What's so great about Hosted Vanilla?

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robreed

I don't mean to be argumentative but it occurs to me that I you believed in these advantages then you wouldn't withhold so many features from the self-hosted version of your product. If the technical aspects of your hosted infrastructure are the reason a user like me should choose to go with hosted Vanilla then I'd like to see much better feature parity between the hosted and self hosted options. Cheers.

Lincoln

@robreed The open source project's goal isn't a longer feature checklist, and very few plugins are not yet open source. The core product is available publicly as we code it, which means most of our features are open source before it's even updated on our hosted service.

erlend_sh

@Lincoln I think Vanilla Forums is an exemplary open source project, but @robreed has got a point. My top 3 Vanilla features all seem to be geared towards the hosted service:
- Vanilla WordPress integration (WordPress plugin)
- Vanilla Comments
- Vanilla Reactions and Badges

If these are now available for self-hosted forums, I was certainly unaware.

Lincoln

@erlend_sh 2/3 of your examples (Vanilla Comments and the WordPress plugin) are in fact open source.

robreed

Thanks for the clarification @Lincoln. I'll have to take another look at the plugins. Early on the repository was full of broken, or partially implemented, or incompatible, or otherwise sketchy bits and pieces. If that's been cleaned up considerably then it's a huge positive for Vanilla.

I think the confusion might come from blog posts like "Introducing Vanilla Comments: Integrate blog comments to supercharge your community" (http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/introducing-vanilla-comments/) which includes this section:

> How much will it cost?

> Comments will be available on all our paying plans which start at $49 per month.

Seems like that could have been written to say something like:

How much will it cost?

Vanilla Comments are based on an open source plugin and so available free of charge to all users who have downloaded and installed Vanilla on their own servers. Starting now it also officially available on all our paying plans which start at $49 per month.

I'll add that almost all of these things that make hosted Vanilla great are geared toward larger installations, by which I mean bigger and far flung communities. If I maintain forum for a local softball league or something like that then automated CDN and the other 'Built to Scale' advantages are all but irrelevant.

Instead of targeting self-hosted Vanilla at 'hobbyists', it might make sense to think about all of the different types of people/use cases self-hosted Vanilla serves now, if only because hosted Vanilla is a bad fit. This article does a good job of emphasizing that the hosted product is geared toward large scale installations and not just people who don't want to install the software themselves. That makes the price structure seem more sensible too. Going back to the local software league example again, $50 a month would be hard for a group like that to justify, especially considering that money is going for things like load balancing.

It seems like there is a gap in there between 'hobbyists' and people who need the kind of platform that Vanilla is building. It will be interesting to see if Vanilla Forums does anything to fill that gap in the future.

Again, thanks for the info. Cheers.

Lincoln

@robreed As a business, we're targeting customers who value support and scalability. I think it reasonable that we don't advertise DIY open source (which fulfills neither criteria) in materials not targeted at the open source community.