limevps

I've got 5.1.2 and love it. Not found any user faults yet.

I've noticed on my site that if you insert the recommended code to change the style of the recaptcha box, it causes the whole page's CSS to fail. Anyone else had this?

The best bet will be to use jWHMCS or Integrator 3 as I think it's called now.

I've turned on the options for NO emails to be sent by resellerclub to my customers, obviously because I don't want the customer seeing that side of the process. However, what happens now with emails about domain transfers? Will they be turned off too and in that case does that mean that customers will never get notified to authorise a transfer? Do enom send emails direct to customers? If not I might switch off resellerclub.

The requirement to register for VAT is whether your company does, or will, exceed £77,000 of sales in the last year, or will exceed that limit in the next 30 days. This isn't really something for WHMCS because your company might have sales that are outside of the WHMCS system. Can't you do a dump of the invoice table? More to the point, don't you have an accounting system?

Volatile maybe not, but what if they want to scale up? What if the first package offered by a host is 100Mb and the next one up is 500Mb, but the client only wants 150Mb? You're forcing them to pay for empty space *AND* as a good host you won't oversell therefore you've lost the chance to bill someone else for that 350Mb. Indeed with emails, my point is that the business model just scales up disk usage with actual usage, not by what the host offers AND the client doesn't need to actually do anything with regards upgrading (which probably also means paying for more bandwidth which they might not use or want). The business model is not flawed at all, it is a very simple approach that just needs a technical solution IMHO. And bandwidth isn't fully PAYG the client isn't paying "as they go" they're paying at the end of the month when the bill is raised. "With respect to disk space The customer is paying for a fixed amount " That's how things are done in the business at the moment yes. Does that mean it's the future? No.

I think I've failed to explain myself well enough! The idea is that the customer is paying for hosting in 5 minute blocks. Therefore they'll be charged a pro-rata charge every 5 minutes for the disk space they use, and the bandwidth they use. The very short span is because the model means that if your disk space changes, you'll only be paying for a very short time for that usage, if you wiped your site down to zero then after no more than 5 minutes your running charge would go down to nil. Now, the issue is that the annual charge for 1Mb would be something like 3p - so if you divide that by 365, then by 24 then by 12 to get the charge for a 5 minute block, it's so stupidly small that it's not feasible to raise a tax invoice. So the answer is this Customer "tops up" £10. At this point you account for VAT, because you'll give the customer an invoice. When their usage is charged every 5 mins, this will not produce an invoice, it'll just produce an internal charge which will reduce their available balance. This is exactly what PAYG mobiles do - the operator doesn't account for VAT on every text or call, they sort the tax out at point of payment and then simply reduces your balance by an appropriate amount every time you use the service. So - what I need a system to do is poll WHM every 5 mins to get usage stats, which can then generate a charge and reduce the client's balance. The monthly/annual stuff - that was basically just an extrapolation of their current usage to show them what they'd be expecting to pay over a month or year based on current patterns, and also so they could review previous months to see how much they paid and what for. The problem with polling WHM once a day is that if the account is polled at the split second that the customer's disk space doubled for a fraction of a second, they'd be charged that higher amount for the whole day. It looks like I have three options 1. give up 2. change the model to be one of paying for blocks of disk space (easily done as a configurable option that can be manually upgraded and downgraded by the customer) and then simply change bandwidth purely to be on overage charges - the issue is that a customer could build up a massive bandwidth bill then just not pay it - the idea of PAYG is that the customer must pay up front. 3. get something custom written, which would be a shame because the current cPanel provisioning model is probably 90% of the way there but can't be used as a base due to it being encoded. A client would be free to provision their account and then delete it an hour later, but I'd not want to refund them because the deal would be that once you've topped up your account it's totally non-refundable and if you delete your account you lose the credit.

I forgot to mention the VAT thing, in essence it's because the charging method would run into fractions of a penny and calculating VAT on that would be an admin mightmare, so it's bes tto charge VAT on the lump sum deposits.

Rule #1 - you get what you pay for

I'm wondering if this is possible, it's for provisioning both Linux and Windows shared hosting accounts. I'll assume it's Linux only to start with. Essentially the customer would be required to top-up his account with a minimum value, say £10. The top-ups would be VATable, for reasons I'll explain in a minute. At time of the account being set-up, the £10 (less the VAT) would be transferred to the customer's balance. The product would be provisioned, with the client able to specify the maximum disc space and bandwidth they wished their account to have - these would be the values entered into their cPanel account stats. The system would then, at x minute intervals, calculate the disk and bandwidth used, and apply the charge for that usage against the client's balance. Once the client's balance reaches a certain level it would warn the user, because suspension will occur at nil balance. The system would obviously have to keep credit for these services well separate from "general" account credit, because if the client put through an order for a domain name, the system might reduce the client's PAYG balance by the value of that invoice, and suspend it. The client should also be able to view stats about their usage on daily/monthly/annual basis and able to view their expected charges based on extrapolating current charge levels. So that's about it. Client's can join and leave whenever they want (although they would lose any remaining credit if they chose to leave, otherwise they could join for £10, leave with £9.99 and I'd end up paying loads of processing fees for the sake of 1p). I can see that the underlying provisioning can very likely be done by the current cpanel built in module, it probably just needs an overlay to handle the billing technicalities and customer balance monitoring. I'm obviously like to hear from anyone who thinks they could assist with this project!

This is something I'm currently considering but not 100% sure how to configure it. I have a server that's charged to based purely on variables - namely bandwidth, disk space, CPU usage, and memory. I can't specify two of those in WHMCS so I'm going to have to rely on a charging model that simply uses disk and bandwidth. I had also considered a set-up fee for things like sql databases, email addresses, etc - because there's no recurring fees for me. I understand I could bill purely using overage charges, but how are they calculated? Daily? Monthly? Purely based on the maximum value during the month?

Two questions 1. is it feasible to store this file outside of public_html? Much in the same way that the template_c, download, and attachment directories are (moved into a higher level than default). If possible, where do we change the variable that points to the new location? 2. once the $cc_encryption_hash variable is set, is there any way to update/change it?

magic, thanks. I'll give it a go. I now realise there's no way of checking the read/unread thing given they could have read them in their email client!

Sorry I wasn't clear - I meant the ability of the client to see WHMCS generated emails from me as their host in their control panel - i.e. as per clientarea.php?action=emails

As Matt says, for things like hosting it would probably be a completely meaningless figure. That's WHY there are things like accounting software packages! They don't configure cPanel, and WHMCS shouldn't tell you profit.

As part of my client panel I'd like to show the number of emails that a client has on the link to the email page. Is there a client stat that I can call to retrieve this or is there another way? If there's a way of differentiating between total emails and unread emails, that would be good too

SSL is set up as a separate product. It's easy to do with using the Reseller Club SSL module as described above.

This looks great, but to be honest I'd never consider leasing it, especially at the prices you're quoting. Maybe if you've got time to talk about developing a version and fixing a fee I'm interested.

I think an iPhone app is a great idea, especially a branded one, but for the sort of money you're talking I'd expect it to be all inclusive (ie not another $250 to get order processing). There are also cPanel apps out there, getting that functionality built in would be superb even if it were pretty basic. Also, given Paypal have an iPhone app, surely it should be possible to allow clients to pay using Paypal for orders? Just trying to think of ways this could be made a very useful tool for smaller hosts to differentiate.

Either I've messed up the set-up or there's a slight glitch (or maybe it's because there's no transactions in my RC account yet....) but I have set the default currency in the settings to GBP, on my admin homepage all the balances are in USD. My RC account is set to GBP too. I tried to update the pricing using the auto tool, but what it managed to do was update my GBP prices, but using exchange rates based on USD as the base currency. This meant that my USD selling price was lower than my GBP price! Very confusing.

Update : works fine in Firefox. Can never be too sure whether being behind a large corporate firewall was doing something funny whilst I was out on a client site, rather than it being IE8.

Just trying out a test globalsign purchase, the order's gone through, I've received an email with a link to the configuration page, which loads OK. I enter the information, and after clicking "Click to continue" the page URL appends "&step=2" onto it, but the page is completely blank. I closed the page, reloaded the original link and tried again, same result. The link works all the time and the status remains as "Awaiting configuration". Using IE8. Will try again later at home using Firefox.