Greetings all--

I'm sure these topics have been discussed several times but seeking some fresh prospective.

We have built our small hosting company to the point we're starting a new LLC, installing new servers at a true data center class facility, etc.

With that said, we have the chance to start FRESH.

The biggest pain we have right now is poor billing automation (use quickbooks with invoice reminders, very manual) and no integration for our clients (Plesk, PerlDesk for helpdesk, and WildWest domain reseller). Customer need three different logins and passwords based on the above.

We like Plesk, so we're proceeding with that product for both our Windows and Linux based servers.

Where I am TORN is the billing automation. I have heard poor things all over the place about ModernBill, and also quite a few negative things about WHMCS (posts on this forum about security exploits).

It seems to be a choice of picking 'which one sucks less' or just skip it all together and just keeping quickbooks. We would like billing automation allowing people to pay online, and if they don't pay have it automatically warn them and eventually disable the domain in plesk for non-payment.

For help desk applications, we are using PerlDesk today. I have heard the new version is quite good, but we are not married to it. If we went with WHMCS it appears to include a help desk so would we no longer need PerlDesk. Any feedback on the WHMCS help desk app vs. something like PerlDesk? I like the idea of the billing and help desk all being under one single login for the client (even better if the Plesk password could also be kept the same).

Thank you all for reading this far. I am seeking some help from bigger successful HSPs offering dedicated servers and shared hosting to hopefully save us some time, money, hassle based on real world experience.

We have a fresh start, really like to do it right this time around....

Thank you.

I think most people here are going to recommend WHMCS and if you want a super support system you can integrate kayako into WHMCS.

Hope this helps mate, but wait for some of the bigger guys to reply to this thread before you pull the trigger on anything.

We use WHMCS and we are fairly pleased, although we have had some issues. Yes WHMCS has a support system which is OK.

I forgot to mention that WHMCS is closed, encrypted code.

Thank you for those replies. It seems in general most are saying they like WHMCS better than MB, and that it works well for the most part.

I was also told to explore ClientExec. Any feedback on ClientExec vs. WHMCS would be appreciated.


Feature wise I think they are both comparable from my small observation. In reading the forums, I get the sensation that 'Matt' might be a force of one so to speak with WHMCS vs. ClientExec that supposedly is a team of folks and a more stable organization. I could be mistaken, just initial perception from reading this forum.

We use Plesk for Windows and Plesk for Linux both-- so seeking which may have best integtration with Plesk.


Lastly, can either of these products operate on another network yet still have the Plesk integration features work?

We would like our help desk application on a different network (at a different facility completely) than our primary production Plesk hosting environment.

The idea is so in the event we have an outage, customer can still get to our help desk application.

Since the help desk application is built in to these products, could we run WHMCS on a server outside of our primary data center where the Plesk servers are yet still have it tie into them as needed for the integration features?

Thank you for the help!

Thank you for those replies. It seems in general most are saying they like WHMCS better than MB, and that it works well for the most part.

I was also told to explore ClientExec. Any feedback on ClientExec vs. WHMCS would be appreciated.


Feature wise I think they are both comparable from my small observation. In reading the forums, I get the sensation that 'Matt' might be a force of one so to speak with WHMCS vs. ClientExec that supposedly is a team of folks and a more stable organization. I could be mistaken, just initial perception from reading this forum.

We use Plesk for Windows and Plesk for Linux both-- so seeking which may have best integtration with Plesk.


Lastly, can either of these products operate on another network yet still have the Plesk integration features work?

We would like our help desk application on a different network (at a different facility completely) than our primary production Plesk hosting environment.

The idea is so in the event we have an outage, customer can still get to our help desk application.

Since the help desk application is built in to these products, could we run WHMCS on a server outside of our primary data center where the Plesk servers are yet still have it tie into them as needed for the integration features?

Thank you for the help!
I own both WHMCS and Clientexec, and honestly I've chosen Clientexec.

I've recently submitted a big list of features I'd like to see. I submitted them to the WHMCS forums, and Matt rudely deleted the thread saying it's a duplicate when it clearly had unique requests in it.

Clientexec has been around for time now, and is and always has been stable, reliable and up to date.