and Security - what are the detailed pains and risks do they need to consider when considering open source
- Example: Updates to open -source: must proactively update the platform, if not, could lead to security vulnerabilities (ex LG)
Tagging a few folks for visibility - would love to hear from Product, Success, Infosec and any others that understand the nitty gritty of managing open-source software.
@ValR @Derrick @Paul Johnston @Adrian @Rhys and not sure who else tag in product :)
Comments
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Hey @janiewall this is something I have worked on
I ask one thing: please don't share externally to prospects or customers this sheet directly, but it should answer most of your questions to build your story as needed.
Let me know any questions
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Features aside, there are other important considerations:
- Security. Pen testing, hacker one for software security, but there's also network and server security. If you host yourself you have to make sure this is maintained. You don't get Cloudflare with Open Source
- Uptime. Making sure your connection to the forum is maintained. Monitoring for failures
- Support. You're on your own if you use Open Source
- Training. You get full training with Cloud
- CSM. Advice, Best practices, etc... from thought leaders in Community
- Migration. If you're moving from another platform migration can be quite challenging.
- Upgrades. Who's going to be responsible for keeping track of upgrades, installing them, introducing new features, etc.
- Staging site. If you want a sandbox to test and try features you need to setup and maintain a second site
- Hardware and Network maintenance and upgrades.
- Off site backups and disaster recovery.
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I would like to mention, a couple of precisions
- Open Source has the support of the community and over 1 million downloads. So they are not alone.
- Migration, the Vanilla Porter is open source for common platforms. If you have the skill it's doable. Heck I've done it.
Let's make sure we don't paint open source as a totally impossible thing to do either, because it comes across as disingenuous. I ran a self-hosted community on shared GoDaddy Server for 5 years, and with proper caching was able to handle 1+ million pageviews a month. You can 100% do it.
The main issues is spending the time to stay up-to-date with the software, and maybe having a lack of access to certain plugins. Most competent technical people can make it work. What they don't get is direct access to the Vanilla team, support and guidance.
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Let's make sure we don't paint open source as a totally impossible thing to do either
Agreed! I think there are 2 types of folks that ask about open-source; companies that have a culture of open-source and those that don't but like to explore the options because of price. The latter might not be prepared to host an open-source offering. Providing a general "this is what you would need to do to get the same level of security and IT as what you get with a hosted solution" would be helpful to understand. Not to talk down Open-source, rather determine which camp they are in.
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Gladly. According to some. But there are enough, I would worry if we sounded like it's impossible.
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A blog Adrian wrote that could be useful: https://medium.com/@adrianspeyer/should-you-build-your-own-forum-software-from-scratch-8d2103d297cc
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