Research Before Committing

For the past few months, I've been meaning to purchase the latest version of WHM.AutoPilot, the web host billing software I use for Akmai.net. There are lots of bugs in the current version and many of my clients have complained about the problems with the billing system (it doesn't work). I finally put it on my calendar and told myself I would purchase the $180 upgrade and get it installed this week.

I was on the WHM.AutoPilot website with the V3 Owned License in my shopping cart ready to checkout when I realized that I should probably do some research to see what other web host billing software was out there. I wasn't even aware of any other options, but with the size of the web hosting industry I knew there had to be competing products.

I quickly came across a couple of different ones, namely ModernBill, ClientExec, and WHMCS. After spending about half an hour searching Google and reading forum posts, I concluded that ModernBill was definitely the most popular and most recommended. But realizing that I had only known of the existence of these products for thirty minutes, I decided to spend some more time researching.

All of these applications have demo areas where I can try the admin and client areas, so I spent some time playing around with them. I then decided to do in-depth searches for recent forum discussions on these products. The software world changes so quickly.

What did I learn? I learned that ModernBill was recently bought by a bigger company (Parallels) and that the ModernBill software has been very buggy since the release of V5. Wow, and a few minutes ago I was thinking that it was the best option for my money! To add to my shock, almost everyone on the Web Hosting Talk forums seemed to think of WHM.AutoPilot as the "beginners web host billing software".

It's looking like I will probably go with WHMCS for my new billing software, but not before I do more research!