Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Billing Sotware ..

[CRego3D]

All of you guys looking for a billing solution, have you looked at this

http://www.ubersmith.com/

Looks very nice

[creid]

Originally posted by CRego3D
All of you guys looking for a billing solution, have you looked at this

http://www.ubersmith.com/

Looks very nice

It does look veru nice!
Only $99/mth!

[cbaker17]

Were looking for a new billing solution and that looks like it might meet our needs, but i wouldnt sign up for anything billing solution thats provided by a competitor...

Id be int. in everyones feedback on how they feel about this issue...

[AlaskanWolf]

I don't see how you would get around this when in fact the web hosting company is the best person to know what goes into the system

Just think, if I was not in the web hosting biz, I would not know what a web hosting company really needs in terms of features. WHNBilling was designed by us, WHN has been in business since 1997 and I am very proud of that.

I know exactly what I need to run my company in terms of automation

1. It works with cpanel
2. Its automated
3. Its easy

And it doesn't have all that crap you see in programs like ISPBill or XXXXX that are designed for "Web Hosting Companies" yet are truly marketed to ISP's that have radius servers and dial up customers.

When I started I used QuickBooks Pro and carried around the credit card terminal you use at your grocery store

then I turned to "Excel" forms which I had

customername,domainname,creditcard,exp,amount

and then imported that into PCAuthorize

Then i got large enough I spilled $6,000 into a company that I hired to build the program...sure they designed billing programs for doctors and crap like that, they of course promised me the world. they never have worked on a web hosting billing program

Where did THAT leave me? almost a year and half later, the programmers disappeared and I am in the process of suing them. They left me with a program that, if WHNBilling didn't come, I would have lost out $45,000 in the last 4 months

So do I think its a bad idea for your competitor to make a billing software? Nope not at all, After all, there's enough customers out there for everyone to share.

I have a great relationship with my competitors such as Hostrocket, Venturesonline. We all share our thoughts, afterall there's no solution out there, but after talking with our "competitors" we found out what was most important to the company

I am grateful there's programs like BillAdmin, Ubersmith and WHNBilling. They are certainly allot more affordable then Rodophi and have features designed for webhosting companies compared to ISP Bill or BillMax.....

[Marty]

Maybe something here would solve you delima. I have been looking at these but do not use them.

http://www.dreamcost.com/?page=shop/...02b8e98f1ad1ca

[cbaker17]

Im more worried about the fact that they would have complete access to your entire client base as well as their credit card information, that doesnt send sivers down your spine??

[AlaskanWolf]

Acually no i am not, i trust any company that puts out a billing program will have enough common sense that they are giving a product to another host

We do not access any companies billing area unless they give us authorization to, and usually this is only done to fix an error or problem they may be having

[ckizer]

How can any of you in good faith store the credit card database, encrypted or not on the internet?

[AlaskanWolf]

In truth, if your looking for automation, theres no other way. This true for anyone regardless of billing program and its true for hosts like HostPro....Hispeed...Addr.com...

As long as you have a strong firewall, and good encryption, you should be pretty safe....and dont go off on a tantrum.."well..blah blah"

If you want to run your company with whatever you want, its your choice, if you dont want to house your credit cards on a computer connected to the net, its your choice

[Get-Hosted.com]

I have this and them being a competitor didn't bother me at all.

Although... if this is a problem for you, they are in the process of selling their current virtual hosting customers to their Ubersmith webhosts. So they will no longer be a virtual host competitor.

What do you think they would/could do with access to your database of customer information?

[incanus]

Hi all,

I designed the support component of übersmith as well as the credit card system. I created and maintain the open-source product Ticketsmith, which is the free version of our support manager and the complement to CBMS. Anyway, I thought I'd finally get on here and mention a bit about how the credit card system works.

On each installation of übersmith, you can configure the hostname/IP of a credit card server. This box can either be with us or on your own network, your choice. By installing our backend software, übersmith on our network will talk to your credit card server. This is done over XMLRPC, which is basically commands and information encoded in XML and transported over HTTP, or in this case, HTTPS that is password-protected. This of course offers all of the transport security of other secure web transactions with 128-bit encryption.

There are two components to the server. The first is the storage system, and the second is the gateway system. Via a modular API that you can use as well, we have written a storage system that uses MySQL and a gateway system that uses Authorize.net.

When a credit card needs to be added to the system (done by the client), übersmith will communicate with the credit card box, locally or remotely, inserting the number and the client id. This is the only time that the credit card number ever travels over the internet, except to the merchant provider. And this one-time travel is of course over HTTPS, further protected by HTTP Basic authentication.

When a card needs to be charged, übersmith tells the credit card box (over XMLRPC/HTTPS) to charge a particular client but DOES NOT RESEND the credit card number. A successful charge returns nothing more than the last four digits of the card number for übersmith to display as information.

Further versions will support additional merchant providers and alternate storage mechanisms. You could, for example, store the credit card numbers on a box in Australia using GnuPG encryption and an Oracle database, run a separate box in Finland which communicates with this box when instructed to by übersmith, and have the frontend be on a dedicated übersmith box with us. You have that flexibility, and all of this is done in realtime, with retries when communcation is unable to be established.

Hope that clears things up.

-Justin

[incanus]

Forgot to mention -- the storage mechanism is modular, as is the gateway. The gateway is what talks to the merchant provider, so you could code one that talks to Go2Pay, for example. Both the storage code and the gateway code can be completely written by you and only have to perform several functions, so übersmith need never know how or where the numbers are stored and who they're being sent to. It just knows to store them and to request a charge.

Cheers,

-Justin

[Walter]

Justin, nice architecture!

[Alareach]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I did not see that Ubersmith automatically set up the clients account on the Cpanel server.
Did I miss something?
I want that feature too.

Thanks
AH

[sPoT!]

Hi:

Ubersmith looks like a nicely done program; very professional. With that said, however, I don't care for "leasing" program solutions that are remotely hosted. My preference is to purchase the software (or use open source) and host it on our own servers. If we as host can't set up a secured environment for such a critical app, we shouldn't be trusted with our customers data.

I'm currently looking at different options:

1. http://www.oregonnet.net/webhost5.html
2. http://www.modernbill.com

Niether are as nice and polished as Ubersmith, but they are purchased outright. Has anyone looked at these?

And, I have to agree, the best people to make such a program, are those that are in the business. Most programs are made out of a neccessity of the developing host, and therefore, tend to be more robust, "cause they know" what is needed. You wouldn't take your automobile to the dentist, would you?

Just my 2 cents

sPoT!