Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Billing and Hosting Servers - should we link them together

[bluebubble]

right now in the market , there are many products such as modernbill, PEM, lpanel etc which links billing and the hosting systems together.

Should we in fact link the servers and the billing together, or should we keep them separated? What do you think?

Thanks!

[Jamie Harrop]

I decided to keep ours seperate, but the reason for that was simply because I didn't trust ModernBill enough to allow it to connect to my server. Generally when they link, they do so to create a new account, and I simply didn't trust software such as ModernBill to do that for me. I'd much rather spend five minutes setting up the account myself.

[demowolf]

If you want to provide "automatic signups" where accounts get created automatically after payment is received, and welcome emails go out automatically.... then you'll have to link them together. I don't necessarily agree that's the best way to do it though. I would feel more comfortable keeping them separate.... but that's just me

Rob.

[Aussie Bob]

Originally Posted by Equentity - Jamie

. . . I'd much rather spend five minutes setting up the account myself.

You'll keep off the scammers too.

Our billing has nothing to do with our client servers.

[Jame$]

I also manually setup new accounts, it has been great actually this way - no more paypal chargebacks/disputes. But probably it's been viable for me because I do recieved orders every minute. Obviously this wouldn't work with larger hosts.

It is a good idea to keep your billing/support stuff off site, but there are arguments against it too - you don't trust your own network enough to host your main critical sites on it?

[mrzippy]

I am using www.awbs.com, and after significant testing, I trust how it "connects" to our servers.

I do not allow "automatic account creation", but I do take advantage of the ability to manually approve a new account and have it auto-setup and auto-send the customer's welcome email, etc.. There's no point doing something manually, when it can be automated in one step.

As long as I can control when that automated process starts.. then it's good.

But anyone who has a fully automated order acceptance and account creation setup is just asking for fraud signups.

(I manually phone every new customer and talk to them, before approving their new account.)

[unity100]

Originally Posted by Aussie Bob

You'll keep off the scammers too.

Our billing has nothing to do with our client servers.

For that, you can set for new billing accounts (new clients as a result, or old clients creating new billing accounts, which is rare), orders wont be entered into API queue in modernbill.

This prevents account creation/domain registration for sign ups for new clients until an admin approves the account and sets it to 'active. Before approving, you can go do an ip, address check and determine fraud with a high possibility.

For existing, already active clients, it doesnt take effect - when they come and sign up for a new service through their existing billing account, their site/domain are created automatically if their invoice is paid.