Cowboy

I only offer annual payment options for my client's website hosting, so it really isn't a lot of admin, plus I have never allowed auto-registrations for domain names. JetPack will be good enough to produce an invoice for me and it also links in with WooComerce for free, so while new orders may not have any automation for account setup in WHM or my other server, I don't have that many clients to warrant the need for it. If there was a WHMCS Lite that only offered billing and no automation I would be fine with paying something like $5 a month for it.

I must have done it in a similar fashion - it was 2009 when it happened. I am not a developer so have no idea what "composer" is. I didn't see anything on FOSSBilling's website relating to install instructions. I will have another look, thanks.

I am going to use JetPack.

No longer supported. I looked at this but installation looks a bit too advanced. Indeed. Sooner or later the straw breaks the camel's back and that has happened for me. I cannot justify the cost of what WHMCS does. I'd be fine paying like $5 a month for it, but anything more than issuing invoices and recording transactions is not required and I don't want to pay for "features" that are of no use to me at all.

I looked and couldn't find anything. Can you point one out?

My mistake. There is more than one page of tables in phpmyadmin. Doh. When I started using this software in 2009 I had over 150 clients and it was costing me $10 a month via my hosting company's subsidised rate. The exchange rate to my local currency was 8:1 or thereabouts. I now have only about 40 clients, my WHMCS license costs me $18.95 and the exchange rate is close to 20:1. It doesn't make any sense for me to be using such a sophisticated and expensive tool when I can easily store what I need in a free CRM like JetPack and a calendar to remind me when to issue an invoice. Or I could use a spreadsheet to store the data.

Not for very much longer. There's nothing that WHMCS offers me that I can't manage myself manually using spreadsheets and a calendar. Yes, it's admin, but I don't have that many clients, so to continue to pay the ridiculous monthly cost for this system is a bit daft. I am going to build my own manual system of billing but it seems that a lot of my data is being stored in places other than the mySQL database that WHMCS is supposed to run off. I am not happy that I can't export from phpmyadmin any data pertaining to my clients' domain names, the renewal dates or even what packages they have. Very fishy.

I am looking through the WHMCS database in phpmyadmin and I am only seeing some of the data relating to my clients and my hosting business. I can see transactions, but I can't see invoice details in any table. Also, can't find clients' domains, renewal dates, etc, etc. Is this being kept in a remote database somewhere? If so where and why is this being done? Is it to prevent me from migrating my data to a different system? The data belongs to me, not WHMCS. Am I wrong in assuming that if they are remote storing some of the data tables this would be a serious breach of ethics?

OK, what I did just now is I changed the client's profile to quarterly billing and ran the upgrade request. It didn't raise any invoice or show any amount due, so I am hoping that this is now correct. They should only receive a small invoice on the next quarterly bill. I do think that WHMCS should have figured out that the product billing cycle should take preference to the client's stored billing cycle if the client wants to upgrade to it.

Unfortunately it did not do that. WHMCS wants to charge the client the difference on the basis of an annual payment, even though I have set up the product to only allow quarterly payments.

Should I open a support ticket for this?

Hi, I have a client who has recently paid for an annual hosting renewal on one of my bigger products. He now needs more space, so I have created a new package but I want this new package to only offer quarterly billing. If I do the upgrade on the system to this new package, how will WHMCS process the pro-rata for the annual package he has already paid for (3 months ago)? Will the system recognise the credit and then offset that against new invoices?

I tried doing this with one client who had about 6 domain names. You basically change the renewal dates on all the domain names to the same time of year. The problem though is that it becomes confusing for your own registrar billing if you have sporadic names due and you haven't got notes - so make sure to place notes in the customer account file!

Hi, Most of my clients are on an annual hosting plan with me, but because of the uncertainty of small business due to the lockdowns and such I would like to offer them the option of moving to a quarterly billing cycle. I know how to do this for products where the billing hasn't renewed yet, but how do I do it if the invoice for the next year has already been generated? Do we have to delete that invoice, change the billing cycle and hope that the cron will run it again? I'm hoping there is an easier way I haven't seen yet.

Keep us informed if you do find something. There is so much potential for alternative private IMAP email solutions to work, but it needs much more robust support.

That is not a good strategy and it will stop me from promoting this as a service to my clients. I do not want to be fielding complaints from customers who get arbitrarily cut off like this in such a short space of time. As much as a hate to support big tech like Google for email services, this kind of wolf at the door alternative doesn't come close to being appealing. The reactivation time on my account was several hours. Business is about flexibility especially in these difficult times, but I guess this is a foreign concept to WHMCS. Right?

I have been testing this service out for about 6 months. I have considered selling it to my clients but honestly, there are too many issues with this service for it to be considered seriously. Just now I have discovered one of the biggest issues. The test account I have been running was suddenly not connecting to the server through Mac Mail app. What? I tried logging in directly on the phone app. Says password is incorrect, I definitely did not change it! I try logging in through the browser. Same deal. I recall that the invoice was raised on the 16th which I forgot to mark paid in WHMCS (seeing as it is my account and I do have credit in Marketplace it's not a case of not paying but just forgetting to do the admin). I get the usual emails thanking me for my payment, etc. Still the service doesn't work. Then I log into WHMCS and see that it has been cancelled. WTF? How is it that in 2 days you can terminate a person's account?

Yeah, it is disappointing to not get the kind of support you would expect for a product that they want you to sell. I have this working on one of my domains and while it's relatively cheap, not being able to increase cloud storage beyond 50GB is very limiting. If they want to compete against big tech (Google, Microsoft) they have to have a better product. Also, something that concerns me is how you can migrate away from OX Suite and take your archived mail with you? Can't see how that is done, which is a bit scary.

A client is asking me for an account statement for their financial year end. Where do they find this? Where do I find it if they can't access it?

I have been using WHMCS since 2008 and I have to say that even while these billing changes don't hurt me by much (still less than 250 customers) I can see where this is all leading and I don't like it at all. In my opinion big tech is trying to dismantle the free and open internet in an insidious manner by increasing the barriers to entry for website entrepreneurs. First it's the software used on servers (cPanel licenses now count the number of accounts), then it's the software used to manage customers. The last pillar to fall will be the death of all open source software because there will be nowhere for people to host their websites other than on corporate owned spaces where they call the shots and set the bills. What I also found very interesting too recently, is that Invision Community Software (the same people who offer this community's platform) are stopping the module that allows one to sell and manage web hosting with their next release. It worked very well and I had tested it but because I have been using WHMCS for so long it didn't make sense to migrate my clients to there. Now I can't anyway. I'll continue along for now, but management here should know that their customers are watching their moves closely and as soon as there is a feasible alternative (viva competition!) they will feel their departure powerfully. Thank goodness I didn't expend too much effort on any of the MarketPlace offerings, otherwise I'd truly be stuck here.

The ticket should never have been closed as there was never a resolution, so whoever closed it needs to explain why. The last response I got asked me to uninstall the iPhone app and reinstall it. I did that and replied to the email on the ticket. That reply seems to have gone missing on the ticket history, but I do have it in my sent items. The suggested solution did not work. What I am annoyed about is the lack of concern from support on getting this sorted and sorted in a short space of time. I provided all the necessary login info and nothing was done about it. Now they are asking me to supply it again. This is not great customer service and given that you want me to begin paying more for this software I must tell you that I am not in the slightest bit motivated to continue paying for something when support is this appalling.

If I change my local IP address WHMCS will not log me in on my browser, regardless of what browser I am using. I am not offline, I have the correct password entered but the system just hangs and then tells me by email that there has been a failed login attempt. Using the app results in 8-9 failed login emails and an immediate IP ban. I lodged a ticket reporting this crazy behaviour on 22 April and still the "support" staff at WHMCS are batting me around like I am talking some kind of hogwash. Who owns this company? I would like to know why something that I have been paying for since 2008 is now misbehaving , but more importantly I want to know why the support people are doing NOTHING to assist me? I have provided all the requested information but here I am more than 2 weeks later and it still remains unresolved. I'd like an explanation.

Ah, thanks! I just put an additional line just below my EFT deets with the merchant URL and it actually converted it to an active URL without any other code needed. Obviously I would prefer to neaten this up, so I will definitely give your idea a whirl. :)

Brian, I have my EFT details hard coded into the template file just below the notes. However, I would also like to add a link to a merchant account that doesn't have an integration for WHMCS with a text instruction to enter the amount manually once on the landing page for the merchant. Is it possible to put a hyperlink into the PDF using some kind of Smarty tag? I see there are HTML tables, so there must be a way to put in a simple hyperlink. TIA.

Oh yes, the migration tool from Gmail to OX Mail is very efficient and it brought over all my emails in a very short space of time - probably a couple of hours at most, whereas when I did this exercise after upgrading from Gmail to Google Workspace it took several days.