blesbill

Hello everyone, I want to get an insight from people who have been using Blesta for a few years on the following: How stable is the software in production environment? How does it really compare to the likes of WHMCS & others(if any prior experience)? How quickly are issues addressed? How is the support? Are upgrades tested before release and are there any issues while upgrading? Do people really feel that Blesta has really progressed fast enough to address the requirements of the clients? Where do you see Blesta in a few years time - does anyone see it competing with OR even overtaking other similar softwares? What industry is it targeted for OR who is it beneficial for - eg. shared hosting, dedicated providers? Developers only - how good do you think the code framework is? How easy is it to create modules/plugins compared to coding the same in say WHMCS? Looking for some useful reviews. Thanks.

Hey guys, Thanks for your responses. I strongly believe that anything which becomes part of Blesta and made publicly available which includes third party modules should: 1. Follow a set of strict guidelines/terms for developers 2. Should be audited, validated & verified by Blesta before going public 3. Not be encoded in any way - when Blesta is opensource, why should others be encoded? If Blesta don't have the time for auditing such external modules, then they can form a review team for this process. They can request a couple of trusted developers from the blesta community to be a part of this review team. Also, I would like to know how much of a threat will be an insecure module for a Blesta environment? What would be the impact? Looking forward for your replies. Thanks.

Hi, open_basedir is enabled on your server and you would need to specify "C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Plesk\Additional\PleskPHP56\ext" within its path in your php.ini Eg: open_basedir = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Plesk\Additional\PleskPHP56\ext;C:\Windows\Temp" OR if you want to disable open_basedir open_basedir = "none" Hope that helps. Thanks.

Hi, I do see a lot of third party modules being developed and made available to the community in general, which is great but, I do have a few queries: 1. Are there any strict guidelines/rules applicable for developers of such modules? 2. Are these modules audited, validated & verified by Blesta before being made available? 3. Is the code within these modules opensource or encoded in some way? 4. Do the modules get re-audited/verified once any new updates are provided? 5. How much control does Blesta have over these modules in general? 6. In case the developer of such modules calls it a day and stops providing any required updates, would Blesta take over and provide updates to these modules. Looking forward to hear from the Blesta team. Thanks.

Hi Paul, These are the queries: 1. I would like to know why an Announcement feature is not built-in to the core of Blesta? 2. Nice that you are working on improving the Coupon features. 3. Non-package options: you said: Well I really beg to differ your definition of services. A service can be any entity which is required & beneficial to your clients and which you are capable of providing to your customer base. So, a service doesn't really need to be always tied to a server/package/module. For eg: Web Design Web Development Support services Recurring invoice is not an option in the above cases. For DNS, PowerDNS seems the most optimal option as LC said. It would really be nice to have such DNS modules integrated in Blesta, which would allow for selling of Managed DNS services. I know this is not in your to-do list as of now but, do you have an ETA when such a module could come into your development stream. Also, it would be nice to have a few more developers around in Blesta so that the development process goes into turbo mode. Looking for your response. Thanks.

Thanks Paul, LC & Ryan for the clarifications.

Thanks once again Michael, for your timely responses. I would like to hear Paul's take on these queries as well. Thanks.

Paul, Would this license be valid for the latest version of Blesta? And how would the transfer process take place? Would I have to just pay $148.95 for it or anything extra I would need to pay? And once I buy this license, would I be able to transfer the license in the future if the need arises? Thanks.

Hi Guys, Been sometime since I started this topic and I was fairly busy with a few things that I couldn't get the time to reply back to Paul & Michael. Thanks to you guys for your responses to my queries. Paul, regarding DNS: What I would like is to have clients managing DNS zones on my DNS servers(cPanelDns/PowerDns). It is much more like a Managed DNS service. Hope that helps. A few more things: Blesta doesn't seem to have an Announcement feature - an announcement section in clientarea so that clients get informed about various things like updates, maintenance schedules, special offers, etc. The Coupon feature doesn't seem to have the option to assign coupons to specific clients/client groups along with coupon usage limit per client. Would like to have a non-package option for creating manual services which are not associated with any servers/provisioning modules. What are the billing durations(hourly, monthly) supported? Looking forward to your response. Thanks.

Nice Paul. This would certainly help any new users of the Plesk module to understand the issue and will now know how to deal with it. I would also like to add that a "Apache configtest" is recommended before setting up graceful restarts. I have updated the post, maybe you can do the same on the docs regarding it. Thanks.

One way to achieve this would be to do the following: 1. Create a new service status within Blesta, say something like "ManualRenew" 2. Modify the respective module's renew function to check for this service status and skip renewal For eg in the renewService function for the logicboxes module (blesta 3.3.2): insert the code after the foreach loop to check for the new status: if ($service->status != "ManualRenew") { #existing code start: if (strtotime("+" . $vars['years'] . " years") > $order->endtime){ ...... $this->processResponse($api, $response); } #end } So, if you want to manually renew on request you would do the following: Set the service status to "ManualRenew" Reset the due date to n days forward Manually renew the service outside Blesta Clients can later pay the invoice and the renewal process should be skipped. The above method would be suited when only a few manual renewals need to be done. If this needs to be done for a large number of clients/services, there needs a solution to maybe aggregate such requests into a group and then check & skip renewals for that group. Hope this helps. Thanks.

Thanks for the results. I think the "Apache with graceful restarts" would be a safe bet rather than the nginx one. It is much more straight forward and does not need additional extensions to get the job done. By the way you should not be surprised to see Nginx restarting, since Plesk would restart the web server(Apache/Nginx) by default for any changes made according to the "Apache restart interval" setting. The guys at Plesk should rather update the default behaviour of Plesk to rather restart Apache gracefully and just get done with the issue. I am not sure what is actually holding them back from such a change. Thanks.

I second what you say about keeping the main site along with billing/support seperate from the Provisioning Server(Plesk/cPanel/Proxmox) and is the most ideal setup. But, it would also mean having the added burden of managing & maintaining multiple servers in the setup. Also, small/budget businesses often have only limited resources at their disposal so, it makes sense to have everything bundled within one server which makes it easier for them to maintain just that one server. The option to have both Plesk & Blesta(or any other billing) on the same box would appeal to those with limited resources or for those having a limited number of Plesk clients. And the solution to restart apache gracefully should work smoothly & efficiently even under heavy workload, provided your server is capable of handling such tasks. I do not know how the Nginx solution would resolve the issue and I would be interested with your test results. Thanks.

Hi Nelsa, I recently posted a solution for this issue a few days back in the Contribute section, maybe you missed it. And it is exactly the solution you finally got to. Check this: http://www.blesta.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6246-plesk-issues-with-apache-restarts/ I am wondering how still most people haven't got to grips with this issue as yet, as the solution is already documented on the official Plesk site...maybe the Plesk KB need to update their article titles to be more specific to the issue rather than just "How to enable Apache graceful restart in Plesk". Thanks.

Hi, I believe that the "Suspend Services Days After Due" set to 1 Day would effectively mean 1 day grace period to pay the invoice. In that case: Invoice due date : Mar 27, 2016 Grace period 1 day : Mar 28, 2016 Suspend Services Time is at 00:00 So, on the 29th 00:00, it should suspend the service. Thanks.