Hello,
My name is Ze’ev Schurmann, and I am based in South Africa.
At our company, we specialize in providing comprehensive solutions for businesses looking to self-host open-source applications without the necessary technical expertise. Our services are all-encompassing, from setting up cloud infrastructure, whether it be a single VPS or multiple bare-metal servers, to ongoing maintenance, updates, offsite backups, system hardening, and regular penetration testing. Additionally, we offer full training, ePub and PDF manuals, support for all relevant staff, and the option to purchase printed manuals for those who prefer hard copies.
Our business model is straightforward: clients pay a flat monthly fee which includes access to our VOD server where they can watch and rewatch training and tutorial videos related to the solutions we provide. We charge based on the cloud/server resources needed, not per user.
We offer a diverse range of solutions, from basic shared hosting systems to comprehensive business platforms. We provide continuous training at no extra cost for new staff members. Furthermore, part of our business model involves making annual contributions to the open-source projects used in our solutions, in the name of the respective client.
For instance, with Invoice Ninja, we cover the annual license fee to remove their logo, and for ISPConfig, we purchase an eBook manual license for each manual provided to the client. Additionally, we contribute a portion of our annual fee back to these projects under the client’s name.
Our clients can focus on their core business without needing to delve into DevOps or SysAdmin tasks, or even community forums. We assign a dedicated expert to each software who trains the rest of our team, ensuring seamless support.
I have been tasked with exploring Xibo, and I am impressed with its capabilities. I will be setting up a test server and experimenting over the next few weeks. I am eager to hear from the community, especially those using the self-hosted option. How are you using Xibo, and what has your experience been like, whether positive, neutral, or negative?
Are you providing hosting solutions for other clients? Using it within your own business? A hobbyist? How do you fit into the Xibo ecosystem? What server specifications are you using, and for how many clients/displays?
I look forward to engaging with you, learning, mastering, and eventually even supporting some of you in the future. I also hope to contribute code to the project as that is an integral part of our business model. Currently, we are working on contributions for NextCloud and YOURLS, expanding documentation for the ISPConfig JSON API, and open-sourcing our training video assets. Long-term, we aim to hire dedicated staff to translate all solutions we offer into all 11 official languages of South Africa.
Please note: We do not repurpose open-source projects as our own. We ensure our clients are fully informed about the projects, the software features, and how to access community resources. Our goal is to provide affordable hosting services with comprehensive training and support while actively engaging with and contributing to the open-source community.
Warm regards,
Ze’ev Schurmann
Fun Fact: Our training videos are rendered 100% without the use of traditional video editing software. Our videos are hosted by two separate AI voices, the AI voices interact with each other as per the script file. We create short video clips, slides or images for each short audio segment. We then use our own in house code (which is currently in Bash but we are polishing it up so we can release it as open source) that then ensures the video clips, slides and images are shrunk or stretched to fit the audio, and then we stitch all together with scene breaks and background music. We can also tell our software to re-render in another language and it then adjusts the video clips, slides and images again to fit the new audio. All this is done using OpenAI (we are going to add support for Azure Voice), and the video is put together using ffMPEG. If anyone is interested in this, let me know and I will personally make sure that you get an early invite. Of course, when we have the Video Assets for our inhouse training videos for Xibo, we will share them with you all as well.