First, I’d like to thank you for this question. This is, by far, the most intelligent and well versed question I have received regarding the license and financial structure behind Crucial’s ‘Split-Shared’ hosting. It is my pleasure to have this opportunity to provide a response to your query.

1. Licenses

It is clear that you fully understand the financial obstacles to becoming a Parallels Partner. I can not divulge the actual costs due to license restrictions, suffice to say it is out of reach of many ‘start ups‘.

Crucial obtained this qualification with SWSoft approximately one year ago, before the recent name change to Parallels. Prior to this time we had been using virtualization to gain better density and performance for our own internal service structure.

As a Parallels Partner, we are now a ‘key maker’. This gives us advantage pricing on all Parallels products. The upfront fee and deposits are substantial, however the discount on products and the value in the ability to manage licenses from creation to removal should not be overlooked.

As far as the minor features, I assume you are referring to things such as VZPP/VZCC control panels and, of course, the Plesk family of products. While the control panels for VE are nice, they are certainly not necessary. Most control of VE is monitored and handled by outside proprietary controls.

As of this time, Crucial does not offer Plesk in a shared hosting production environment. While we have a great deal of experience with the Plesk product with internal clients, this is not something we offer in a ‘Split-Shared’ hosting environment for a variety of reasons.

Security is always a concern as you mentioned and at this time we feel most comfortable using Cpanel/WHM in our shared hosting environments. This does, however, introduce it’s own licensing fees.

2. Support

Servers and support are the primary financial considerations . At the time of this posting we are provisioning shared hosting accounts to Dual E5450 (quad core) with 12GB RAM. This includes the Network Attached Storage iSCSI along with RAID1 local disk configuration for backups. This is the best performing hardware configuration available for our needs. It is very unlikely that you could find a host with comparable servers for the same price.

Support starts at the top. A solid system and hosting foundation ensure a low support volume, which is important to Crucial as a start up. We not only take a great deal of pride in our systems but also our systems administration.

Crucial was founded by administrators/owners of Internet domains dating back to 1995 and today these domains rank in the top 15,000 visited websites on the Internet. Our experience lends a great deal of expertise when it comes to virtualization and using density and network storage to overcome the shortcomings of traditional virtualization solutions.

The isolation that VE provide to the ‘Split-Shared’ client further enhance the hosting experience. As the number of clients per hosting environment go up, be it a dedicated server or VE, so to go the problems and support related to those problems. It’s not a great leap to understand the support benefits gained by isolating clients from each other.

3. Turning a profit

The profit comes over time. Crucial is now two years old with continued growth month after month. Negative reviews are almost non-existent after two years. Public RatePoint.com review page has 5/5 average review since November of last year with 25+ non solicited reviews. Crucial continues to quietly grow.

While I cant exactly give you the math that makes Crucial work, I can assure you that it is not a large margin of profit. This fact requires that we maintain a high quality of service to keep support costs down without sacrificing on either.

Crucial’s future depends on the word of mouth of our clients and ultimately, their absolute and complete satisfaction with our product. We are proud of what we have brought to the shared hosting marketplace. I don’t believe you can find a similar product anywhere on the Internet. This is something unique amidst hosting providers who differ only in there support systems.

Thanks again for the great question.

Kind regards,
Richard Garcia

Plesk implements soft quota limits, clear stored passwords via its unencrypted database “out of the box”. Even their billing software runs upwards of 4k or more and require 100/mo per reseller account to be tied into the software.

How on earth you are making money, is beyond me. I would like to know how you are dealing with these premium fees and turn a profit?