Hi All,

I'm curious to know which control panel people are using billing systems with. So if you're using a third-party billing system (modernbill, WHM autopilot, Clientexec, Lpanel, Ubersmith, etc.) which control panel do you use it for? I realize that some of these only work with Cpanel/WHM. Please vote anyway. :)

If you're a Plesk/DirectAdmin user, what do you use to manage billing? Are there any good solutions out there or do you use billing systems built into the control panel?

Thanks for the feedback!

Matt

The most popular billing software would probably be ModernBill or WHM AP with Cpanel/WHM as the control panel. I personally use WHM AP, it works great and handles all of the billing and account activations, so I'm just waiting on version 3.

We use HSphere which has intigrated billing software with it. It uses your own merchant account or payment provider to bill your customers. We are very pleased with the functions of the control panel and billing system.

Greetings:

H-Sphere from http://www.psoft.net/ includes an integrated billing system, fraud prevention through sign up guard, automated provisioning, and much much more.

Thank you.

Whoever voted Direct Admin, what billing software are you using?

Originally posted by systema
Whoever voted Direct Admin, what billing software are you using?

I am using a custom script that I designed. I eventually plan to release a full open source billing system, with support for most common control panels, but currently development is slow due to other projects taking priority.

Adam

Custom billing script, custom user side script, and custom control panel here. Doubt it'll make it into the public however because it was really built with "only us" in mind so there's not much use for the public :(...but of great use for us :)

For our H-Sphere webhosting, we use its internal billing system, and for our enterprise/colo/dedicated customers we use an inhouse system.

mine is directadmin with modernbill

Originally posted by Deb
Custom billing script, custom user side script, and custom control panel here. Doubt it'll make it into the public however because it was really built with "only us" in mind so there's not much use for the public :(...but of great use for us :) Yeah yeah Deb, we know... stop bragging! :rolleyes:

:D

Originally posted by Site5-Matt
Yeah yeah Deb, we know... stop bragging! :rolleyes:

:D Weeellllllllllll it's true :stickout:

On the non-bragging side.... custom has it's downside obviously...... It takes a ton of time to keep up with it and would likely be cheaper to just buy software from someone else so that they can "deal with it" for the upgrades. I've looked around at the precanned options several times for this reason alone.

Biggest problem with precanned scripts is if "they're system" doesn't quite fit "your system" then you have to adjust your business to fit their ideas which I don't like. This is the upside of custom.

Since we don't use the precanned control panels this is more an issue for us and "almost" forces us to continue with custom development...

We use H-Sphere.

I use cPanel/WHM and am very satisfied with it. Still learning my way around

That aside, I stumbled upon this thread while seeking an alternative to ModernBill. I tried AutoPilot but it was lacking in one very important feature - it will not reclaim vacated webspace. MB supports this feature and seems to have almost everything I need. One downside they have in common is that I have to set a specific number of accounts to create on a server, regardless of the various sizes of the accounts. That seems kind of stupid, since almost all hosting providers offer at least 3 sizes of accounts - bronze, silver and gold - or whatever they decide to name them. It's like saying a basket will hold 20 fruits, regardless of whether they're grapes, apples or watermellons.

From what I've seen, every billing/setup script has it's downside but MB seems to have the most upsides. However, they've gone one step too far - they shut down the support forums!!! Or is it just that the page is loading sooooooooo slowly that my browser and patience time out every time? I know their general public pages make php.net look like a speed demon.

I found H-Sphere here in this thread, but the first thing I noticed was cPanel servers are limited to one - the one it's installed on, I assume. Anyway, I plan on having dozens of servers running eventually, and I need a script that will be with me all the way, despite my lack of coding skill, which is none.

Is that asking too much?

From what I've seen, every billing/setup script has it's downside but MB seems to have the most upsides. However, they've gone one step too far - they shut down the support forums!!!

Actually the forums are open to the public at forums.modernbill.com

:angry: Is that supposed to be funny???

I pasted that url in my browser and clicked go, waited no less than 10 minutes while the little globe just kept spinning round and round. Finally clicked the stop button to reveal a blank page.

Is it only me? Okay wait, I'll try again . . .

Okay, the little globe is spinning. I bet I can go to sleep, wake up in the morning and it will still be spinning. Needless to say, I'm using explorer. It's 6.0 with the latest service pack. No other site does this.

BTW, what's the deal with the knowledge base? Why is it even there? No forum, no knowledge base, and now way of knowing this till my money is paid!!!


and that fancy schmancy flash header drags every single page view to a near halt. I didn't get a cable modem just to have all the resources used up by someone's artwork.

As far as I'm concerned, I wasted $24.95 on a lesson well learned. I only paid that because the demo license clearly states NO SUPPORT.

I just sighned up for DRAMS and I have a feeling it's the right move. Any chance of getting my $24.95 back? I won't even ask about the $110 I put into my new enom account.

Originally posted by WebTrooper
I found H-Sphere here in this thread, but the first thing I noticed was cPanel servers are limited to one - the one it's installed on, I assume.

Thats true, but this control panel server is able to control dozens of other servers without a problem.

Hi Walter, that's a lot of posts you got there.

I didn't mean to knock H-Sphere, just looks like I'd have to do a lot of configuring to make it work with cpanel/WHM. Maybe I misunderstood.

I've already subscribed to DRAMS, so I'm going to give them my best shot. On visiting their site I found everything easily, obviously a great deal of support, appeared very well thought out without all the extra gadgets and graphics to make it appear more than what it is. Funny thing, it appears to be very similar to ModernBill in functionality.

By the way, are you able to access forums.modernbill.com?

In all fairness, I just tried forums.modernbill.com with Firefox and got the same results. Waited and waited, would not load. ;)

Originally posted by WebTrooper
In all fairness, I just tried forums.modernbill.com with Firefox and got the same results. Waited and waited, would not load. ;)


I am not sure why it doesn't load for you but it loads for me just fine in IE and firefox.

The forums, knowledgebase, manual and flash demos are all open to the public through http://forums.modernbill.com

Originally posted by WebTrooper
I didn't mean to knock H-Sphere, just looks like I'd have to do a lot of configuring to make it work with cpanel/WHM. Maybe I misunderstood.

No problem.
Just for clarification: H-Sphere (http://www.psoft.net) is not an add-on to Cpanel/WHM, it is a complete control panel solution including billing and support.

I found the problem why I couldn't access the MB forums. My firewall was blocking it. As for the knowledge base, they sent me the url kb.modernbill.com. It appears to be packed with knowledge but it's the first mention of this url in all my sign-up emails and such. The only one I was made aware of is http://www.modernsupport.com/helpdesk/?_a=knowledgebase&group=mbcb9b770aafcc0, which is empty.

At any rate, I'm going to stick with ModerBill. I'll have to disable my firewall to use the support forums, but I can live with that. Admitedly, it does appear to be the best software of it's kind.

Addendum - -

I just finished reinstalling MB and sure enough, the url to the knowledge base is displayed in the final step of the installation.
So, I couldn't access the forums because of my firewall, I didn't know the url to the database because I didn't look closely, and I was totally out of line with this one. It's probably my firewall that makes their pages load so slowly as well.

To Modern Bill, I extend my appolgies. You have a premium quality product and apparently top notch support. I bow to you.