Can anyone see anything inherently dumb about this?

[Murodese]

My company is considering offering hosting (based in Australia). We have a server and colo space for it, and have interest from between 20-30 small business clients to begin with. Money is not really an issue currently.

 

I've been doing some research and, obviously, I don't want to do hosting admin on that scale by hand. Hence, I'm considering getting DirectAdmin and WHMCS to cover everything I need. Payment would be via bank deposit (which I believe is manually confirmed in WHMCS?).

 

My questions are: would these two software solutions cover essentially everything we need for a small hosting solution?

 

Does anyone have any experience using the two and have words of wisdom for me?

 

Does interfacing with the domain registrars need a fee/account or is it done automatically by WHMCS?

 

Am I stupid for even thinking of this?

[hightekhosting]

In all honesty, Australia is already overcrowed with website hosting providers and with the current price of bandwidth here, it simply isn't viable. Infact, it is far too competitive and may turn out to be far to expensive and difficult to compete in such a market.

 

That being said, we use WHMCS with Bank deposit and it works well for us, however there are a few factors to consider when consider it, the market and the Australian clientbase:

 

• To sell to Australian clients and provide bank transfer details, it's going to be best to have an Australian bank account for this, as not many people like making international bank transfers due to the fees involved, but in saying that, to get an Australian bank account, your going to need an ABN. To get an Australian bank account, your going to need to register an Australian business. The list goes on when it comes to requirements in order to trade in Australia under such a clean belt.
  
• Australian clients, either personal or business clients (more directly businesses) are a little "edgy" about utilising an overseas company when it comes to support simply due to time constaints when it comes to technical support.
  
• Australians have this "wonderful" thing called GST (Goods and Services Tax) , which you cannot charge unless you are an Australian business with an ABN and registered for GST. If your not registered for GST, sure, you cant charge it and clients dont have to pay it, but it makes your product a little more interesting for the "said" company/client to claim on tax because there isn't any taxes applied to your invoices.
  
• If you do happen to have a client not pay an invoice by bank deposit, it may be a fun process for you to chase them for an outstanding debt.
  
• In addition to Bank Deposit, yes, each transfer needs to be confirmed by hand. It can become a labour intensive process if business booms for you here
  
• There are not many domain registrars in Australia that WHMCS currently interfaces with except DistributeIT, TPP Internet and PlanetDomain. The rest are all US owned companies. That being said, I don't believe any of them charge a fee for the access except DistributeIT, who require some kind of "credit deposit" into your account before any domains can be ordered/processed.
  
• DirectAdmin is not all that popular towards Australian clients. WHM/cPanel or Plesk seems to be the "flavour of choice" for Australian clients due to ease of management and support in Australia.
  

 

Thats about all I can think of at this time, but feel free to ask any more questions and I'll see what I can do to help you out.

 

Regards,

 

Dale Evans

Manager

[Murodese]

Hi Dale,

 

Probably should've made myself slightly clearer: we're an australian company with an australian abn and already have a potential client base that will easily cover bandwidth fees and so on.

 

Thanks for the information though, it should be helpful. I'm just curious if anyone had any direct problems but it doesn't seem so, so we should be ok.

 

Thanks~

[hightekhosting]

No worries...sorry for any confusion

 

Dale

[Nexxterra]

As far as I am concerned, Direct admin and Whmcs are the perfect combination.

My clients find the Directadmin panel very easy, and the help files are great too!

I have some University programing buddies That I have had look over my sites and they think My control panel is great too... but most of all, my friends that can barely turn on their computers like it too.

As for support, It would be tough to decide who is better DA orWHMCS! they are both great...

You are looking at $600 total for lifetime licenses for both!

A bargain!

[dreamcon]

I do agree that directadmin is having all the help files, but here in australia WHM/Cpanel is more choosed(their are lot competitors whom you can research on),But again if you are comfortable go with it.

 

WHMCS is the best billing software I came across so far, they keep on upgrading so seems best for now to me

 

Bank Transfer may slow down your process a bit, why not use paypal or something else(just a friendly recommendation) to give faster and better services to your clients

 

About registrars, you need not pay any acess fee but all of them ask for top-up amount on your reseller account so when any domain ordered thru direct interface can go thru by itself