ServZoo

I use them for my clustering because they are cheap and reliable for the most part. I like that they are easy and they are postpay for billing. Basically, I can spin up a droplet and decide to not keep it. I would only be responsible to pay a few cents (depending on how long it was running.) However, if I keep it a month, the hourly rate converts to the monthly rate on my billing date. I don't have to buy a VPS, pay the full month, and wait for a refund. It's great for testing! They've been around since 2011 and are well-funded from what I've read in the past. I know that the developers of JQUERY and Stack Overflow use them. I've been with them since 2012ish and have loved it!

You have my vote. This would be nice to have.

Very nice! I love the woodgrain!

I spent days working on making our site responsive and then fighting with load times. :-)

It broke the CSS for me when I commented it out. I had the same thought as you; it was not necessary, until I noticed my CSS wasn't loading without it.

I use Blesta for my web hosting company. I have used WHMCS for a few years, before that I used ModernBill (they were purchased and died off), and I've used ClientExec. They all have pros and cons. What I like about Blesta is that it's clean and the developers are actively involved in the community. If you compare the customer base, I'm sure WHMCS wins in numbers, but I promise you they don't win on support, helpful community, or code security. Problems? Not really. I'm a little crazy with wanting things to work a certain way, so I'm always digging into things to make them work. But, not issues at all really with Blesta.

I would honestly take anything I can get on this! The way I have seen other systems work is that your first card is automatically the default card. As you add more they are saved but not auto debit enabled. You can update the settings yourself as you desire to pick the default card. I've been toying with it myself, but I have to admit I'm old school when it comes to PHP and MySQL. I know what I want to do to make it work for me, but I don't quite get how to do it with the way Blesta is written. What you are saying is essentially what I was going to tweak myself without checking the other payment methods (which is not a bad idea.) When making the payment when they click the save checkbox, just adding an entry for auto debit = true to the database. That will make it work pretty easy. If I can just figure out how to make the change work myself, I will deploy on the dev install and do some playing.

Love it! It just feels cleaner and I am all about responsiveness.

The issue of multiple billing as I understand Tyson mention is that if that have multiple accounts (they really shouldn't) but if they do, they are simply setting up auto pay for the services that they have. For instance, a customer has two accounts with services for $5 per month. The auto debit would charge $5 per account (regardless of the gateway.) This would be accurate billing. Obviously if the gateway supports it. I know all the merchant account gateways do it with a call to the gateway. PayPal does subscriptions. If the customer had an account with auto debit and they added a new service, the order form allows them to pick a saved card. The account level auto debit would just automatically pay all the invoices unless they disabled auto debit. I know I ignore the invoices that are sent to me by almost every company I deal with as they are all auto debit.

Thanks for the update. Is there a way to have an option to set it automatically? This is a pretty big deal to me as it's industry standard to set auto pay. The customer can decide to remove it if they want, but asking them to take additional steps to set it up is a little much. Not trying to complain here, but it just makes sense to have the option setup since most web hosts do auto debit automatically. I agree with the above.

I was testing the gateways last night and noticed that if I paid by credit card (I checked to save the card) but it did not enable auto debit automatically. When I opened the user account in the admin panel, it showed "Payment methods on file but auto debit not enabled." Basically, it wanted me to select the card as the default auto debit method. I'm thinking that it's not auto selecting the card for auto debit.

Great! It drove me nuts as well until I figured it out! I'm in love with Mandrill and was determined to figure it out! If it starts failing again, just restart CSF and it will work again. I've experienced that a few times.

It would be great to see an option to have auto debit setup automatically on an order. I was actually unaware that this didn't happen, but it would be great to have a tick box to allow a client to setup auto debit automatically when placing an order or having a setting on the backend to enable it on packages by default. I think that most clients assume that this is done as almost every billing system does this by default. Are there any plans to add this functionality in the future releases?

I get what you are saying, but I want to just clarify that Blesta can or cannot (on it's own) automatically auto debit. I use Stripe as a backup processor and use Quantum (my merchant account.) I really don't want to be dependent on the payment gateway to control my auto debits. I would rather Blesta handle it on it's own. I see the auto debit option, but it's not default. I guess that's my real question, how do I make auto debit default? Or is it not possible. I can go into it as the customer and set auto debit on both Stripe and Quantum, but there should be a way to make this automatic.

Quantum and Stripe. I avoid PayPal like the plague!

Thanks man! I might be able to get some sleep now!

I'm still adjusting.... Is there a way to setup auto debit automatically? I'm noticing the orders going through are not setup for auto debit. The payment accounts are there but not enabled for auto debit. I'm sure I'm just missing something.

I had a similar issue with both WHMCS and Blesta. There is another setting in CSF that was blocking me. See the screenshot and add the username of the account trying to use mandrill to the box. Also, make sure the port is open for SMTP. Then restart. No promises, but it's another option to try. I hope this helps!

Exactly what naja7host said. I had to do this for a few cPanel accounts and all of my LogicBoxes accounts. It's a little time consuming, but it works 100%! Welcome to the brighter side!

I just wanted to chime in and say that the Blesta team has been amazing in my support requests (the very few that I've needed to open.) Not to mention, the forum is a great resource to get help (and usually pretty fast.) If you are just starting out with a billing system, Blesta is definitely what I would use. Many of the other ones are just overly complicated with minimal support. I struggled with my decision to leave a billing panel that I have used for years, but I have not looked back since making my decision.

Good catch! I just changed it to the standard order form for now. Thanks Tyson!

Let me tell you, there is a hole in the seat I was sitting in when I clicked the button to finally move over to Blesta! However, I have to say that it was not near as bad of a process as I would have thought. Some of our clients are already loving the new system! Here's our instance: https://billing.servzoo.com It's not identical to our main website by design. I didn't want it cluttered with navigation links once the order process starts. I am actually a subscriber of keeping the shopping cart and billing system simple.

How do I change the navigation labels from Support Pro to Support? I modified support_managerpro_plugin.php. But, that didn't seem to work even after clearing the cache.

So, I'm not an expert on Blesta or NGINX, but I have learned the easy way to make the two work and wanted to share. Credit to cloudrck for starting the project on github (I have used a lot of his work in the config.) 1.) Fire up a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 64-Bit (DigitalOcean works great for testing) 2.) Install EasyEngine (easy way to setup a LEMP server) curl -sL rt.cx/ee | sudo bash ee system install 3.) Create your site with EasyEngine ee site create youdomainname.com --mysql 4.) Install Ioncube cd /usr/local sudo wget http://downloads2.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz sudo tar xzf ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz mv /usr/local/ioncube/* /usr/lib/php5/20121212/ nano /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini zend_extension = /usr/lib/php5/20121212/ioncube_loader_lin_5.5.so service php5-fpm restart 5.) Apply PHP 5.5 Hotfix Prepare your files before you upload. Copy the "blesta" folder from the PHP5.5 Hotfix folder to the main "blesta" folder. This will overwrite the files that need to be replaced. Zip up your "blesta" folder contents and upload to your new server instance. 6.) Edit your NGINX Conf cd /etc/nginx/sites-available/ cp *yourdomain.com *yourdomain.com.backup nano You can use the following NGINX config as a starting point (it should work out of the box for you after you edit the paths.) # MYSQL NGINX CONFIGURATION server { listen 80; listen 443 ssl; server_name *your FQN*; access_log /var/log/nginx/*log directory & file* rt_cache; error_log /var/log/nginx/*log directory & file*; root *local directory for Blesta install*; index index.php index.htm index.html; server_name *your FQN*; ssl_certificate *SSL Cert File*.crt; ssl_certificate_key *SSL Key File*.key; location / { error_page 404 = @blesta; #IF file doesn't exist log_not_found off; } #Core rewrite location @blesta { rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php last; # rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php/(.*) /$1 permanent; } location ~ \.php$ { try_files $uri =404; # Tweak for Nginx to work with PHP from vendors fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini fastcgi_connect_timeout 60; fastcgi_send_timeout 180; fastcgi_read_timeout 180; # Buffer settings increase to compensate for increased time/size due to SSL fastcgi_buffer_size 128k; fastcgi_buffers 4 256k; # fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k; fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass php; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; } # Disallow access to any file with .pdt extension location ~ (\.pdt) { return 403; } if (!-e $request_filename){ rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php; } #Core rewrite location @blesta { rewrite ^(.*)$/index.php/(.*) /$1 permanent; } include common/locations.conf; } Now save the file as *yourdomain.com (Press CRTL-X, then Y and type it in.) This should have overwritten the current config (the one you just made a backup of.) 7.) Test & Restart NGINX nginx -t (if all goes well, you will see successful) If successful, then restart service nginx restart 8.) Set database password and create a database (assuming using root user for this tutorial) mysqladmin -u root password YOURnewPASSWORD mysql -u root -p *ENTER PASSWORD* create database DATABASEname; flush privileges; exit 9.) Install Blesta Follow installation instructions. 10.) Make the SEF URL's work cd /var/www/*yourdomain.com/htdocs nano lib/init.php Find the HTACCESS line and replace with this: define("HTACCESS", true); Note: This tutorial does not address security or hardening in any way. I will leave that up to you. I am simply sharing a good starting point to get Blesta up and running. I'm using Ubuntu in this instance as it works great for starting out with EasyEngine and UFW. Feel free to add to this and let me know if I have missed anything!