View Poll Results: Which accounting software would you choose if whmcs didn't exist?
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Thread: If not WHMCS, what...?
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05-06-2013, 04:39 PM #76We do WordPress!
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05-06-2013, 04:42 PM #77Disabled
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05-06-2013, 09:58 PM #78Web Hosting Master
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Well, it just feels like an abandoned project. There are some dead links on their site: extensions.boxbilling.com (which is coded into the app, incidentally) just redirects to the main page, and clicking on any of the partner links gets a 404 (/tour). They don't support many payment gateways - Google Wallet and QuantumVault are both missing. Ditto on registrars (NetEarthOne is there, so that's a good start), and no built in support for things like SSL sales through The SSL Store / Enom / etc.
It just FEELS like a dead project. I sincerely hope that's not the case, because it otherwise looks like a very interesting, very lightweight billing system ideal for smaller hosts.▐█▌Fresh Roasted Hosting :: High-performance Harrisburg web hosting since 2012!
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05-06-2013, 10:16 PM #79We do WordPress!
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Yeah, I want to like box billing, but I've read support is lacking. It has a nice look/feel and I like the clutter free backend (whmcs is way too busy). But I agree, there are some problems. We use mostly paypal and stripe--so we can continue to use paypal and we use netearthone, so all is good there.
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05-07-2013, 06:06 AM #80Junior Guru Wannabe
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HostBill is an absolute mess right now, the forums are inundated with angry people just asking for a myriad of bugs that broke once functional aspects of the app to be fixed. The Vmware 5 module never worked, for anyone as far as I've seen in the forums, and now most folks I'm sure won't bother to update it since it's now available only for a fee and there's still no word on whether it works yet.
And @Lisa, as of yesterday you can't just plunk down 6 $100 dollar bills either - Try 10 $100 dollar bills.... Each year, because the support subscription with no support is also now a whopping $thousand$ $dollars$ a year; this is particularly odd since you can, at this time, buy two owned, branded licenses for that price. It's like, if you don't mind their brand, you can get two years for the price of one.
Or maybe someone's arithmetic skills have lapsed. I really don't know. I can say this is really, really sad, because I was one of those folks who moved from WHMCS to HostBill and bragged about it a lot until just recently.
Here's what I can say about Blesta.
I've been sitting on an owned copy I purchased some time ago, unable to really use it, hoping for the day when I can, at least for some aspects of our business.
I've talked to Paul two or three times on the phone - He answers it. That means a lot to me, as the owner of a company that believes we should answer our phones.
Maybe that's just a southern California mindset, or call us old fashioned, but I think it speaks volumes about the ethics and commitment of a company towards their customer base.
That having been said, we don't actually provide actual support over the phone unless it is a managed services account - we direct people to open tickets for support, yet for managed customers we do charge by the minute for priority enterprise support.
I can't say whether Blesta's going to have things we really need, like quotes /estimates that are slick and painless (we do a lot of quotes for our customer base needing local onsite support, and prefer to quote in our billing system instead of doing it twice by not having the luxury of converting a quote to an invoice.
I predict that for webhosting companies, Blesta 3 is gonna rock. I'm containing my expectations however, since that's not really our model, we operate cloud farms, and I'm not sure what to expect in the way of extensibility in the near future for things like Xen, KVM, VMware, CloudStack, OpenQRM, and such - But I've kept my questions there to minimum so as to be pleasantly surprised no matter what the roll out is going to look like, and I'm anxious to take least some advantage in leveraging what Blesta has to offer.... or you could blame it on nepotism, coz SoCal folks like to throw business to other SoCal folks lol.
I hope that helps
.Bradley D. Thornton - http://NorthTech.US - Registered Linux User #190795
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05-07-2013, 09:11 AM #81Web Hosting Master
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This is a major factor keeping us away from Hostbill. Not necessarily the price (I'm on record somewhere on WHT saying that if we found the perfect billing system for $25, $250, or $2500, we're in), but the fact that it changes wildly and randomly. Had we bought in and committed to a $300 / year update fee, and then discovered our five-year cost just went up $3500, we'd simply go buy another billing platform.
That's the funny thing: It's now cheaper to simply replace Hostbill (and pay for custom coding, if necessary) than it is to keep the software around.
Another posted in another thread mentioned that some on the Hostbill forums who bought their licenses way back when for next to nothing were screaming for price hikes to "keep out the riff raff". I wonder how they feel now?
I predict that for webhosting companies, Blesta 3 is gonna rock.
We can limp along on WHMCS for now, but we're probably going to purchase Blesta today just to lock in that price.▐█▌Fresh Roasted Hosting :: High-performance Harrisburg web hosting since 2012!
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05-07-2013, 12:58 PM #82Disabled
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05-07-2013, 01:16 PM #83Web Hosting Master
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05-10-2013, 07:13 PM #84Disabled
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05-10-2013, 08:41 PM #85We do WordPress!
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05-10-2013, 08:59 PM #86Aspiring Evangelist
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Looks like WHMCS and HostBill's stupidity has woken the competition. The way they both are turning their backs at their customers means that there is now an opening for anyone who want to have a part of this business.
WHMCS good reputation is long gone, there's no real support to get from the old market leader with the aging wreckage of a software. HostBill has done so many bad decisions lately that they literally owes reputation. I for one will be watching BoxBilling and Blesta closely in the time to come.
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05-10-2013, 09:52 PM #87Top-Notch Hosting
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05-11-2013, 06:38 AM #88Disabled
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It is nice to see that a lot of people are interested in this
We plan to open BoxBilling for everyone by the end of the summer. It will come along with our new website design, new killer features, and new licensing options (free version will be available without limits, of course).
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05-11-2013, 07:33 PM #89Web Hosting Master
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That's great news! Maybe you should put something on your website to let people know that a major revision is coming this summer. When I last visited your site I got the impression that the project was in its final days.
The industry desperately needs a new billing platform. I think WHMCSs' and Hostbill's recent follies have opened the door for a quality replacement. Go get 'em!▐█▌Fresh Roasted Hosting :: High-performance Harrisburg web hosting since 2012!
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05-13-2013, 09:33 AM #90Web Hosting Master
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None of them. Putting it blunt, they are all crap.
Seriously, none of them do their intended job well, and are all poorly coded. The quality of code is terrible.
I'd go with a custom option, without all the unneeded modules for panels we dont use.
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05-14-2013, 01:20 AM #91Web Hosting Guru
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A bit off topic. Does there excist a solution coded in ASP.NET?
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05-14-2013, 08:17 AM #92Web Hosting Master
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After further consideration, can I change my vote to Blesta? Because that's what we purchased, and it looks amazing.
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05-30-2013, 05:25 AM #93Web Hosting Master
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Well, to back up my previous comment, we finally have taken the plunge and are working on our own system, with any luck we'll be making a start very very soon
Out of the bunch? Blesta is the best. But in my opinion they all share the same flaws that need fixing.WHSuite - Billing, Automation and Client Management Software.
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05-30-2013, 08:03 AM #94Web Hosting Guru
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05-30-2013, 08:07 AM #95Web Hosting Master
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as long as you don't mind paying $75 for a support ticket, having policies/prices changed every other week, massive security flaws that should have never existed if it was even given the slightest security inspection by devs, extreme lack of communication, paying $100 for standard themes that used to be free, paying $100-$200 for modules that are standard in many other billing systems, etc, etc, etc...then yeah...I guess it's "better"...
Me? I'll stick with Blesta...v3 is turning out to be a blast
Have you actually looked at Blesta's code? It some of the most organized, secure, and efficient code I've seen for something of it's size...
As to none of them doing their intended job well...all of them seem to do billing just fine. I'm curious, what about them isn't working well in your opinion?
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05-30-2013, 08:55 AM #96We do WordPress!
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05-30-2013, 09:07 AM #97Web Hosting Master
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Blesta 3? Not looked at it yet (other than the public info). It does however look like a great step forwards, thats for sure.
As for why I dont think any of them are 'working well' (and note that this may not apply to Blesta 3):
Modules (i.e servers, domain registrars, payment gateways, etc) as it stands you essentially had one or two files that have to have predefined functions. So in WHMCS for example you have a file and inside that you'll have yourmodule_CreateAccount as one function, and maybe yourmodule_Renew, etc.
That works ok I guess (heck I've used it to make modules myself). But because its a case of having to follow this direct structure, there leaves little room to customise things. Lets say you wanted to allow your cPanel clients to see all their subdomains, or maybe add email accounts - that cant be done with the server module. So you have to write a completely new module, following the same ancient way of writing code. No OOP or anything like that.
Surely a better option is to have the billing system MVC based, and allow addon developers to take advantage of that MVC to access any part of the system, and hook into different key areas. That way it becomes pretty easy to add functionality without having to touch the code of the billing system itself.
The encoding I've removed my sig at this point to avoid getting in trouble, but basically - why is billing software encoded? Logically the only reasons I could think of were to prevent piracy, and to force the software to connect up to the license server. But its also being used to hide sloppy code. Given that piracy will happen whatever you try to do, then the encoding becomes pointless and just limits genuine users in what they can do. So from that perspective (and hey I dont claim this to be perfect in all cases) I dont agree with encoding the systems.
The code quality From what we've seen of the big systems out there, they are pretty shoddy. The code base for the biggest one out there isn't even OOP based - might not sound like a big deal but it really is. It's using standard SQL queries, making XSS stupidly simple. Think about how apps work these days, they mostly go for OOP MVC based, with a decent ORM system, which if used correctly essentially blocks any possibility of XSS flaws, and because you're using a modern structure addons are stupidly easy to make, and adding major features really is a walk in the park compared to the older options.
Hey this is just my opinion. I've used WHMCS, ClientExec (Which incidentally is now OOP), AWBS and to a limited extent Blesta for years and just grew fed up of how poorly they did their various tasks. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone.
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05-30-2013, 09:25 AM #98Web Hosting Guru
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05-30-2013, 09:26 AM #99Web Hosting Master
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05-30-2013, 09:48 AM #100We do WordPress!
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It is also MVC based.
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