HostBill Changelog Discussion - Version: 4.7.4 Date: 07-12-2013

[electric]

there is a lot of talk about blesta at the moment and there are a lot of people jumping ship to it. I have to say even with hostbill in its current state it is so far ahead of blesta its not funny. Blesta looks nice but is exceptionally basic, hardly any modules, plugins etc and it will take them at least 6 months (probably 1 year +) to get to a standard for selling shared hosting plus domain reg - NOT including being able to sell vps / dedicated and being able to manage the data effectively. Don't get me wrong blesta look lovely, and I like where it is going but I don't understand how you can move from hostbill to it in its current form.  If anything I would head for clientexec or whmcs and keep the $99 blesta license for at least 6 months before re evaluating.

I agree 100%.  We've been beta testing blesta, and it is nice software... but still very very young.  As such, it lacks a lot of features and functionality.

The Blesta developers have a few different threads in their forums which explains what modules and functionality are going to be created after the official release, so I am confident it will eventually become full-featured.  However, for now, I agree that it is best to wait at least 6 months or so until switching to it.  (Enough time for the new functionality to be developed and any remaining bugs to be squashed.)

[Patrick]

there is a lot of talk about blesta at the moment and there are a lot of people jumping ship to it. I have to say even with hostbill in its current state it is so far ahead of blesta its not funny. Blesta looks nice but is exceptionally basic, hardly any modules, plugins etc and it will take them at least 6 months (probably 1 year +) to get to a standard for selling shared hosting plus domain reg - NOT including being able to sell vps / dedicated and being able to manage the data effectively. Don't get me wrong blesta look lovely, and I like where it is going but I don't understand how you can move from hostbill to it in its current form.  If anything I would head for clientexec or whmcs and keep the $99 blesta license for at least 6 months before re evaluating.

I'm starting a move.  I run several businesses and Blesta supporting multi-company is one strong reason why.  If you follow WHT, Blesta is going to have a strong 3rd party community by the sounds of it, backed by a good owner and developers.  Blesta is an excellent option for domain + hosting.  It may not offer as much as WHMCS or Hostbill but it's very strong presence is why you shouldn't ignore it.  Let's be honest, what does Hostbill offer?  It's run as a EOL software with no company behind it, encrypted and no 3rd party community even allowed.  It may have been good up to a point, that point was May 26th, 2013.  V2 of Blesta sucked and i'm not sure if you're going based off of V2 or you purchased a $99 license and you have been trying out the V3 beta. 

As of right now, we're keeping the hosting + domain and our server/VPS side of the business on Hostbill until Blesta becomes viable to support these, or we may go back to UBS.  I've also considered getting our devs involved in creating what we need for Blesta.  It'll take some time for them to do it, but they can get it done.  Customers right now can't so much as request cancellation under modern panel them and this was brought to KBKP attention 2 months ago.   

Hostbill may look awesome and offer this and that but it's absolutely pointless without anyone behind it and bugs being looked at as if they're treats for the current customers. 

[psybox]

well I guess there are a few things then - we use nextgen_clean - modernpanel was too new to move to until it settled and Im glad we didn't.  However Blesta doesn't support enough domain or Cp or payment modules to use. I understand they have a strong community but so did awbs 8 years ago and even today it is still the best domain registration software you can buy (hire a dev to sort out the ugly templates). Multi company is nice to have - but until it does what you need for all, why move?  Hostbill still does all the basics (plus more including the cp in hostbill) than blesta does and does it very well. If Im honest - clientexec has a far more loyal userbase and support team than most systems out there and if you are discounting whmcs that is where you should put your money.  Until blesta decelops into a more mature product in 1 year time you might be just swapping the devil you know for the devil you dont

[Patrick]

well I guess there are a few things then - we use nextgen_clean - modernpanel was too new to move to until it settled and Im glad we didn't.  However Blesta doesn't support enough domain or Cp or payment modules to use. I understand they have a strong community but so did awbs 8 years ago and even today it is still the best domain registration software you can buy (hire a dev to sort out the ugly templates). Multi company is nice to have - but until it does what you need for all, why move?  Hostbill still does all the basics (plus more including the cp in hostbill) than blesta does and does it very well. If Im honest - clientexec has a far more loyal userbase and support team than most systems out there and if you are discounting whmcs that is where you should put your money.  Until blesta decelops into a more mature product in 1 year time you might be just swapping the devil you know for the devil you dont

Payment processors we've started developing in house, so that's a non-issue for my business.  When you're talking about support domain, you mean stuff like opensrs and such?  If so, as long as it supports what people need, it's sufficient in that regard.  I still talk to Sam over at AWBS and still carry my license for a deep and old domain company i started years and years ago.  I think the issue you may be missing that I and many have an issue with though is trust.  Can you trust KBKP ?  If so, i'd love to know how you trust them.  If not, i obviously feel the same way.  This said, have you seen their code?  I have and it's to a point where i'd highly recommend Hostbill find a day to audit their coding practices.  Now if i'm being honest, i do still like my hostbill software, the unfortunate part is, Kris talks to Lawrence for example of "secret" things that are happening but the owner doesn't have the gull to speak to his customers as a whole.  So should we all stick to a software run like this?  Trust it?

I personally base a lot of my everyday values on honesty and integrity.  That of which KBKP has none of. 

On that note, Modern panel works very well, so i'm not sure why you've not used it.  Nextgen_clean is also very new, so not much different then modern_panel.  nextgen i find has far more issues with it with div widths than anything.  The blesta framework is a great start and if you have in house developers you can speed the process up by developing in house and in 2 months time you'll have everything you need.  I'm simply buying my Blesta license Friday and moving over a few of my smaller non hosting related businesses over. 

Even today Hostbill still has many domain related bugs.  I haven't had a .ca registration lately but the last one a few weeks ago gave nothing but errors and we had to manually register it.

[psybox]

this is open banter - so please continue to take it that way :-)

Do I base my relationship with ANY vendor with trust? NO. You would be daft to. This isn't new to hostbill, whmcs (sage / salesforce) or any other company.

If payment processors are not an issue for you great, however when it comes to payments I want the software I pay to take entire responsibility for mistakes in this area.

Blesta doesn't support the top 20% of domain registrars (enom / godaddy / resellerclub / etc)

Ive seen the code for all the top 5 providers, you might know me as wise on other forums :-)

modernpanel is a lot newer and the problems being raised by people using it - I (personally) do not find them using nextgen - however I don't modify the website template for it.

Hostbill does have bugs and you are right there is a manual way around them ;-) However so does whmcs / ce / boxbilling / plesk billing / lpanel (you remember them right?)  and lots of others.

Fact still remains even as a basic web host the benefits of hostbill far exceeds that of any other software unless you need a specific function.

[tallship]

Now i don't mean to sound so negative, but this comes at a time i'm about to buy a license to another software and prepare a move, so it's almost frustrating.

Don't be frustrated Patrick - buy the Blesta license now. Even if you decide later you want to keep using HostBill for some things, The Blesta will, I am sure, serve quite nicely for the webhosting, with more coming later, and prolly right around the time we all start thinkng that HostBill is at EOL - if that happens.

Besides, most of us, including yourself, already have an owned/unbranded WHMCS license too, don't we? and we may or may not be using that for some things, right? So at 99 bucks, I don't see Blesta as a bad move - I was just disappointed when Paul told me on the phone that it wasn't going to include quotes/estimates as part of the base functionality, or I would have moved over a substantial portion of our field services business already to the V3 Beta.

Okay here I go again lol. I'm going to rant on the fake bug fix for HostBill's quote/estimate system, which was never fixed. That bonehead was given fine grained reports for over a year about it on his kbkp forums, and it was continually updated with each new release to show that the bug still existed, then it was reported in his new fake bug tracker, marked as fixed, and even... grrrrr! nuff said.

Not only does HostBills quotes/estimates system sucks, have you ever tried to normally bill a client for time in the system? it doesn't work! Unless you only bill in whole hour increments, it can't be done - you can't even bill in quarter hour or half hour increments (.25, .5, .75 hours) at your standard billing rates. this is extremely frustrating for us, since billing in quarter hours after either the first hour or fourth hour is standard in this industry!!!!

VERY VERY VERY basic premises of IT billing do not even work at all in HostBill - Oh, and then there's that nasty lack of sane regex parsing in ticket imports that is almost forcing us to completely disable the ticketing system except for notifications because it isn't case insensitive - that's totally STUPID!!! JOe@cOMpAnY.com and joe@company.com and Joe@Company.COM are all the fricken' same! i.e., if a ticket deparment is CustomerService@Company.com HostBill won't import the ticket response when someone does a reply from their email (not found, I believe, is the error), if the C, the S, and the C, aren't capitalized.

Similarly, if a customer creates an account with Joe@JoeCorp.com, and sends an email to a ticket department, it will be rejected if the email doesn't have that capitalization - at least that's the jist of what we've been experiencing, having to alleviate most of those issues by doing everything in lower case.

Okay, I know I ranted off topic there... Sorry 'bout that.

[Patrick]

Well no matter the case, just bought the Blesta license.  Even if it's not good enough on release, it's a steal at $99.  Like investing in stocks lol.  Buy early earn later. 

Edit:

One thing i just noticed with Blesta though and it was a selling point was the ability to use it for multi-company.  Just noticed it's $95 per company though.  (though cheap, it was unexpected)  I'll probably leave my hosting, vps, server and domain section on hostbill though.  I do after all prefer Hostbill over all others.  One thing though.  Blesta is mainly open source.  HUGE +1 from me there.

[Patrick]

woah, apparently there is now an "enterprise" version.  Not sure wtf this means for us "little" people using the itty bitty version

[Lawrence]

If it's any consolation, I did receive some positive news from KBKP. I can't give any details, but some things are gonna change (No ETA). I'm guessing within 1-2 months. Hopefully for the better.

STATEMENT WITHDRAWN

[thetrusteeco]

If it's any consolation, I did receive some positive news from KBKP. I can't give any details, but some things are gonna change (No ETA). I'm guessing within 1-2 months. Hopefully for the better.

Actually it's good to know someone has some contact with Kris.  I'd recommend you keep in mind that we're all pissed-off with KBKP, and not take the response too personal.

Honestly though, I'm not sure if anything can restore confidence in HostBill now; too many poorly thought-out policies for too long, and too many unfixed bugs for too long.

[tallship]

STATEMENT WITHDRAWN

Because it doesn't look like whatever you were told by kbkp is really the truth, or for some other reason?

I wasn't curios before, but now I am.

[Enterprisevpssolutions]

Wow We have moved off topic on this one  LOL Well another update out! More bugs or do we have some real fixes yet? Great discussion about the future of hostbill and other platforms. Yes hostbill has bugs, Yes the owner is a little out there, but the software does have potential just need the right direction. If he ever sells they just need to change the name of the software and fix all the bugs and you will have a really nice product, everyone has potential just need the right leader.

[Patrick]

Wow We have moved off topic on this one  LOL Well another update out! More bugs or do we have some real fixes yet? Great discussion about the future of hostbill and other platforms. Yes hostbill has bugs, Yes the owner is a little out there, but the software does have potential just need the right direction. If he ever sells they just need to change the name of the software and fix all the bugs and you will have a really nice product, everyone has potential just need the right leader.

uhm, you may want to follow what's changed.  LOL.. your post sounds like you have missed the news flash.  DO NOT update.  I cannot stress this enough.  This is about the owner being an idiot but this software  no longer has potential.  You may want to better understand the software you are NOW using. 

As far as i'm concerned any topic on these forums is pointless at this time.  The software has now taken a turn.  Delete your current install and go buy the "enterprise" version because if you update, you'll be using an apparently and purposely slowed down version designed for "shared hosts".  So if you're not a reseller.  It's in your best interest to go dump $999 on the enterprise version as it is now for dedicated servers.  We (You and i and others) are on the shared host version after you update to the latest update.

[Enterprisevpssolutions]

Yes I see the news about the enterprise version, haven't updated as I always wait a week or 2 to be safe that no one else has issues. LOL Yes would be interesting to see what he has changed in the new version and if there is a difference in performance. I have not had a issues with performance which is what is funny.. We all know the issues are the bugs in the software.

[Patrick]

Yes I see the news about the enterprise version, haven't updated as I always wait a week or 2 to be safe that no one else has issues. LOL Yes would be interesting to see what he has changed in the new version and if there is a difference in performance. I have not had a issues with performance which is what is funny.. We all know the issues are the bugs in the software.

No version 4.7.6 is the new software.  The slowed down version apparently made for shared hosts.  If updated it's probably suggested you stop using the one you're on and buy the "enterprise" version.  This isn't about finding new bugs  bud. I think your best bet is to contact their licensing so you can better understand the changes as i'm clearly not explaining it properly.