How can we improve WHMCS?

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Colo/Dedicated Server Management Addon

  • Anonymous shared this idea 12 years ago
  • Integrations
  • 79 Comments


378 Votes
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While WHMCS does in fact allow us to manage the sale and
billing for Dedicated Servers, we do not have the ability to actually
manage them from within our billing platform. This would be ideal for
allowing us to have a single point of access for Client, Tickets, and
Inventory management. Some of the below entries are suggestions for
overall functionality:

Asset tracking / Server inventory
- I keep track of server serial numbers anyways, it would be nice to
keep a table of server details that are linked back to the serial
numbers. The serial number details might have more information on
specs, notes, location (see below), etc. You could see which customers
have had that serial number. It could show if it's currently assigned
to an active customer, terminated, decommissioned, or available. The
nice thing would be is if we had some older out-of-date servers it would
be a nice way to allow customers to see inventory and order them at a
discount. Once the order comes in it wouldn't be available and not show
up as orderable.
The accounting ramifications could be nice as well, I'm not an
accountant but I'm sure they'd like to see more details as far as when
it was ordered, PO #, cost, vendor. You could run a report showing
costs and revenues of equipment as well. When equipment is
decommissioned you know you made X amount back on the initial
investment, or how long equipment is lasting.
Who knows, maybe a batch of servers comes in with faulty hardware and
you see a pattern, you could see which customers are on servers from the
same PO # and email them about preventative maintenance.
Location Mapping
-
While it doesn't need to be complex on day 1, it'd be nice to also
group serial numbers by location. room : row : cabinet : U
Then you could drill down to the cabinet and see what is in it. To add
complexity you can see capacity (u) and other infrastructure (switches /
pdu). Keep in mind that the asset tracking knows sold/unsold so you
could pull up a row or cabinet and know what is available
rDNS/IP management
- Keep track of IP management, allow customers to set their own rDNS for IPs assigned to them. (PowerDNS)
Network Control
control / disable / label / switch VLAN on switch ports
- disabling a switch port for a server that is suspended / enable on un-suspension
- relabel / change VLAN on the switch port when assigning it to a server

80 Comments

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The biggest thing here is reporting for me, we had to go out and create our own report template to do just that, we had NO way of using the automated system to know what we were making on our Dedi's. The worst thing is if you have some customers paying a bit less than others for X reason, this makes manual reporting of it much harder.

This would be a great addition since it would allow hosts to keep better track of Dedi expenses and revenue. When we made our report many many people loved it and wanted to for that very reason.

WHMCS is a billing system, not just a hosting system. As such it should do ALL billing and keep track of it. Most of us sell Dedi's and this would be a great addition to great software.
This would be a really good feature to have added to whmcs.
Paid add-on or datacenter edition would be perfect. If it had half the features of ubersmith without the hard constricts of "per device cost" like ubersmith it would be well worth it.
Altomarketing,

It is well within your right to vote how you feel, saying it once is enough,

I know for a fact, that over 5 datacentres here in Australia are using whmcs, I myself have our own custom plugins to manage bandwidth and overages with the help of cacti, I would love to see more modules for datacentre systems introduced into WHMCS, not only for cisco equipment, but others such as APC and HP would be very handy
aleach wrote:Alto, if you don't like the feature, don't vote for it..
You are wrong about this request-feature-system. You can vote for yes or for NO.

I vote for NO. why ? reasons are already explained and also id would like whmcs team to focus on fix actual bugs (several ones), and better multilanguage or better multicurrency support ...
Altomarketing wrote:Please !! whmcs is not for Datacenters !! , use Hostbill for that..
Whats next ? ask Cpanel to register domains and SSL ? ... I use Hostbill for my datacenter / colo , AND whmcs for hosting and webdesign..
Alto, if you don't like the feature, don't vote for it. Whether people are colocating equipment or run an entire data center, these features would be very useful and would add value to WHMCS. Keep in mind that WHMCS is made for web hosts, so going beyond the current scope would only help the current WHMCS market share.
Please !! whmcs is not for Datacenters !! , use Hostbill for that..
Whats next ? ask Cpanel to register domains and SSL ? ... I use Hostbill for my datacenter / colo , AND whmcs for hosting and webdesign..
To summarize the 'Datacenter' features we are looking for include:

- Bandwidth Billing (per GB/TB and 95th percentile)
- Switch Port Control (enable/disable Cisco switch ports)
- Traffic graphing for network switch port (dedicated server/colocation ports via cacti)
- Power PDU (allows clients to power on/off power port - dedicated server/colocation)
- Reverse DNS (Allow customers to manage their own reverse DNS)
- IP management (IPAM Module)
- Ability to define multiple Datacenter locations and tag inventory to location, room, cabinet
- Datacenter Rack/Cabinet level Management w/Inventory management (place device in rack w/ details of device)
- Inventory Tracker for dedicated servers (ability to save details of the server and then tie to a customer)
- Ability to add custom fields for dedicated server products and colocation products that are searchable
- Ability to specify a description and fields that should be added to the invoice when its generated.
- Ability to add dedicated servers into WHMCS so they can be assigned to a customers dedicated server order.


Below are link to the HostBill and UberSmith websites:

http://hostbillapp.com/features/colocation-and-dedicated-server-manager.php
http://ipam.hostbillapp.com/
http://extras.hostbillapp.com/dedicated-server-manager/
http://www.ubersmith.com/features

WHMCS will also need to expand on the PRODUCT TYPE's which will enable WHMCS to handle each product differently from the point of having different fields on a per PRODUCT TYPE basis. This will also help for reporting purposes.

Along with this feature request WHMCS will also need to address how the Product Addon are handled. Below are a few threads I started and the December 2012 WHMCS feature request Poll:

http://requests.whmcs.com/responses/expand-product-addons-functionality
http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?64686-Feature-Request-December&p=281954#post281954
http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?63506
WHMCS could get a huge boost from Ubersmith clients migrating over:

It's really (really) long, but you'll enjoy this:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1217980
Yes, WHMCS should have a DataCenter Edition and charge more for it, or at least make this an addon and charge extra for it. Otherwise, we're thinking moving to HostBill.
Altomarketing wrote:I repeat Whmcs is like Hsbill, are diferent products for different services / customers.. Please, a dedicated or cloud customer does not use shared hosting .. If you sell dedicated you should use Hbill.
So your basically stating that if a company that does shared/reseller hosting, dedicated servers and colocation you should use WHMCS and HostBill or HostBill by itself?

I like WHMCS and think WHMCS should expand more into the dedicated server, colocation and whole datacenter market. It should incorporate features from UberSmith and the features included in HostBill's Colocation & Dedicated Server Manager:

http://hostbillapp.com/features/colocation-and-dedicated-server-manager.php

If WHMCS wants to make this an addon and charge extra for it we are ok with that too but for a larger hosting company it is not practical to have multiple billing systems.
Yes, I agree totally. That's why I bought the WHMCS Project Management module and am now going to post any feature requests for it in the proper place :-p
these features would be great to have but are outside of the scope of WHMCS base product I think. However, it would make a LOT of sense to have this as a paid add-on, so additional $ could justified dedicated labor for this effort
WHMCS resources better focused on project management integrated with the ticket system. Dedicated and Colo is a whole different clientele.
I repeat Whmcs is like Hsbill, are diferent products for different services / customers.. Please, a dedicated or cloud customer does not use shared hosting .. If you sell dedicated you should use Hbill.