Web Hosting Blog

Case Study – 4Design Creative Media

At 4Design we have searched for what seems forever for a complete reseller hosting platform for our design/development clients. We needed a platform that would provide us with a hosting department straight out of the box. Every aspect of our hosting service needed to be tailored to our unique needs and be fully branded to our business. Most importantly we required an automated hosting system that would double as billing management platform, accepting both local (South African Rand) payments via EFT and credit card as well as international US Dollar payments. We also needed a hosting provider who would be willing to support our large hosting client base transparently as 4Design Creative Media support services. Lusion Technologies have provided us with all this and much much more.

Why we chose Lusion AHS?

This was a no-brainer. In all honesty we have never seen a system this complete in both functionality and originality. Lusion AHS is a complete billing management, client management as well as hosting management platform. Some incredible advantages to Lusion AHS include:

1. No setup or recurring fee to use the system! Yes the complete Lusion AHS system is free! We only pay Lusion Technologies their base cost price including a 20% reduction in their normal fees, for the service provided to our client, and we are only billed for this from Lusion once we have received payment from our client, what a brilliant way to do business!
2. Incredible fexibility. We can setup our own hosting packages and pricing via Lusion AHS, never having to touch a web server or domain name registrar. Lusion AHS even tells us what our custom packages will cost us as we create them and we can add our own price markup accordingly. That way we are in total control of what we earn off each custom hosting package.
3. Client management is extremely easy and adding a new domain registration or hosting account takes 10 seconds or even less. The client is then automatically billed in 4Designs’ name with our branded invoices and in addtion also receives our branded statements and custom late payment warning emails. When we process a payment for a domain registration for example; the domain is automatically provisioned for us from the correct registrar as 4Design. With hosting accounts the account is automatically activated and our client receives a welcome email with all the relevant hosting details branded as 4Design.
4. By setting a single option in Lusion AHS we are able to accept all popular credit cards from clients during registration and at an extremely competitive rate. Who else does this? We were even provided a registration form which is seemlessly branded to our business.
5. Clients don’t always pay 4Design and Lusion knows this. They warn clients for us in our business name in advance. They suspend and unsuspend clients and generally oversee management of all our hosting accounts. Lusion only ever expects us to pay once a client has paid us. We could not find any reseller hosting provider who would do things this way.
6. When we experience any support issue with one of our clients, our Lusion support department is available 24/7/365 to handle the problem directly with the client. We can therefore go on with our lives without having to worry about client support needs. If anything this is probably the single largest benefit to and already incredible system.

Billing management and accepting payment

Lusion AHS is a comprehensive billing management platform with support for branded welcome emails, invoicing, statements, late payment warnings and automatic account suspensions. Any payments we added to the Lusion AHS system were automatically logged under our clients account and processed against their outstanding invoices. Our clients are automatically sent statement updates and only once we have received client payments are we invoiced the amount due for their service from Lusion.

Lusion Technologies provides support for EFT (Electronic Fund Transfers) and credit card payments. We can now accept credit cards as payment method for any service we have rendered to a client. International clients may easily make payment via Lusions 2Checkout payment gateway integration.

All client side billing management takes place via SecureBill, which is Lusion Technologies unbranded payment gateway and client billing solution. SecureBill allows our clients to add/update or remove credit cards and to generally choose how they get billed. It also allows our clients to access their full billing history in case of any billing related query that may arise. This helps greatly to reduce our billing related queries.

Comprehensive branding capabilities

We have never come accross any system that is as brandable as Lusion AHS. Every single aspect of the system allows for customization and branding. Instead of saying anything let us rather show you what can be done, quickly and easily. Our branding was setup in under an hour! Below are a few examples of branding the Lusion AHS system our way:

Signup Form:

Invoice Template:

Statement Template:

Welcome Email:

Login Form:

Turnkey signup and login forms

Lusion Technologies provided us with functional signup and login forms. These connect transparently with our hosting services on their servers and at no point in time is a client ever aware that they are not dealing with 4Design. We were especially impressed by the completeness of the Lusion AHS package. Nothing has been left out for us to do. You may see and example of our signup and login forms (Client Login) at the following addresses:

Signup: http://www.securebill.co.za/design/signup
Login: http://www.4design.co.za and click on “Client Login”

Website hosting control panel & incredible backup solutions

The fully brandable cPanel website hosting control panel is provided by Lusion Technologies to all our clients and includes the Fantastico addon which allows a single click install of most popular blogging software and CMS solutions. Clients can via cPanel manage all their email accounts, email forwarders, domains and website files via an easy to use file manager.

All 4Designs’ client data is backed up at 4 hourly intervals and all data including databases may be restored at any point within these 4 hourly intervals for a 1 week period. This backup flexibility allows us to restore any version of our clients website which may not have been affected by a failure and thus retain important client data.

Peace of mind & premium third-party support services

Lastly but most importantly, Lusion Technologies provides full hosting support services via support tickets branded to 4Design 24/7/365. There is no additional charge for this service. As a Lusion AHS client we receive Lusion Technologies excellent and knowledgable support services free of charge for both ourselves and our clients. This is an amazing deal and the reason why 4Design is sold on this system.

In Conclusion

All the above said and done we can with all certainty say that we have come accross no reseller system similar to the one offered by Lusion Technologies. It is simple to learn, massively powerful and extremely comprehensive.

In our opinion Lusion AHS has no equal in the hosting industry today. It revolutionised the way we do business, host our clients and it presented us with a high quality truely passive income which we would never be able to have achieved without Lusion AHS intervention.

Check it out today at http://ahs.lusion.co.za. It does not cost you a cent, but is priceless in value.

Tags: billing, Branding, cpanel, lusion AHS, reseller hosting, web hosting

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Branding, Lusion AHS, Reseller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.