Mark P

We've decided on SmarterTrack since it's a hosted option, ready to run, but is written in .NET so we would have the option to host it ourselves if we wished. We're just trying to decide on a billing solution, accepting that the clients won't be able to see their invoices in the portal, but that's not critical, we can live without that.

Thanks all. As I type this, the system has gone down again, as it does every day since the upgrade to the latest version (504 Gateway Timeout). It will come back in about ten minutes. I don't know whether the software or the host is to blame. I wonder if the software trips some kind of "overload" which causes the host to suspend it briefly now and again. Or they just don't have the capacity. It's virtual hosting. We could host it on Azure but that would cost around $150 per month and we still wouldn't know how to secure or support the environment. Unfortunately, this isn't the right product for us. We don't need most of the features, we don't sell through the system, and only use the billing and ticketing features. The overhead of hosting the system and trying to work out what is wrong with it is simply too great for us. WHMCS doesn't really suit a hosted off-the-shelf environment because of the security needs of the hosting automation features. The benefit for us was the integration of support and billing, so clients could view both in one unified portal. Nothing else like that seems to exist. For people who need all the automation features of WHMCS and have a PHP/MySql environment, it's a perfect feature set and the overhead of securing and supporting it is worthwhile. We're going to be moving, I think, to a combination of SmarterTrack and Quickbooks, both hosted editions.

We cannot optimise the server environment because we do not and cannot have root access to the server. How well it performs is largely down to the amount of resource it has, which is something over which we do not and cannot have control. Therefore, we need a hosting company that maintains relatively low resource utilisation / number of customers per server, which is where the current one seems to fall down.

We cannot host a Linux server. We only use Windows servers. While it might be possible to get WHMCS to run on one of our Windows servers with the database on Microsoft SQL Server that isn't, so far as I know, a supported configuration, and we don't have the time to try to make it work. Therefore we must outsource the hosting to a virtual hosting provider.

We develop for Windows (.NET) and so we do not have and cannot have a Linux based server. We don't know how to secure it properly nor diagnose any problems. The overhead is too great for us. Therefore we can only use WHMCS with a virtual hosting package. The first hosting company we used was fine, however they discontinued virtual hosting to focus on dedicated, which wasn't an option for us because of the above. So we were forced to move it. We paid to move the site to another company which has proven to be poor. Most of the issues seem to be related to high load on the database server, as I type this we're seeing Gateway Timeouts. I notice that the WHMCS hosted offering, which would be ideal, remains "under development". We need a reliable hosting provider for the product. Can anyone recommend one? We'd be happy to pay more than whatever this one costs, but we can't go down the road of a VPS or dedicated box, it has to be virtual hosting only. Thank you.

.. However you were on the right lines, and I thank you: it turns out the slowdown was caused by an add on called "Time and Task Manager" which we used briefly but which turned out to be unsuitable so we did not renew the licence. Formally deactivating it has fixed this. All sorted.

Thanks - that sounded promising. However, it isn't the widgets or the "hooks", this makes no difference to the page load time (I tried temporarily emptying the entire folder in both cases) At the moment the admin area is moving along reasonably quickly but the client area is basically unusable.

As title.. The admin area has always been slow, normally this is seen in pages that begin to load immediately, but the browser doesn't determine that the page has fully loaded for about 20 seconds, so it's slow progress moving through the pages (drop downs won't work until it's 100% loaded). I'd never really looked at the client front end until a client told us it was very slow. Indeed it is, but the 22 seconds are spent with the browser doing nothing and loading nothing. After 22 seconds the page then begins to load. Late-loaded items pop up fairly quickly. The problem is that delay. Every page is like this. List of tickets, view a single ticket, and so on. It seems like it's waiting for some sort of timeout on every page regardless of what else the page does , and it's basically unusable for clients. I've checked the "Optimisation" tips, but I'm not seeing anything relevant. It's not "slow sometimes", it's slow all the time. The same thread will begin to load instantly in the admin area. The client must wait 22 seconds to see anything at all. We recently had to change the host for this, I don't know if the slow down in the client area started after that or if it was always like this. The back end has always been slow with both providers. It's on a virtual hosting package, we can't have a dedicated or VPS box because we don't do Linux and PHP. I could try moving it to another host but I'd rather see if I can work out what's wrong with it first. Does anyone have any tips on how to go about this?

We've been using WHMCS hosted with a third party, because all our kit is Windows / C Sharp and we don't do PHP or Linux. However we have no option but to move it to another host as the current one will discontinue this shared hosting platform shortly. I've followed the instructions and set it all up. However, the new host's server doesn't execute PHP scripts, it just sends the raw PHP code to the browser. It's looking in the right place at the right index file, it just doesn't execute it. I think I might need to install something called ionCube but I can't do that because it won't run PHP scripts. This is something that someone experienced with PHP could probably fix, but that's not us. I've searched around and checked all the basics. It's just beyond our expertise. Nothing works. The host's control panel also tosses errors when trying to configure SSL so that doesn't work either. The orignal host used something called CPanel, the new one doesnt. I had to FTP the files over, then import the database dump, and then update the config to point the app at the new database location. All seems good, but to no avail. Will this be easier if I find another host that does use CPanel? Can I just do an export/import? I see there is a hosted version of WHMCS coming (SAAS) - this would be ideal for companies like ours, meaning we could use the product without the need to understand the programming language and platform. Is there a date for this?