Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Hosting Provider that provides an API?

[blender1968]

Hi All,

I have the following business need:

I want to allow my customers/users to register a domain, setup/configure a website, setup/configure email from within my own website.

Thus I am looking for a Hosting Provider that exposes this functionality through an API. The API must expose the "control panel" through the API in addition to the ability to register a domain.

So far I have looked at:

- Resellers Panel: looks like they really only do the register a domain piece
- eNom: looks like they only have Windows 2003 servers (we're a Linux shop)
- Fasthosts: looks like they may be able to satisfy my business need

Anyone using Fasthosts in a similar way?

Anyone have other suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers

[fwwebs]

I want to allow my customers/users to register a domain, setup/configure a website, setup/configure email from within my own website.

Do you plan to code a control panel use the API? Or are you looking for a control panel that allows you to create a theme to make it look like your site?

There are a few out there that might fit all of your needs, but there are limitations with domain registration, such as only working with one registrar. Several scripts will allow the user to register a domain and create a web site, however, in general they integrate with an existing control panel. The client would log in to one control panel to purchase or administer their domain registration and manage their billing, then log in to another panel to administer their web site.

[rca538]

Simplenet has a Reseller program and they have an API.

[blender1968]

Originally Posted by fwwebs

Do you plan to code a control panel use the API? Or are you looking for a control panel that allows you to create a theme to make it look like your site?

There are a few out there that might fit all of your needs, but there are limitations with domain registration, such as only working with one registrar. Several scripts will allow the user to register a domain and create a web site, however, in general they integrate with an existing control panel. The client would log in to one control panel to purchase or administer their domain registration and manage their billing, then log in to another panel to administer their web site.

Thanks for your reply.

The most important thing for us is to be able to register a domain and create a shell of a website and a default email account programmatically. We spin up other services programmatically already - we now want to add basic web hosting & email.

Going further I think that we would expose a minimilistic control panel to our users. We want to achieve as tight an integration as possible.

I suppose the services offered by a white label hosting provider would generally satisfy our business need - but for us, exposing a billing interface is not important/needed.

Cheers

[jazbek]

Webfaction has an API, and from experience, I can say that they are a very accomodating and reliable host. Here is a link to their site - webfaction.com

And here is their forum for discussions about their api - forum.webfaction.com/viewforum.php?id=32

[fwwebs]

Originally Posted by blender1968

Thanks for your reply.

The most important thing for us is to be able to register a domain and create a shell of a website and a default email account programmatically. We spin up other services programmatically already - we now want to add basic web hosting & email.

Going further I think that we would expose a minimilistic control panel to our users. We want to achieve as tight an integration as possible.

I suppose the services offered by a white label hosting provider would generally satisfy our business need - but for us, exposing a billing interface is not important/needed.

Cheers

Sounds like the best way to go would be deciding on a registrar and taking their stock API and modifying it for your hosting control panel to create a web site and subsequently an email address.

Most registrars have a very basic example API in the more popular scripting languages. It's been my experience that registrar integration is more difficult than creating an account on the server. Of course, it depends on the hosting control panel.

<<Snipped>>

The only panel that I'm aware of that will do what you're looking for is written by GPL Host (www.gplhost.com). It's a little buggy, only integrates with one registrar, and is written primarily for Debian, but it's basically what you're looking for.

[Burhan]

Many moons ago, I did this using:

Enom for domain registration
cPanel to create accounts
2CO & another third-party payment gateway

All worked as 'seamlessly' as you would expect considering the three systems involved and that I had to create a new API that hooked into all three (one of the payment providers didn't even have an API so we had to write a wrapper for their online payment "gateway").

In the end, we had a one-click solution where the site, DNS, and billing were taken care of from our main page.

Moral of the story is that you could do this with just a cpanel + WHM server and writing your own "middleware". I would not dismiss this as an option; especially if you can't find something out of the box that does what you want.

Just something to consider as you shop around