thehickmans

I'm trying to determine what common practices for support are with applications that are hosted in a client's data center.

Without getting too far into specifics, let's say that you sell a web application based on the Microsoft stack, so you've got Windows Server 2012, .NET 4, IIS 8 and SQL Server 2012 (this should apply equally to other stacks). Your clients provide you with the necessary VMs and you install and configure your application to meet their business requirements. You charge an initial fee for the license and an annual support fee to deal with updates and support requests.

For some period of time, your application operates smoothly - but Windows updates get applied or an update for SQL Server comes out, which may require updates to your application, but may just be prudent to install due to performance or stability improvements. Now you've entered a grey area where you could be charging an additional system management fee or you could push this work back to your clients.

Can anyone describe their approach to this situation? What has worked for you or what has backfired?

Many thanks!

I'm not a naturally born coder, don't have a CS background, and my career has been more on the sysadmin, project management and IT management side of things. I've always loved building things and I've got several ideas for web apps floating around in my mind. I've done a bit of tinkering in csh, vbscript, asp, javascript, so I'm not starting from absolute zero. To get myself started on this new path, I'm thinking of building some "fun" apps as educational exercises, and then moving to bootstrap some of the ideas that I think people may pay for.

Has anyone else gone through this process to having a viable startup or is it the domain of the CS grad?