ezpnet

Currently on a vm for testing. Will be moving to a HA setup (using drbd, heartbeat, etc.) on dual dedicated servers, e3 1270, 16gb ram, 2 x intel s3500 ssd when we put it into production.

Man, how can you not enjoy hockey? Or basketball? Both action packed.

Hey twhiting9275, pretty sure the trial has the registrars. As cubicwebs said it "does have them"

Yes, indeed. Ubersmith routes it to the latest account the email address is associated with. Blesta could lodge the ticket, but force admin staff to associate the ticket with the appropriate account? My main concern and the concern of my clients, is that they don't want to share the main account login.

Yah Paul, I can see that for the current majority market share of blesta users, a buycpanel integration would make more sense. TBH, I didn't even know such sites/services existed, I signed up with cpanel so long ago... guess perhaps another custom module I need to build. :/

A good designer is hard to find. By good, I don't just mean "makes great designs" but one who can come in on time, on budget and is readily available. Most are so flaky, even the ones who charge "real money" rates. It's sad.

Ahh I guess if you don't have $300/m in billing then it doesn't make sense to use cpanel directly. Sorry, forgot about that. http://cpanel.net/data-centers/become-a-partner-noc/

Hey Cubicwebs, seriously why use buycpanel? I've been trying to figure it out. VPS pricing is a HUGE markup over going to cpanel direct. The dedicated licenses are the same price I pay with almost no cpanel dedicated licenses in my account. Cloudlinux is marked up... I'm confused, what's the benefit?

Never heard of buycpanel. I just looked them up, do you mean: https://www.buycpanel.com? Why not just go through cpanel directly and get an account with them? Pricing is better with cpanel... As cPanel has an API, I simply figured it should be rather easy to have cpanel licenses be managed via blesta. Client orders a vps with cpanel, blesta orders the cpanel license via cpanel api and provisions it. Client cancels, blesta cancels the license via cpanel API. Same could be done with softaculous, etc. Easy peasy.

For example. You sell VPS/Dedicated servers. cPanel is an option. When the client makes a purchase with cpanel included/added on, you need to purchase a license and when the client cancels or whatever, you need to remove the license from your cPanel account. I think this would be a great module for Blesta. (could easily be extended to several other licenses we resell)

Hmmm. So I understand that contacts with the ability to login and permissions granted via acl is not quite here yet. But in the meantime, if contacts can simply use the support system via email, it would remove a huge roadblock for us. The main client (and any contact in the future with support system permissions) should be able to view support tickets, but the main client/any other contacts should not be emailed ticket updates unless they created the ticket or were cc'd on the ticket. Personally, I would love to see the full contact system in place (still waiting on a reply to that sponsored dev cost guys!) so I can encourage users to *actually* use blesta instead of just emailing us but this would be a fairly easy quick fix for contacts I think.

How would I go about sponsoring this? Should I just email sales@blesta.com?

Sure, but it was a list with errors and not a full feature list.

Same vein of thought - what about extending current features - such as an account having multiple fully functional authorized contacts/users? Authorized users with a simple permissions setup... would be awesome. I'd sponsor that today. What if we got a pool of donations for things many of us want to see right away, such as enom? Could that be done? Kinda wish there was a list of feature online where users could actually vote on them...

Seems like pretty aggressive pricing. Or maybe I'm just used to enom's garbage pricing?

Hey gualter, I used hostbill (never made it to production though, too many bugs) and I even spent $xx,xxx in custom development with the hostbill dev (powerdns, hardware manager & ipam improvements, etc). Saying it's a well documented software is a joke - half the documentation is outright wrong, the other half is out of date. Ever week they'd push out a new release and every week something that was previously working would break. So yes, we did send in a lot of tickets. And none were answered within a reasonable time frame imho & I am a very easy going Canadian guy with a lot of patience. Plus I was a big fan of the software that claimed to do everything I needed/wanted and the dev team were happy to take my money and do more stuff that I wanted! How awesome is that?! Except, while coding was fast, it was sloppy. Every week something broke. I offered to pay a monthly fee for priority support. Then he instituted the pay per ticket policy... and then didn't live up to his end of the policy! I have two hostbill licenses that I am not using right now because of this fiasco. I think that you and I purchased at a time when we got everything for free... including the ability to use the API ourselves. Now they've cut the software up into chunks, so that it is near unusable without spending significant $$. And without an API, there will be no third party modules or custom integrations. The longevity of hostbill at this point must be seriously questioned when you look at all these changes. Plus, from a security standpoint you should be very afraid using that software. No one is going to pay $99 to submit a bug report... and the security folks who have looked into hostbill coding have pretty much gasped in horror. So, use at your own risk and take every precaution you can.... So to sum it up again, if hostbill did what it claimed and had usable docs, it would be worth the cost they want now. If the software did what it claimed, had usable docs and was run by a company who offered superior support, it would be worth at least 10x what it is now. I'd _gladly_ pay $10k upfront and $100/m for that software *IF* if did all that/had all that. But it doesn't, won't and can't (because the owners are nuts I believe). ubersmith wants some retarded money too ($2500/m for our business) and they are a rock solid team with rock solid software. But they are NOT worth that money, because their software has horrible integrations and doesn't really do much of anything. Blesta will, in just a few releases I believe, surpass ubersmith. All blesta needs is Onapp integration, dedicated server module, device manager, ip manager and perhaps monitoring and they will be well on their way to competing with ubersmith. I'd gladly consider sponsoring development of these modules with blesta too... I wonder if we could get a group of us to do so and convince the blesta team to concentrate their efforts a bit more on that end.

I have a gmail account but barely use it. Never understood why it gets so much love, it's never seemed to be very useful or any better than anything else. Doubt the new interface - which hasn't shown up for me yet - adds anything of particular import... maybe they flash EVEN more google plus shit in my face now? lol

Having used Hostbill, I have to say the software is pretty amazing. Too bad it's buggy, support is slow and there is no real documentation. If it all worked and docs were there... it'd be worth it's price. If it was backed by a real business it'd be worth 10x what they charge now.

Are you kidding me? Up here in the great white north, that's considered a short commute! But seriously, a 6 hour drive I can handle. Drove to vegas a couple times, that was over 20 hours straight...

AFAIK, Blesta has been around for many years. I assume at this point that it is a relatively stable company...

My experience was similar - that many companies literally stopped talking halfway through a conversation too. Although, I last went in 09! I just looked. I assume much may have changed since then.

Looks like fun. I enjoyed my visit to hostingcon a few years back because I enjoyed Texas, but ultimately it was not a fruitful visit from a biz point of view. It makes much more sense for Blesta to go than for a small hosting company like us to go I would think. Haven't been back since, likely won't go back again... unless I just happen to be in the area on vacation or I want an excuse for a mini vacation. My reasoning? Had a very hard time to actually meet and discuss anything with any reps from any company that we work with. The few other people we did meet were other small hosts in the same boat as us, pretty much excluded (we had to sneak into the cpanel party, which is crazy as we pay cpanel some serious money each month). It seemed like the whole show was a big ol' party for all the reps of the big companies who all knew each other and wanted to hang out. It was very clique-y and although I am an outgoing guy I had a really hard time to actually meet anyone/have a real conversation or learn anything. Plus all the keynotes and speakers were basically just pitching their product/affiliate program and telling us smaller hosts we couldn't compete without them and should give up. Was a very odd vibe that way. I wonder if things have changed at all.

Well so far, Blesta has given us the best initial impression of any billing system we've used. We managed to code up our own merchant gateway without much issue. The 2 bugs we found were fixed the same day they were reported. I also love the level of interaction here in the forums.

I don't wanna think of the money, time and effort I've invested in Hostbill. Or Ubersmith for that matter. I still get angry thinking about WHMCS doing a custom module for me back in the day. Then there is the disaster that was modernbill. Billing & automation systems have been our biggest limitation in the 13 years we've been doing this. Honestly, excel and simply accounting was probably the most reliable...

Ok, I think changing it would make more sense but I can understand waiting until granting contacts the ability to login to implement this.