Do any of you have experience with Platypus Billing Software and their Support plugin ?

We have both Plat and Wombat Lic. at first we though it was the answer what we where looking for, and accutally if we just wanted to do ISP type stuff it would have been great. For a web hosting company there are much better choices at this point for far less money.

With that said I must say they are coming with a new release of Plat that might show quite a bit of improvment. I have been working with them on some of the features we would like as a hosting company. But like Helm this is something I would wait for before the purchase.

H-Sphere --> psoft.net
Good package and cheap to boot ($4.50 / user / one time) with half way good support. I would suggest purchasing the premium support as well. I feel the best option right now. Does have a few bugs to work out.


Helm --> webhostingautomation.com
(Comming Dec 2002) Looks quite impressive and in the right $$$ price range. You are going to have to wait for this one.

Cpanel

I personally think is subpar to what others can do.

Plesk

Again, I think there are better options.

The TopHat Team

Originally posted by tophatis
[B]We have both Plat and Wombat Lic. at first we though it was the answer what we where looking for, and accutally if we just wanted to do ISP type stuff it would have been great. For a web hosting company there are much better choices at this point for far less money.

With that said I must say they are coming with a new release of Plat that might show quite a bit of improvment. I have been working with them on some of the features we would like as a hosting company. But like Helm this is something I would wait for before the purchase.



Do you see Plat as a solution for a dedicated hosting company ?

If you just wanted to use it as a billing solution you could, but I feel you would be better off using QuickBooks or Great Plains SBM and use reaccurring billing.

As far as the control panel stuff goes the problem comes in we had some problems implementing the stuff we wanted, when people modified their account, adding and removing worked fairly well.

A lot of the problems we had are suppost to be "upgraded / fixed" in 4.0 (the new release), but it is hard to say now until it comes out.

To get it to work the way we wanted we put in many months of development plus built our own scripting language to work with it. (SARL - system adminstrator replication language) If I was to do it over again I think I would look for a solution that didn't cost me some much time and money.

If you have an EXACT plan to have the setup you want with Boardtown it could be worth while. The good part of using Plat is no one can really say they have the same CP as you.