How to protect my self-hosted website/system?

Question

I am currently creating a .NET based (website/system) solution for small IT companies and I am offering it in a self-hosted package, which means my clients are going to mainly install it on their own servers. How do I make sure my system is not being run except on one server per client and no body is illegally-copying it to other servers/machines?

Answer 1

The simplest way is with a legal license agreement (that is, one that you pay a lawyer who specialized in that sort of thing to write). Yes, there will be some people who will ignore that and run illegal copies anyway, but that's going to happen no matter what you do. You just need to concentrate on providing a good enough service (that is, sales and support) that people will want to pay for it.

Anything more than that, and you're just going to annoy legitimate users (which affects your ability to provide "good service").

Answer 2

You may want to ask Micrsoft, or Adobe, or...