WHMCS Replacement - Which billing panel?

Micronode

As WHMCS have decided that we don’t already pay them enough money for their bloated buggy billing system it’s time to move away.

Maybe with the savings we can add another location or two to our instances platform.

What panel do you recommend/like/have experience with?

Bonus points if it’s quick and simple to migrate from WHMCS.

Extra bonus points if it’s easy to port WHMCS modules over (I’ll have to rewrite the Micronode module regardless but I’m hoping some/most of the code can be reused)

Extra extra bonus points if a provider here can give us a licence for “X billing panel” for a reasonable cost - preferably billed annually.

Jab

@Jord TIME TO SHINE

Jord

@Jab said:
@Jord TIME TO SHINE

Thank you for the mention, I like to SHINE

I'm happy to see if we can help, feel free to DM me if you'd like. You can see our software/demo in the link in my sig.

bikegremlin

c1vhosting

@natvps_uk said:
As WHMCS have decided that we don’t already pay them enough money for their bloated buggy billing system it’s time to move away.

Maybe with the savings we can add another location or two to our instances platform.

What panel do you recommend/like/have experience with?

Bonus points if it’s quick and simple to migrate from WHMCS.

Extra bonus points if it’s easy to port WHMCS modules over (I’ll have to rewrite the Micronode module regardless but I’m hoping some/most of the code can be reused)

Extra extra bonus points if a provider here can give us a licence for “X billing panel” for a reasonable cost - preferably billed annually.

Clientexec.

yoursunny

Buy NexusBytes VPS to run your main site and Blesta is free for the family!

Other providers that offer free Blesta include BuyVM and InceptionHosting.

Micronode

Other providers that offer free Blesta include BuyVM and InceptionHosting.

I wonder what the terms are on this. If I was to buy a VPS from @InceptionHosting and claim the free Blesta Licence would it have to be hosted within Inception Hosting’s network to comply with the licence? Not that I’d be against that at all, I like to keep the control panel as far away from our network as possible.

Can I use the licence to sell services that are hosted outside of IHs network?

Surely there must be a catch as that is a very good deal.

host_c

@natvps_uk

We have the same dilemma, alto, the price is not the issue, the bugs, oh man, the bugs, rats, and so on., and not necessarily of WHMCS, the modules on the marketplace, and here I am talking about the automation part. We were so naive to think if a software cost $ dollars, then it should work out of the box right? well, not quite....

If apps on the marketplace for WHMCS ( as of my knowledge the biggest for providers) are full of bugs, in light of this, how would the less known/spread billing systems behave? We have some friends, also in the provider sphere, they tried blesta, after a few months they moved back to WHMCS, either because they did not find the modules they wanted, or because it did not work out for them.

If you find something better, in terms of stability, functions, do not forget to post it here.

AuroraZero

@natvps_uk said:

Other providers that offer free Blesta include BuyVM and InceptionHosting.

I wonder what the terms are on this. If I was to buy a VPS from @InceptionHosting and claim the free Blesta Licence would it have to be hosted within Inception Hosting’s network to comply with the licence? Not that I’d be against that at all, I like to keep the control panel as far away from our network as possible.

Can I use the licence to sell services that are hosted outside of IHs network?

Surely there must be a catch as that is a very good deal.

9 times out of 10 yes they are internal licenses. @hosteons had one on for BF

MikeA

I think Clientexec is the most user friendly, both user and admin end, but it has some missing features. Better to custom develop stuff for it. Hostbill is fully featured, but admin UI sucks.

yoursunny

@natvps_uk said:

Other providers that offer free Blesta include BuyVM and InceptionHosting.

I wonder what the terms are on this. If I was to buy a VPS from @InceptionHosting and claim the free Blesta Licence would it have to be hosted within Inception Hosting’s network to comply with the licence? Not that I’d be against that at all, I like to keep the control panel as far away from our network as possible.

Can I use the licence to sell services that are hosted outside of IHs network?

Surely there must be a catch as that is a very good deal.

@Francisco has clear rules on the DirectAdmin and Blesta licenses.
The license must be used in their VPS or shared hosting accounts; otherwise, it will be suspended.
There's no rules against selling things located elsewhere.

webcraft

@natvps_uk said:

Other providers that offer free Blesta include BuyVM and InceptionHosting.

I wonder what the terms are on this. If I was to buy a VPS from @InceptionHosting and claim the free Blesta Licence would it have to be hosted within Inception Hosting’s network to comply with the licence? Not that I’d be against that at all, I like to keep the control panel as far away from our network as possible.

Does IH still ship any sort of licenses with their services?

Advin

@natvps_uk said:

Other providers that offer free Blesta include BuyVM and InceptionHosting.

I wonder what the terms are on this. If I was to buy a VPS from @InceptionHosting and claim the free Blesta Licence would it have to be hosted within Inception Hosting’s network to comply with the licence? Not that I’d be against that at all, I like to keep the control panel as far away from our network as possible.

Can I use the licence to sell services that are hosted outside of IHs network?

Surely there must be a catch as that is a very good deal.

Yes, these providers have bulk licensing deals with Blesta to offer free licenses, but the catch is that it has to be on their network (internal licenses). The point of them giving out these licenses is to encourage people to purchase a VPS with them Blesta licensing is already really cheap, only $14.95/month and you can also buy owned licenses starting at $250 one time, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to just go directly with Blesta and then host it wherever you wish, especially if you already have an established business. They also have a 44% off discount on owned licenses at the moment, expiring in a few days (for Black Friday). One of the best benefits of Blesta is that I am pretty sure that they have a completely open code-base, meaning that you can modify the panel in any way you wish. The only files that are encoded are the files that are required for Blesta licensing.

Hostbill is OK, but they charge an extremely high upfront cost, and I am pretty sure that everything is encoded unless you pay a ton of fees. HostBill also charges for each support ticket that you open, and will charge for certain integrations unless it's bundled in your plan. It's extremely expensive upfront and you may get eaten by fees (i.e. for opening tickets), but in the long term it might end up being worth it.

crunchbits

@Jord said:

@Jab said:
@Jord TIME TO SHINE

Thank you for the mention, I like to SHINE

I'm happy to see if we can help, feel free to DM me if you'd like. You can see our software/demo in the link in my sig.

You know, I do have a free BillingServ premium license @natvps_uk

1 lucky Crunchbits customer can get it

adly

Maybe support FOSSBilling and forever avoid price gouging?

AuroraZero

@adly said:
Maybe support FOSSBilling and forever avoid price gouging?

And lose all your hair fixing shit

adly

@AuroraZero said:
And lose all your hair fixing shit

To be fair, it’s come a long way since BoxBilling and is being improved regularly. Though, admittedly there’s still quite a bit to do…

MikeA

@adly said:

@AuroraZero said:
And lose all your hair fixing shit

To be fair, it’s come a long way since BoxBilling and is being improved regularly. Though, admittedly there’s still quite a bit to do…

I'm not familiar with it. Is FOSSBilling a spin off of BoxB?

Edit: Nvm, I see it is.

Joseph

@c1vhosting said:

@natvps_uk said:
As WHMCS have decided that we don’t already pay them enough money for their bloated buggy billing system it’s time to move away.

Maybe with the savings we can add another location or two to our instances platform.

What panel do you recommend/like/have experience with?

Bonus points if it’s quick and simple to migrate from WHMCS.

Extra bonus points if it’s easy to port WHMCS modules over (I’ll have to rewrite the Micronode module regardless but I’m hoping some/most of the code can be reused)

Extra extra bonus points if a provider here can give us a licence for “X billing panel” for a reasonable cost - preferably billed annually.

Clientexec.

Why not Blesta or Hostbill?

Otus9051

just use email
pretend its the 80s

sh97

@crunchbits said:

@Jord said:

@Jab said:
@Jord TIME TO SHINE

Thank you for the mention, I like to SHINE

I'm happy to see if we can help, feel free to DM me if you'd like. You can see our software/demo in the link in my sig.

You know, I do have a free BillingServ premium license @natvps_uk

1 lucky Crunchbits customer can get it

Count me in!

@natvps_uk you can get Blesta license from @hostEONS . They even mentioned in their welcome mail that it can be hosted outside, as long as blesta is routed through their network.

wagumaxida

where is your offer? I want to buy buy buy

webmash

Both Blesta and CE are great, CE needs to roll out version 7 though as its backend is ugly, and clunky. Both have good integration with most hosting panels, and billing providers and the communities on both are starting to become a lot more active with people leaving WHMCS/WebPros. Its down to personal preference and cost, ours for now is Blesta.

legendary

Blesta is half baked panel without proper domain management. Yes, you can modify it, but codebase also very complicated.

Clientexec promises v7 ages ago. No delivery. Indicates bs.

Hostbill is viable solution as price is one-time and you pay for support and updates only.

tentor

At scale any PHP solution will suck (and even more if it is using ioncube). My vote for own in-house solution which does exactly what you want in a way you would like it to.

webmash

@legendary said:
Blesta is half baked panel without proper domain management. Yes, you can modify it, but codebase also very complicated.

Clientexec promises v7 ages ago. No delivery. Indicates bs.

Hostbill is viable solution as price is one-time and you pay for support and updates only.

CE is dragging its feet I must admit, the current backend is awful. We've found Blesta okay in terms of making changes we need and support is pretty good. Hostbill is very good, but might be outside of some peoples price points.

stablecloud

I've also heard that Upmind is gaining popularity but it's not self-hosted, looks like it's still free during the BETA period although I haven't seen it in the wild yet https://upmind.com/industries/web-host-billing-system

webcraft

Is paymenter still in beta or are the v0.x releases a working version?

yoursunny

@Otus9051 said:
just use email
pretend its the 80s

Just let customers come to sales office.
Pretend it's the 60s.

DYK yoursunny summer host has a sales office?
We are conveniently located across the street from Starfleet Headquarters.

c1vhosting

@Joseph said:

@c1vhosting said:

@natvps_uk said:
As WHMCS have decided that we don’t already pay them enough money for their bloated buggy billing system it’s time to move away.

Maybe with the savings we can add another location or two to our instances platform.

What panel do you recommend/like/have experience with?

Bonus points if it’s quick and simple to migrate from WHMCS.

Extra bonus points if it’s easy to port WHMCS modules over (I’ll have to rewrite the Micronode module regardless but I’m hoping some/most of the code can be reused)

Extra extra bonus points if a provider here can give us a licence for “X billing panel” for a reasonable cost - preferably billed annually.

Clientexec.

Why not Blesta or Hostbill?

I love how Clientexec and their support works

adly

@skhron said:
At scale any PHP solution will suck (and even more if it is using ioncube). My vote for own in-house solution which does exactly what you want in a way you would like it to.

I think you're vastly over estimating the scale if you think simply by using PHP, the solution won't scale well enough to serve any web hosting provider.

Micronode

I’ve slept on this and had a few thoughts, we’re going to test Blesta, clientexec and work with @Jord over the coming weeks to see if we can come up with a solution.

I’m also thinking of another approach where we build billing and support into the Micronode panel. The panel is currently going through a rewrite anyway and this could make sense - especially as we’re only selling one product (instance credits).

This would obviously be a huge amount of work in comparison to an off the shelf solution but it seems like the best long term investment.

Otus9051

@yoursunny said:

@Otus9051 said:
just use email
pretend its the 80s

Just let customers come to sales office.
Pretend it's the 60s.

DYK yoursunny summer host has a sales office?
We are conveniently located across the street from Starfleet Headquarters.

you write nice stories

dosai

@webcraft said:
Is paymenter still in beta or are the v0.x releases a working version?

@sh97 😂🤣

Neoon

@skhron said:
At scale any PHP solution will suck (and even more if it is using ioncube). My vote for own in-house solution which does exactly what you want in a way you would like it to.

What, yes WHCMS does suck, because it does a shiton of SQL queries, some of which are not necessary.
But to say any, nah.

Dewlance

Blesta & WISECP with a lifetime updates license.

webcraft

@dosai said:

@webcraft said:
Is paymenter still in beta or are the v0.x releases a working version?

@sh97 😂🤣

?

sh97

@webcraft said:

@dosai said:

@webcraft said:
Is paymenter still in beta or are the v0.x releases a working version?

@sh97 😂🤣

?

Xeroz.tech uses it on production. It's really really bad, they don't even have entries of my invoice or services.

tentor

@adly said:

@skhron said:
At scale any PHP solution will suck (and even more if it is using ioncube). My vote for own in-house solution which does exactly what you want in a way you would like it to.

I think you're vastly over estimating the scale if you think simply by using PHP, the solution won't scale well enough to serve any web hosting provider.

No, it is based on benchmarks I have done when choosing billing solution. I think PHP has two issues:

1. Proprietary code is ionCube encoded, and to my testings it has enormous overhead
2. Each request either launches new PHP interpreter process (CGI interface) or reparses scripts (FPM). Combined with first issue and complicated logics billing software has, it makes such solution vulnerable to slightest traffic spikes.

I see no valid reasons to have a cluster of tens of beefy servers just to be able to handle thousand of requests. And this is why we were forced to implement permanent challenge which drops any bot traffic at all.

@Neoon said: But to say any, nah.

Any commercial, I think Haven't tested FOSSBilling enough.

iandk

@skhron said:

@adly said:

@skhron said:
At scale any PHP solution will suck (and even more if it is using ioncube). My vote for own in-house solution which does exactly what you want in a way you would like it to.

I think you're vastly over estimating the scale if you think simply by using PHP, the solution won't scale well enough to serve any web hosting provider.

No, it is based on benchmarks I have done when choosing billing solution. I think PHP has two issues:

1. Proprietary code is ionCube encoded, and to my testings it has enormous overhead
2. Each request either launches new PHP interpreter process (CGI interface) or reparses scripts (FPM). Combined with first issue and complicated logics billing software has, it makes such solution vulnerable to slightest traffic spikes.

I see no valid reasons to have a cluster of tens of beefy servers just to be able to handle thousand of requests. And this is why we were forced to implement permanent challenge which drops any bot traffic at all.

@Neoon said: But to say any, nah.

Any commercial, I think Haven't tested FOSSBilling enough.

With proper architecture, PHP can scale without any issues.
I highly doubt any provider on LET/LES gets enough traffic where a PHP application is the bottleneck.

Implement proper caching mechanisms and background queues and you should be fine for 99% of the use cases.
If that's still not enough you could implement an in-memory cache like Laravel Octane for instance.

Just because the popular PHP-based billing platforms have bad performance doesn't mean it's an issue with the language.

tentor

@iandk said: Just because the popular PHP-based billing platforms have bad performance doesn't mean it's an issue with the language.

Maybe I have chosen the wrong wording but what I meant is developing own solution from scratch is the best possible option.

crunchbits

@skhron said:

I see no valid reasons to have a cluster of tens of beefy servers just to be able to handle thousand of requests. And this is why we were forced to implement permanent challenge which drops any bot traffic at all.

@Neoon said: But to say any, nah.

Any commercial, I think Haven't tested FOSSBilling enough.

Maybe specific to WHMCS (or billing software with databases?), but we used PHP years back to handle customer-facing reporting and display of stats (think Hetrix-type but for proprietary hardware) and it was all run off a pretty anemic dedicated server. We were handling roughly 22,000 requests a minute 24/7 and the server wasn't even breaking a sweat.

Of course, we didn't use ionCube and I can agree that our WHMCS starts to choke itself at 1/100th that kind of volume on much beefier hardware.

tentor

@crunchbits said: we didn't use ionCube

Pure PHP and if written properly (with opCache and/or APCu/memcache/Redis on top of it) should behave normally (well, look at Facebook - AFAIK their social media backend is still on PHP), but all solutions I have tested (both WHMCS and Blesta) have same performance issues.

SimpleSonic

The biggest problem when trying to move away from WHMCS is the lack of modules.

HostBill is one that comes close, but not enough to make most leave WHMCS for it.

Neoon

@crunchbits said:

@skhron said:

I see no valid reasons to have a cluster of tens of beefy servers just to be able to handle thousand of requests. And this is why we were forced to implement permanent challenge which drops any bot traffic at all.

@Neoon said: But to say any, nah.

Any commercial, I think Haven't tested FOSSBilling enough.

Maybe specific to WHMCS (or billing software with databases?), but we used PHP years back to handle customer-facing reporting and display of stats (think Hetrix-type but for proprietary hardware) and it was all run off a pretty anemic dedicated server. We were handling roughly 22,000 requests a minute 24/7 and the server wasn't even breaking a sweat.

Of course, we didn't use ionCube and I can agree that our WHMCS starts to choke itself at 1/100th that kind of volume on much beefier hardware.

If you do your queries wise and optimize them, such as combining multiple queries into one.
Which databases servers are optimized for, especially if you tell them to cache indexes in memory, its fast as fuck.

If you pull all rows or by values you didn't tell the database server to cache, well rip.
Depending on the database engine you use, you either lock the entire table or rows.

If you fetch all rows in a table and at the same time you update one, your query is on hold until the update is done.
Which is even worse if you have an engine, that locks the entire table.

hostEONS

@sh97 said:

@crunchbits said:

@Jord said:

@Jab said:
@Jord TIME TO SHINE

Thank you for the mention, I like to SHINE

I'm happy to see if we can help, feel free to DM me if you'd like. You can see our software/demo in the link in my sig.

You know, I do have a free BillingServ premium license @natvps_uk

1 lucky Crunchbits customer can get it

Count me in!

@natvps_uk you can get Blesta license from @hostEONS . They even mentioned in their welcome mail that it can be hosted outside, as long as blesta is routed through their network.

Thanks for the mention

Yes we provide Free Blesta License with all our services

But Blesta itself has to be hosted on our network, though the servers that you manage through Blesta like your web server or VPS nodes etc... they can be hosted outside our network

Calin

Try Paymenter

ViridWeb

My personal choice and recommendation is for Hostbill

I'm not sure if you can afford it, but if you can then go for it

Way better than any other Billing software.

1. Awesome fast support
2. Regular patch and updates
3. Multiple in-house plugins (specially for Hosting providers.
4. No need for 3rd party modules
5. User friendly and professional UI
6. And more..

Micronode

Thanks for everyone’s suggestions,

We’re going to go for the bespoke option. I took a look at the new Micronode panel over the last few evenings and made a fair amount of progress.

Considering we’d have to write a module for any of the options available this feels like the right thing to do.

Having a single panel for both billing and Instance management is definitely going to be more user friendly and easier to support.

So far we’ve implemented Fraud detection at signup, credit purchases and started on the support ticket aspect.

This is also the cheapest long term solution and one less monthly/annually outgoing means we can invest the money into additional locations.

I’m hoping to have this ready for early next year and it will be released with at least two new locations.

yoursunny

@natvps_uk said:
at least two new locations.

🎉🎈

go626201

@natvps_uk said: at least two new locations.

Hopefully include one new location in Singapore or any southeast asia location please.
Similar to Korea bandwidth setup is acceptable. (Or With double bandwidth )