I've been spending a lot of my free time working on the new website for my hosting business and integrating the new site with WHMCS (the web host management software I'm switching to). I'm currently using WHM.AutoPilot but it has failed to meet the needs of my growing business and it still seems quite buggy. I'm also working on a couple of posts -- one for this blog about how I hacked together remote Growl notifications from irssi, and one for my new tech blog about setting up a great local web development environment in OS X.
Just a quick aside … WHMCS is a pain in the ass to get working. Seriously.
What’s the advantage that things like that have over standard WHM?
They are designed to manage customers, not just sites. Ordering, billing, promotions, affiliates, email templates, automatic invoicing and invoice reminders, automatic suspension/activation upon fail/success payment, a client portal to manage their info, place new orders, etc. And all of that is hooked into WHM so account creation/suspension/termination/upgrades happen automatically. Domain registration integration. Integration with dozens of payment gateways.
As an admin, WHM is awesome and its really all I need to manage the server/sites. But as a business owner, stuff like AutoPilot and WHMCS are a necessity because they make customer management 10,000x easier.
Oh, and I’ve already got WHMCS working the way I want it. (In comparison to AutoPilot, it was easy!) Now I’m just creating a WHMCS template and modifying the whole user account section so it blends in with the main site.
Fair enough. I just host my own blog and a couple of sites for a couple of authors, and that’s all gratis for the sake of the friends-in-high-places thing, so I tend not to think about customer management so much.
Well, “gratis” might not be the right term to use there. Casper Fox still owes me a copy of The Dark Backward. He did make good on the entire run of The Awesome Slapstick, though, so we’re most of the way there.
Yeah for your situation WHMCS or AutoPilot would be overkill. I’m hosting 50+ domains with 20-30 customers (70% of whom are friends, or friends of friends) and those numbers are slowly but consistently growing.
Messed with Plesk much, by the by? Reason I bring it up is that it’s a more user-oriented system, it would seem, and we’re beta testing it with a few customers at the moment. Might be worth checking out at some point.
Hmm, I was under the impression that Plesk was Windows-only, but looking at their site it appears they support Linux too. I tried their demo… it has a Windows Vista look to it (yuck!) and personally, I don’t like all the AJAXy stuff (I love the plan HTML feel of WHM), though I’m sure all that could be fixed with a template change.
Plesk has definitely come a long way since I last used it (I used to rent a Windows server that used Plesk), but I’m not sure if I’d be ready to make the jump just yet. I’ve already purchased an owned-WHMCS license, so once I finish integrating my new site with WHMCS I should be good for awhile.
Are there any major advantages that you know of (besides better user-oriented design) that Plesk has (or will have) over WHM?
Honestly, I haven’t used it terribly much, outside of the odd Winders issue at work. The only advantages that I see are things that most users don’t really care too much about.
Seemingly all of the packages that it installs are inserted through the package manager for the underlying OS, for example, which is something that I dearly wish Cpanel would do (Cpanel compiles apache, php, and just about everything related, and their build system is notoriously horrid).
The other advantage, to me, is the UI. I’m not a fan of the particular flash that they’re using and all, but I do appreciate that the UI is more or less uniform for all users on the system … the only real difference is that the admin has access to more features than the users.
Then again, I’m a bit happier not dealing with that stuff altogether. Would much prefer to sit around and write quasi-genetic algorithms to solve system administration problems (see my most recent entry on my site … something about a balance). 🙂
Yeah, the way Cpanel has their own method of managing Apache, PHP, etc., is a huge annoyance to me. If I ever end up switching to Plesk, it will probably be because I get so sick of Cpanel’s totalitarian grip over the system software.
I couldn’t figure out how to create an account to leave a comment on your site (or maybe that’s intentional?) but solving that kind of sysadmin stuff is exactly what I wish I was doing every day. 🙂
YEAH!! Can’t wait to see just how many sites are behind on my end. 😳 I know of at least 2 maybe 3…. 🙁