Which script would you recommend for small-time hosting reselling automation (Paypal support) that would work in Dathorn setup of WHM/CPanel? Free scripts are most welcome but I could shell put some money if it comes to that.
Reseller script
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I'm not sure exactly how small you're talking here, but if you've got it in your budget I'd definitely recommend WHMCS (http://whmcs.com). It's easy to set up and use, has great reporting features, integrated support tickets and knowledgebase, and is very easy to customize. I've used ClientExec and WHMAP and WHMCS has them both beat in my opinion.Comment
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I haven't had good luck with whois.cart; I have a copy and it is just hard to use. I could never get the configuration with ResellerClub to work right, and once you buy the product, you get to the forums where everyone is asking for help. They try to keep up, but any company that hides their support forums until after you pay is one that knows they have a problem. It looks to me like they simply remove posts that contain complaints, although I can't be sure.
If you are just looking for a lightweight program to keep track of accounts, phpCoin is free and pretty easy to use. Also, the CMS twins Mambo and Joomla have the "Webhosting Component" at http://extensions.joomla.org/compone...759/Itemid,35/ that looks interesting ... I'm looking at it now to see if it will work for me.Comment
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I haven't had good luck with whois.cart; I have a copy and it is just hard to use. I could never get the configuration with ResellerClub to work right, and once you buy the product, you get to the forums where everyone is asking for help. They try to keep up, but any company that hides their support forums until after you pay is one that knows they have a problem. It looks to me like they simply remove posts that contain complaints, although I can't be sure.
I did have both DirectI and paypal integration working well. IIRC Andrew had to upgrade the Zend encoder thingy to work on Cpanel 15..Comment
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WHMCS : Planet Domain
Hi
I have recently installed WHMCS but when I attempt to do a Domain Check it comes up "There was an error in your request".
I have entered all the Domain Registrar Details but it still doesn't work. Any ideas?Comment
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ClientExec/PHPCoin/WHMCS
I recently asked Andrew the same question and he told me about WHMCS. While it looks pretty sweet, it is a little more than I wanted to spend right now since I also invested in an SSL, etc at the same time. So I went with ClientExec since it is built into my customer control panel. As such, I assumed it would just drop in like any other script provided as part of my hosting package. I was a little disappointed that I had to download, unzip, read, edit config, create db/user, upload, install, configure. Since it is the one script you have to pay for that DIS offers it seems like it should have automatically installed and entered the license info and created the db for me like a good little script. That's just me being lazy, but hey, I'm a programmer and like automation. My guess is the cPanel install of phpCoin requires less interaction (really the longest part of the process is unzipping and uploading and setting file permissions since it has thousands of files, I should have done everything in a shell).
That being said, CE has a ton of nice features but that means a ton of time to get it configured to your (or rather, my) liking. Also, I think that it (and phpCoin last I checked) is too focused on pre-existing customers. Since the system starts out customer-less, shouldn't it focus a little more on sales? It is a great customer relation tool, but it doesn't seem to care much about helping you _get_ the customers! It also requires a lot of work to coordinate with WHM, you basically have to duplicate all the work of package creation.
It seems to me that you still need some sort of front-end for the system to advertise your services, tell about your company, and then link into CE from there. Basically a lot of work for something that pretty much has the sales features built in, but they are kind of hidden. From what I recall, I think WHMCS handled this a bit better, but I am sticking with CE so that I can get it all figured out, tie in a front-end, and hopefully earn some food money helping others do the same. :>
I tried PHPCoin once upon a time and one thing I can say for sure is that it is coded superbly and has some cool features, but it is pretty much the same as CE. WHMCS seems to be a little more intuitive and I will probably move to that at some time in the future.
A note about CE... I have SSL for the domain I am running it on, I set up my .htaccess to redirect all traffic to the secure domain name without www. affixed to the front (because I think using www. is for noobs and did not get a wild card SSL). This caused problems logging in to CE (the redirecting to SSL part, not the non-www part). To fix this problem I had to edit the 'settings' table in the CE database and change 'http://domain.com' to
'https://domain.com' in the 'ClientExec URL' record. I have not yet run into any other issues, but I did spend some time doing recursive grep'ing to figure out what the problem was and where to correct it.Comment
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Almost all of the scripts will work with Paypal, although I could never get whois.cart to log in and make the connection correctly. But I'm impatient with configuration items that are cumbersome.
For recurring billing in Paypal, use "Subscriptions" as the sales type instead of "products". You can have static web pages with a "Subscribe Now" link (you can rename the link if you like) and Paypal takes care of the checkout process.
The automated scripts we are talking about here are intended to handle the entire sign up process ... allow the customer to sign up, buy a domain name, select a web package and pay for it all. Then the script creates the web account for the customer, gives them the password, and the customer is set to go.
The problem for very small companies, like mine, is that I'm not sure I want it that automated. Almost all of my customers are people referred to me for set up and other consulting type of work. A charge back on Paypal is pretty expensive. And when I had a sign up form that looked like it was an automated script, it attracted thousands of spam submissions from Chinese hackers; some of them put a credit card number in the comment field (I'm sure it was a stolen card number).
Not all of my customers pay by PayPal ... I accept personal checks from 4 of them. One pays me every year, others are on 6 month intervals. For them, I'm using a PC based freeware invoicing program that allows recurring invoices (hard to find under $200.)
BTW - I forgot to mention that Dathorn has ClientExec licenses for $4 a month as an add-on to your account here. Not sure if there are limitations on that in terms of how many customers you can manage through it or not. Maybe Andrew will chime in here.Comment
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