Im starting a hosting business and am thinking of using CE for my billing and management platform. But does CE allow you to interface into the frontend of your site so customers can select the packages they want and proced to checkout? Or will i need a whole shopping cart solution to do that, then take the creditcard info collected and setup the client manually in CE?

If anyone is using CE for their site, do you mind if i take a gander at your site?

Yes CE works this way, you create your hosting packages and just link to the order page. You can set up as many package types as you wish, ie Shared, Dedicated etc, and each type has it's own ordering page.

CE interfaces with most leading payment gateways as well.