New user!

[Johnnyboy]

I hope to find some other people here who are interested in discussing Hostbill!

I've been using it for many years now and have experience from in-house and some WHMCS, for which I have spent a lot of time testing and trying to make it work. Hostbill has its issues with many things lacking, but it seems to be the best option.

What I lack primarily as a Hostbill user:

- Community!
- Managed services (being able to pay for getting configurations done and guaranteed)!
- Interaction with Hostbill and users (Meetups, Shows)
- And as a sub-section to Community - some sort of exchange (Reports, templates, solutions!)

So, is there anyone else alive around these forums?

//
Johnny

[Lawrence]

Welcome to the forums Johnnyboy!

The forums aren't very active, and mostly serve as an archive.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

And if you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to post ideas!

[Johnnyboy]

We'll see. Maybe we can make them active again! There should be more users out there lacking companionship with their Hostbill hardships around 

[Fusionhost]

I stopped checking the forums because most Hostbill clients suffer in silence...

[Johnnyboy]

I hear you, Fusionhost.

But, in part, it's our fault when we don't build any community around a product we use. And I have spent a lot of time researching alternatives. It's not like others magically make life good; I would buy that immediately.

[Fusionhost]

I agree!

I think @lawerence should create an archive section and archive outdated posts

[tallship]

I hope to find some other people here who are interested in discussing Hostbill!

I've been using it for many years now and have experience from in-house and some WHMCS, for which I have spent a lot of time testing and trying to make it work. Hostbill has its issues with many things lacking, but it seems to be the best option.

What I lack primarily as a Hostbill user:

- Community!
- Managed services (being able to pay for getting configurations done and guaranteed)!
- Interaction with Hostbill and users (Meetups, Shows)
- And as a sub-section to Community - some sort of exchange (Reports, templates, solutions!)

So, is there anyone else alive around these forums?

//
Johnny

Well Johnny,

We actually had a very active and robust community, and a lot of open source stuff too at GitHub. Then Kris went cray cray and took everything down, including all the published API stuff, closed it off so all the 3rd party devs dropped support and when people complained he nuked his own community forums in a single day, disenfranchising his entire user base that eventually managed with Lawrence's tireless efforts to hobble together a place where those who knew how to contact the others could send this way.

Then Kris really went off his meds and started threatening people, and blew up the licenses for those of us who had Owned Lifetime Licenses. We couldn't even d/l security patches or the latest modules if, say for example, VMWare up'ed a version, so your entire hosting infrastructure became obsolete very quickly, requiring thousands of dollars just to stay current, when you had already spent considerable funds to ensure that you wouldn't have to continue doing so.

People started reverse engineering and doing unkewl stuff to pirate the software, and I can't say that I felt badly at all for Kris because he did it to himself.

On the other hand, yes, he probably still charges money to read messages w/o any guarantee of ever answering. I have a few trouble tickets that I've paid for that I still haven't used, but once he started refusing to honor his business obligations it pretty much killed his entire business and now HostBill is a mostly forgotten billing and orchestration system that's virtually useless unless you purchase several of the most basic functioning modules to make it relevant.

Sadly, HostBill could have... Should have.... been the best. It really was right there on the precipice and poised for greatness. Now it's just dust in the wind.

Like @FusionHost said:

most Hostbill clients suffer in silence...

And indeed, it looks like even FusionHost might have bled out. I just visited his site and literally every single link is a 404 except for the index page.

Your assertion:

But, in part, it's our fault when we don't build any community around a product we use. And I have spent a lot of time researching alternatives. It's not like others magically make life good; I would buy that immediately.

That is true enough, if people are actually using a product at all. In today's world, and even as it was heading this way years ago when Kris burned down his own house of HostBill, the majority of all worthwhile software is at least in large measure, Open Source, (if not entirely FOSS), with Licensing options themselves driving the viability of the products. Even those who offer community editions with enterprise or hosted versions driving revenue streams are successful with publishing and seeing what they've developed adopted.

The community comes about when there's actually a community, and HostBill doesn't have one. Most of the larger providers running it were pretty tightlipped and were coddled by Kris, there was a lot of development spawned by their needs, and they were happy having a platform with dwindling community as long as they were having their needs met - fair enough, but to all of the rest of the small operations everything went back to WHMCS, and now, even that software has pretty much sliced its own wrists with it's latest licensing, migrating to the subscription model and even the 3rd party developers who publish modules for it are venturing out to support other platforms.

We're finalizing Blesta 6.0 right now, it's in late beta and still has reasonable pricing tiers that are reasonable. Paymenter has some really great modules by 3rd party developers too at reasonable costs, And Here's another one for Virtualizor on Paymente.

So WHMCS, for all intents and purposes, IS cPanel - same company. And people are raving more and more all the time about DirectAdmin, and there's many others that will suffice nicely that are part of the open source movement that are quite capable, considering that people really don't need that much with their web hosting, it's the hosting providers and developers that want all that fancy stuff, to demo to the customer, but honestly, much of the hosting is administered most easily on a VPS on the command line - MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Even WordPress and Drupal have CLI based installers that are superior to the one click installers that are marketed to bundle with webhosting control panels.

So yes, there's community, but it's a more generic bunch now, LEB and WHT and other sites harbor the majority of discussion because the options to create a unique environment for providers to compete with each other on price and features is vast - for example, here's some very unique and popular options that don't simply fit the glove of common UX's:

• Kyun.sh
• PikaPods
• xShells

That's just a few of the completely unique provider facades that are taking over through permutation of what was previously perhaps just three or four "looks" - because there were only three or four billing/orchestration systems for hosting. At least we had those, because if you go back as far as I do.... well, not that far because we didn't need control panels for customers. Anyway, we used to run something called ModernBill. Those are ancient times compared to what we can do today, especially without cray cray whackjobs off their meds like Kris who once had a bright and shining product that many of us affectionately remember.