[joshcrews]

I'm a Ruby developer and interested in creating a business in this space.

Specifically a online-CMS that generates static html uploaded to a CDN. The target market is businesses who need to know their content is "uncrashable" and "infinitely scalable". The price point would be >$100/mo.

Get in touch with me if you are interested in that idea.

[ixmatus]

That sounds like a feature not a product.

[ixmatus]

Lol at the downvoters. I'm sure you can build a lifestyle business around a CMS that spits out a static site but honestly, unless your audience is Hacker News, people don't care whether it's static or dynamic and often times they'll ask for that one thing that isn't static and breaks your ability to sell to them.

So yes, this is a feature and not a product as evinced by the numerous plugins and projects that take existing dynamic web application software and can produce static sites (Flask Freeze, Drupal's plugin, I think even WordPress has one).

[EDIT] Which means, what's to stop the existing "site builder" companies from doing the same? They don't sell the feature (static builder from a dynamic site), they sell the product (build yourself a site), and people buy it. The "background benefit" is a slightly faster site and who does that really matter to? Not the customer. The service - reduction of bandwidth and server resources; the could easily introduce the feature, cut resources, and keep the margin.

[programminggeek]

I have a similar idea and your pricing is on track. Most people seem to price according to cost and think they're clever charing $9/mo. for hosting.

The technical side is not particularly difficult aside from dealing syncing and maybe failover. What is trickier is probably the CMS side because building a CMS is like the definition of feature creep. Eventually people want/get every feature under the sun, even if that doesn't really scale.

You probably have an interesting business there, but managing customer expectations and finding the happy balance in terms of investment is tricky.

Also, the customer acquisition side of the business is somewhat tough, but worth solving.

Good luck!