Are you interested in a turn-key hosted public/private pool service?

[Craig]

I'm considering a pool-as-a-service offering, is there a market here?

Basic description of the service:

100% hosted - we handle database security, scalability, infrastructure management and bug fixes/enhancements
good data security practices - properly salted and hashed credentials, SSL-only, offsite backups, etc...
JSON and/or XML API - you put together a user interface (PHP, RoR, Python, whatever…) connected to the service API, requires no data storage/management/mining code on the web tier
possibly multiple scoring algorithms - could choose from several scoring algorithms (proportional, PPS, cheat-proof, etc…)

I'd imagine most interest would be from those who are looking to start a pool but are short on time or technical expertise.  Ant other thoughts or ideas?

[PandaMiner]

Ant other thoughts or ideas?

Yes.  How will your customer be able to be in control? What type of back-end will you be providing? What about FTP/cPanel etc?

What kind of pricing are you ball-parking?  Would you consider a percentage per block? Would you take BTC as payment?  Would there be a contract/lease?  Do you have experience running a pool?

The most important one is the price point.

Good Idea.

[Kingpin]

Yah Im interested.......But i dont know how to make the site lol.....so how much for all this.....

[Craig]

Regarding pricing, I was thinking about a few different pricing options.  Maybe a breakdown like this:

Low cost plan - something like 1BTC per month plus small fee (1.5% maybe?), unlimited Mhash/s
Medium - say 5 BTC per month and no fee, some mid level limit on Mhash/s
High - maybe 10BTC per month and a very high limit on Mhash/s or maybe a dedicated server instance with no limit on Mhash/s

Again that's nowhere near set in stone, just an idea of how the price structure could look.  I'd imagine most would prefer to pay in BTC?  No contract, no cancellation fees or anything like that.  I want happy customers, not to lock them into something if they decide they don't want to use it!

For those who don't want to or can't create their own front end, I could provide a pretty basic standard interface you could enable.  Depending on extra server load, that might end up being an extra BTC per month or so (don't know yet).

How will your customer be able to be in control? What type of back-end will you be providing? What about FTP/cPanel etc?

I'm not quite sure what sort of control you are referring to here?  The pool server back-end is custom built.  I'm thinking there would be at least a basic admin page, what would you want to see there?

Seems like maybe most people would be interested in using a default website interface to the pool rather than build and host their own front-end?