The best custom development is sometimes none at all

The request: a custom-built system

Burrito Communications provides hosting and virtual servers. The company needed a system to cover its entire operation: clients and their services, VPS management and orchestration, billing. In 2013 it approached [binary] with this brief — to develop a custom system.

A brief that couldn’t be delivered well

The allocated budget would have been a decent contract for a single developer. But it would have fallen far short of a working system for running a hosting business. And above all, such a system isn’t finished at launch. It has to be continuously maintained, secured and adapted to changes in legislation, payment gateways and connected services. The company would bear these costs alone, indefinitely.

Taking on the project as briefed would have meant delivering a system that lagged behind from day one and whose operation would cost the company more than it saved.

Solution architecture instead of a system

[binary] therefore recommended not developing the system and instead building the operation on an off-the-shelf specialised solution, WHMCS, proven by thousands of hosting companies and continuously maintained by its vendor. What followed was selection, configuration and data migration.

Most of the requirements the off-the-shelf system didn’t cover were added through custom hooks or third-party add-ons. At the cost of a few small compromises on the original brief, the company got more features than custom development would have delivered, without the burden of maintaining its own system.

What remained with [binary]

[binary] kept what sets the company apart from others: integrations with other systems, client portal customisations and a custom dashboard for selected orchestration routines. Small projects and consulting as needed, without having to maintain an entire system.

Where the risks moved

With a custom system, the company would have carried the risk of unfinished development, dependence on a single developer, and security, updates and legislative changes remaining its own responsibility.

With an off-the-shelf solution, the risks narrowed down to what matters: making sure custom modifications and integrations survive system updates, and keeping custom code to a minimum.

Takeaways

The best solution isn’t necessarily the one that gets built. For [binary], it meant turning down a larger development contract. But the client ended up several levels better off, both financially and functionally, than if the system had been developed. The fact that it has been running on the recommended solution for over ten years is the best measure of success.