Hosting company recommendation

[Mark P]

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.

[bear]

3 hours ago, Mark P said:

We develop for Windows (.NET) and so we do not have and cannot have a Linux based server.

Why does your WHMCS installation need to be on the same server you develop your Windows applications on? 
For us, and I'd personally recommend this, it's on a server totally segregated from hosted sites and clients. Safer, and available if the hosting server(s) fall over. 

[Mark P]

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.

[RadWebHosting]

On 12/6/2024 at 2:29 AM, Mark P said:

Most of the issues seem to be related to high load on the database server, as I type this we're seeing Gateway Timeouts.

If your only requirement for this virtual hosted server is hosting your WHMCS, then it shouldn't be too challenging to optimize the server environment for your explicit use. One of the benefits of your requested environment (as I understand it) is that you will have the luxury of tuning your virtual server to meet the demands and overcome the current shortfalls you face on your current platform.

[Mark P]

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.

[nmdpa3]

If you did want to run it on a Windows server, you could install Plesk on a Windows box, then install WHMCS. 

[Mark P]

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.

[bear]

49 minutes ago, Mark P said:

the host is to blame

^^ This. 
Likely an overloaded environment, congestion, or something along those lines. If I had to guess, it's a less than ideal server configuration. 

[Jade D]

Hi Mark

Have you moved away from WHMCS yet or are you still looking for a solution?

[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.