We’re happy to introduce new HostBill integration: Rackspace Email and Exchange.
Rackspace is a managed cloud company with a comprehensive portfolio of managed services across applications, data, security and infrastructure on the world’s leading public and private cloud platforms.
With HostBill Rackspace module you can reach new customers by reselling Rackspace Email and Exchange services. Multiple advanced billing models in HostBill allow you to bill your clients for mailboxes, mailbox size or extra storage. The whole account lifecycle is automated by HostBill: from creating the customer and domain, through upgrades and downgrades domain limits to terminations (customer and domain).
Rackspace Email module for HostBill allows your clients to effortlessly manage all aspects of their services from your client area: manage mailboxes (create, edit, remove, track usage and more), access webmail, manage aliases, enable or disable mobile access per user. Client is also given the opportunity to manage spam options: set filter settings, blacklists, safelists etc.
The admin panel will allow you to manage billing details, control account lifecycle and client area functions and appearance.
Check the details and pricing here or browse other email services modules here.
Manage & access mailboxes from client portalManage mobile access from client portalSpam options management
In business your time is your money and in order to be successful you need to stop wasting it on redundant, repetitive tasks. If you’re serious about achievement in business you need to focus on efficiency.
This is how HostBill helps you work smarter, simplifies your workflow and saves you a lot of your precious time:
Automation
Automation is the answer to many of your headaches. It makes much of your work redundant letting you spend your time on more important things. With HostBill, automation means letting our software take all the sweat and do most of the daunting tasks for you. It speeds up your business, improves operability, reduces cost and increases return on investment, totally transforming the way you work. As HostBill is all about automation, we focus on every aspect of your business: billing and invoicing, accounting data exports; account provisioning, lifecycle (suspension, unsuspension, termination), upgrades/downgrades, account synchronization & imports, domain registration, IP provisioning, DNS provisioning, client notifications/reminders, support responses, affiliate commissions, fraud prevention, reports generation, hardware control and more!
Single Pane of Glass service management
Managing different aspects of your business through various software can be challenging. It makes finding necessary information difficult, it costs money to maintain different software and if a specific program doesn’t interact with another, productivity slows and frustration mounts. HostBill makes it possible to access everything in one place. It provides a unified dashboard, that integrates information from various sources across multiple applications and environments into a single display – one tool to rule them all. Simply put you can access and manage all your services from one backend. It’s a complex, comprehensive and versatile solution for your business.
Plugins
Today’s world changes rapidly, the technology constantly evolves and customers expectations change often. This means you need to adapt your business to various conditions. In HostBill we keep abreast of the latest industry trends and requirements. We constantly introduce new tools and features to help you run and grow your business with ease. Whether it comes to security (fraud protection, verification) communication with your clients, payment management or legal requirements, our solutions are reliable, innovative and often game-changing.
Effective management
The first step in time management is to create an efficient work area. HostBill provides you with all the necessary tools to better organize your work, enhance communication both between staff members and with your clients, delegate tasks and track and measure your team performance. Follow these simple steps to improve your teamwork and help your organization run like a well-oiled machine.
New business opportunities
Companies come and go, and it doesn’t apply only to emerging startups. Also established businesses drop off the scene after making a strong appearance. Why? They lack the ability to adapt to ever changing business environment that is the key to success. Flexibility is essential and gives you the security and stability your business needs. With HostBill you don’t need to waste your time on looking for new business opportunities.We give you the freedom to lead your company into the direction you choose and easily grow your business by diversifying your product and services portfolio and adding other services to your current offerings. Whether you want to sell Cloud and hosting services, domains, VPN, dedicated servers, backup, monitoring, email or any other web services – we got you covered and constantly add new integrations, that can help you to expand your business.
Time is money – be sure to spend yours wisely to ensure your company’s success now and in the future!
Want an extra layer of protection for your admin or client area? Use CryptoPhoto two-factor authentication via crypto images!
Why use CryptoPhoto?
CryptoPhoto is a high-security login and transaction-signing service that provides strong defense against human-factor exploits. It protects your staff and your customers against sophisticated attacks like phishing, scams, social-engineering, malware and all forms of credential-theft and abuse while still making logins fast and easy for everyone. CryptoPhoto is also said to be much faster to use than other 2-factor authenticators. And as human-factor exploits cause 9 out of every 10 break-ins, CryptoPhoto is arguably 10 times more important than any other security tool in your belt!
How does it work?
CryptoPhoto plugin for HostBill utilizes CryptoPhoto service to provide simple, optional two-factor authentication for both client and admin area via crypto images. The module adds additional registration field to customer and admin profiles, which allows you to enable/disable CryptoPhoto 2 factor authentication. When enabled, admins and/or clients will be able generate tokens that will be later needed to login to the system. After successful login, users will be redirected to the main page.
Enabling CryptoPhoto for customer by staff member – displays token wizardAfter adding token to client portal, client can manage his other tokensAsking for entering token after client login
This year HostBill celebrates 9 years in business!
When HostBill was founded back in 2008 with clear vision – to make hosting companies life easier. Right now HostBill is one of the most popular billing and automation software in web hosting industry and the innovation leader that sets out the trends.
We have accomplished a lot together over the last 9 years: we have helped thousands of companies to make their work easier and empowered them to realize their full potential.
We could not have come this far without our clients who trusted us since the beginning, loyally supported us and who encouraged us to develop the project. We always listened to our customers and their opinions, suggestion and testimonials that helped us to move forward, seek for and deliver new solutions and constantly improve.
To all our past and current clients: THANK YOU for keeping us in business for 9 years.
In recognition of this anniversary and to show our appreciation we have prepared a special offer, personalized for each of our customers. To check what we’ve prepared for you, login to HostBill licensing portal and reveal your deal!
We plan to keep our business and relation growing and continue to provide you with nothing less than the best service.
HostBill has recently added new payment gateways that you can now process payments with in HostBill and a new domain registrar!
Paysafe card processing
Paysafe is a leading global provider of end-to-end payment solutions. Its core purpose is to enable businesses and consumers to connect and transact seamlessly through industry-leading capabilities in payment processing, digital wallet and online cash solutions. HostBill now supports Paysafe card processing for collecting payments. Paysafe processes payments in background, so your client will not leave HostBill UI. This gateway also supports tokenization – credit card details will be stored in database in tokenized form, and can be only used with this gateway, but you can also use regular card processing through Paysafe Card, with cards stored on your end for portability. Paysafe also supports one-click refunds processing for your staff members – transaction can be easily refunded from invoice details.
MOLPay payment gateway
Quite recently the list of payment gateways supported by HostBill joined MOLPay – a leading payment gateway in Southeast Asia that since 2005 connects international brands with local consumers across region. MOLPay offers global cards payment for merchants to sell online and has wide coverage of e-banking and e-wallet solutions. It is also the first payment gateway in South East Asia enabling online purchases to be paid physically with cash at their physical payment centers such as 7-Eleven. With the new HostBill integration you can collect payment using MOLPay out of the box. This payment gateway is a great choice if you have customers in South East Asia or plan to expand your business to SEA markets!
Instra domain registrar
Instra is a company with over 15 year presence in the domain industry, selling and promoting gTLD and ccTLD domain names and servicing customers in more than 200 countries worldwide. HostBill now provides seamless integration with Instra to enable you to automate all aspects of Instra domain management – from registration, through transfer, expiration reminders to automatic renewals. HostBill also ensures automatic synchronization of your domain names with the registrar to make sure that details you store are up to date. What is more, HostBill gives you the opportunity to order and manage domains in bulk: set privacy, name-servers, auto-renewal and other settings for number of domains with just a few mouse clicks.
Integration features:
Automated domain registration. When enabled, domain module connects registrar API to register new domain name ordered by client.
Automated domain transfers. Customers can request domain transfer from other registrar to you. During signup customers are asked for EPP/transfer code used in transfer process.
Update domain registration contacts. Customers can manage contact details related to domains they have registered with you.
Registrar lock – Your customer will have ability to enable/disable registrar lock from client portal, preventing unauthorised domain transfers.
Update Nameservers – customers have the ability to change nameservers the domain is pointing to.
With this week’s release we’re happy to announce that we’ve added ONApp v6 version support and a number of other pretty useful options to your admin area!
OnApp v6 support
OnApp has recently launched version v6.0 of the OnApp cloud management platform, which makes cloud faster, easier and more profitable for Telcos, MSPs and their customers. More information about this new OnApp version are available at https://onapp.com/v6.
Commitment period for the service – we’ve added option to set the commitment period for the service account. Unitil today, when configuring products in HostBill you had the ability to set for how many days after making the order the client can cancel it (in Product -> Other Settings -> Allow cancellations). As of now, in the account view you can also set the commitment period. Once this period is set, customer will not be able to place cancelation request on this service until this date.
SSH Keys – keys added with the SSH key select component can now be viewed in the account details, giving you the ability to quickly copy it.
Credit Notes – in HostBill credit notes are documents that indicate the money coming out/owed to customer. This document is mostly used to indicate refund. Until today you could create credit notes only related to a specific invoice. We’ve now added the functionality to allow you create credit note documents manually. First of all you need to enable credit notes in General Settings -> Billing -> Credit Notes. Then, to create a new credit note go to Invoices -> Credit Notes and press ‘New credit note’ button.
Period on estimates – in the Document Templates settings (you can find this section in General Settings -> Billing -> Document Templates), we’ve added the Period on Estimates option to allow you to turn off the period for Estimates. This option by default is turned on.
Black Friday is the day that everyone is waiting for almost whole year long. We also couldn’t wait and that’s why we’ve decided to start our Black Friday promotion a bit earlier this year!
We’re celebrating this occasion with a 20% discount on all HostBill licenses and all modules from our portfolio that you can find in our marketplace! Use the code BLACKFRIDAY2018 to claim your 20% off on everything! There are no limits in promotional code use – you can use it on multiple purchases.
Note: The offer applies to new and current customers and may not be combined with any other sale, promotion, discount, code, coupon and/or offer.
This week’s release comes with a new payment gateway supported by HostBill – Alipay Cross Border and a bunch of new admin features!
Alipay Cross Border payment gateway
Alipay is a popular Chinese mobile and online payment platform. Alipay cross-border website payment gives your buyers a simplified and secure payment experience that keeps them local to your website throughout the payment process. Once integrated the Alipay online payment service, you can present an Alipay payment button on your website for the consumer to complete the payment and check out. Alipay cross-border website payment solution will let you offer your Chinese consumers a familiar payment experience that they are comfortable with. With this payment method you can deduct payment amount from the consumer’s Alipay account in real-time in CNY and settle the payment to you in a foreign currency.
Admin area – User account list bulk management
The Service management section in user profiles within the HostBill admin portal has now been improved. Staff members can now control number of records per page in accounts quick list (the list of accounts across admin UI/client profile). The amount of accounts that will be displayed in one page can be either 10, 20, 50, 100 or all accounts. You can easily select the account to be managed in bulk – you can select all accounts on the current screen with just one click, or choose accounts one by one, and then perform various actions such as create, suspend, unsuspend etc.
Client group settings
We’ve added two new settings per client group. Staff members can now control for each client group:
Continue Invoice Creation – this option lets you to decide whether or not to allow the customers to create new invoices if they have any previous unpaid invoices for the given product or service (which is currently suspended).
Final invoice settings – this option enables you to choose if you want to generate final invoice number immediately after order is made or to wait after the payment is received (and determine how many days after payment to generate final invoice)
The list of all new features and bugs fixed in this release can be found in our changelog.
Strengthening your HostBill area access: we’re happy to introduce new Mobile 2FA plugin! This week we’ve also added a support for a TrustPay payment gateway and some other exciting features!
Mobile 2FA
Mobile 2FA is free plugin aimed at strengthening your HostBill admin area protection. With mobile two-factor authentication your staff members will receive a one-time passcode upon login. This method of two factor authentication can be enabled/disabled per staff member. The message the admin receives with the passcode can be easily edited in message templates. For this module to work you need to enable one of HostBill mobile notification modules and active mobile notifications setting.
TrustPay payment gateway
Our extensive list of payment gateways supported by HostBill keeps on growing. The new addition is TrustPay – a provider of online payment solutions and a principal member of Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay. Founded in 2009, TrustPay belongs to first financial institutions within the region to provide secure e-commerce payments across EEA area. Now you can process payments in HostBill using TrustPay gateway!
We’ve also made a few other updates to HostBill admin area:
Password Manager
Password Manager module lets you manage your passwords from HostBill and share them with selected staff members in a secure way. The module gives you control over who can view, edit and delete password at the per-password level. The new option allows you to share password link with a client. To share a password, in your password manager module click “Share” button and choose one of the options:
Send to client – sends the password to the given client
Generate link – creates the link and allows you to copy it
The client can copy the password only once and after that the link expires.
Knowledgebase
Knowledgebase is a perfect support tool to help you save some time on client support allowing them to browse various how-to articles divided into different categories, easily browsed and filtered by your clients. We’ve now added the option to manage (reorder) articles in a tree view. Also, it’s now possible to search through Knowledgebase and Macros entries in ticket view so that searching for a given article is now even easier!
EU Billing
HostBill allows you to choose between two invoicing methods: Default Invoicing and EU invoicing method, where pro-forma invoices and paid invoices have separate numeration. With the new release we’ve added the option to fully block ability to edit invoice with Final ID issued. Enabling the option Block final invoice edits (by default it’s off) will mean that the staff member will not be able to edit/update invoice once final number will be issued for it. When the invoice is blocked the admin will only be able to change the invoice status, add payment or edit payment method.
Domain import
We’ve added the possibility to import domains from registry into HostBill starting with several domain registrars, including Antagus, InternetX, Realtime Register. You will find this option in HostBill Admin -> Extras. From the list of registry’s active domains you can select:
Domain to import
The client that the domain should be assigned to (or create new client using domain registrar details)
TLD/product in HostBill the domain should be assigned to
For the full list of features added and bugs fixed please refer to our changelog.
One of HostBill’s free (and extremely useful) support tools – aimed at client self-service Knowledge base has just received a few enhancements!
Why use knowledge base?
Customer support probably consumes a lot of your time and providing your clients with a self-service support tool can help you reduce customer service to minimum. The knowledge base is a source of information that can be obtained by clients without sending a support ticket. So if you do it right you can provide your clients with great customer experience with almost no effort! That’s why we’ve taken some time to improve HostBill knowledge base. Last week we’ve added the option to manage (reorder) articles in a tree view and to search through Knowledgebase and Macros entries in ticket view to make searching for a given article is now even easier. Today, we’ve added some more new options:
Customers can now vote for articles
If you’d like to know your clients opinions on your knowledge base articles you can let them vote for them. You can enable/disable this feature in HostBill admin area -> Settings -> Support. Once the feature is on your clients will be able to upvote or downvote each article. One visitor can only vote once!
Let customers Disqus comments to knowledge base articles through additional free module
Not only your customers can now vote for the articles, they will also be able to add comments through DISQUS thanks to our free integration!
You can now set articles relationships
To make your knowledge base more comprehensive and easy to use you can now link related articles. This can be easily done by searching through existing articles and multi-selecting related articles. The viewers will see related articles at the bottom of the page.
You can now see Viewed/Rated knowledgebase statistics
Knowledge base statistics will help you better understand what your customers are looking for (articles view statistics) or for example which articles turned out to be more useful. In the statistics tab you can check 100 most viewed articles, 100 Most upvoted articles, 100 Most downvoted articles or 100 least viewed articles. The statistics are available in HostBill admin area -> Knowledgebase -> Statistics.
To learn more about HostBill knowledge base click here.
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This week we’ve also introduced some other new features – check our changelog for the details!
HostBill’s Affiliate System is a free add-on that comes with every HostBill license and allows you to implement affiliate program in your company to increase your sales, gain more traffic and improve search engine rankings. We’ve recently put HostBill affiliate system on our developers’ radar and built a few new tools!
Affiliate system update
Introducing affiliate campaigns with custom URLs
With the new release HostBill gives you the opportunity to create affiliate campaigns. Each campaign will have a custom URLs redirecting referrals to campaign landing URLs. After visiting such custom link the person who clicked it will be redirected to pre-defined landing page. Clicking the link will be counted as “affiliate hit” and will be assigned to given affiliate.
Affiliate campaigns can be created, edited, deleted and managed in HostBill Admin -> Clients -> Affiliates -> Affiliate Settings -> Campaigns. Each campaign will have:
ID – campaign ID number
Varchar (letters, number and two special characters: “-” andi _”) – defined by admin; it will be displayed in the URL
Name – name of the campaign that will be visible in client area
Description – the campaign description that will be visible in client area
Redirect URL – the URL that the client should be redirected to
Start date – campaign starting date – the campaign will be visible in client area since that date
End date – optional (campaign can have no ending date).
Status of the campaign – it can be draft, active or inactive
Notes – personal notes regarding the campaign, visible only for admins
Creating new campaign
All active campaigns with matching start/end dates will be listed in client area in Affiliates section, along with the campaign name, description and URL.
Statistics page
New statistic page will give you insights into useful affiliate-related statistics and reports. You will be able to view top affiliate visits, top affiliate signups within a period or 100 top affiliates. The statistic tab can be found in HostBill Admin -> Clients -> Affiliates -> Statistics
Affiliate statistics
Recent visits/signups graphs
We’ve added new widgets to affiliate admin area’s profile, displaying recent visits and recent signups. The line graphs will display information from the current and past month and will list number of visits/signups per given day. The graphs can be found under under the commissions table chart.
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This week’s release also comes with new features:
Option to split setup fee as separate invoice line for newly ordered items
Some of the services that you offer your customers may require adding a setup fee to the regular price. Until now, the setup fee and recurring price were added up and on the invoice the sum was displayed on a single line. Now you can split those two values and list them separately on the invoice. This feature can be accessed in Settings -> Billing -> Document templates and by default it is off.
Preview of document/invoice settings impact
We’ve added the ability to preview invoice and to see the changes depending on chosen options.
For the full list of new features and bugs fixed this week please see our changelog.
At the end of this year we’re not slowing down and as on every Monday we release new HostBill version! Find out what’s new!
Transactional email modules update
Transactional emails, unlike ‘bulk’ or ‘marketing’ emails are sent to single individual user, usually in a response to an action taken by that user – and that’s why they’re also called ‘triggered’ emails. Those messages contain important notifications and confirmations, such as account creation emails, account notifications, password resets, order confirmation etc. From now on, thanks to the new enhancement added to those modules, you can send attachments along with the messages (such as PDF documents – invoices, order confirmations ect).
TrustPay CopyAndPay
Recently, we’ve added new payment gateway integration: TrustPay. TrustPay is a payment gateway for Central and Eastern Europe that allows you to accept payments in BGN, CZK, EUR, GBP, HRK, HUF, NOK, PLN, RON, TRY, USD. Now we’ve added the support for TrustPay CopyAndPay payment method. COPYandPAY is a SAQ-A compliant payment-form solution, used to securely accept the payment data.
Admin area changes
In HostBil admin area we’ve improved date pickers UI in Reports section and added “All” option to Records per page in accounts quicklist. We’ve also introduced a couple of new options for our provisioning modules – check out the changelog for details!
While the year 2018 comes to the end we find ourselves reflecting on the past year and what we’ve achieved. It has been quite an amazing year for us! 2018 for HostBill was a year of strong progress, especially in terms of product innovation.
New features every week
At HostBill we proud ourselves in our fast release cycle, which has always been one of the biggest HostBill advantages over our competitors. This year we managed to publish 66 releases, which gives us roughly 1.27 releases per week! This way, as always, we were able to quickly react on new market trends, bug reports or feature requests.
Speaking of improving HostBill, in 2018 we’ve added a staggering number of 467 new features, made 76 other changes and fixed 828 bugs! The enhancements to the product cover various areas: both admin and client panels and our multiple integrations. Especially HostBill admin area has been equipped with many new features: from team management tools (such as new admin permissions or adding staff members teams), through billing (i.e. post paid billing), service management (service auto-renewal control, related services feature) to marketing tools (credit vouchers, product components discounts) and many other.
New integrations
We also keep on working on our integrations, adding new features to the existing ones and introducing completely new modules almost every week! For the past year we launched 32 new paid modules and 40 free modules! Many of the new integrations are provisioning modules such as WHM, Digital Ocean DNS, Comodo, InternetX SSL, Rackspace, Duda, Servertastic (and more) that allow to sell and automatically provision services such as SSL certificates, licenses, email services, VPS machines, backup services and other to help you maximize HostBill’s potential in increasing overall revenue.
This year we’ve also put our efforts on developing apps that extend HostBill core functionalities and strengthen fraud protection (Abuse.io, AbuseIPDB, CryptoPhoto), help with billing and collecting payment (Payment Links, Gateway per Client), improve the support efforts (Support PIN), ordering process (Private Products) and miscellaneous utilities that become very useful in various processes when running an online business (MailChimp integration, WebHooks plugin, Customer Rewards)
We also integrated more than 10 new payment gateways and payment methods to make sure our customers can offer solid and secure checkout experience in their preferred currency.
Improving customer experience
In 2018 we also focused on improving customer experience. We launched completely new website with redesigned marketplace. When developing the new website we focused on improving website navigation and organizing the content to make it easier to read through and find specific information. In terms of customer resources, we also polished-up our documentation structure and introduced new bug report system.
Another milestone for HostBill this year was introducing GDPR changes. We not only implemented necessary changes to our policies and terms of use but also developed a set of tools to help our customers comply with the new EU directive.
What’s next?
Although we achieved a lot in 2018, we will not become complacent. In 2019 we anticipate to keep up the pace with our weekly releases, adding even more new features and new integrations – should you have any suggestions please let us know as we always appreciate our customers’ feedback! We also hope to keep surprising you with our innovations!
All of this would not be possible without our clients who support us and help us to shape our business. We hope that 2018 has been just as memorable for you and for your colleagues. We look forward to working with you in the years to come!
Product automation in HostBill has just became even more powerful with the new ability to create conditions for custom automation tasks!
Custom automation tasks in HostBill
With HostBill automation rules you can ensure the service you provide is fully automated, from signup to termination. Automation areas include the whole service lifecycle from creating the service or product, through automated billing and invoicing, upgrades and downgrades, suspending, unsuspending to terminating.
In HostBill you can also easily create custom automation rules which give you countless of options to manage your services. Creating custom automation tasks is one of the most powerful HostBill features, as it gives you high flexibility to adapt automation options to your needs and to each product/service/account individually. You can choose one of the pre-defined tasks that you wish to implement to your product and that can be configured according to your individual requirements or create your own automation tasks. Each task can be scheduled to be executed automatically on certain events – you can set number of days or hours before or after certain event.
Custom automation tasks logic/conditions
New HostBill feature allows you to define various and multiple conditions under which the tasks should be scheduled or executed. Automation tasks conditions provide an ideal way to save time on predictable, repetitive tasks as well as standardize service management process. Also, automating simple yet important processes helps you to avoid unnecessary delays and possible communication gaps and it also minimizes customer dissatisfaction.
How does it work?
When creating custom automation task you can add additional conditions. The tasks include sending the email, opening the support ticket, changing account billing cycle or changing recurring price, suspending the account or terminating the account. The conditions can concern the client (such as client personal details, address, client group, language etc) or the account (date created, billing cycle, billing type, next due date, status and more). You can direct the action to be taken upon one given condition, or define multiple set of conditions that must be met all at once. What is more, the conditions can be grouped, for easier management.
Defining custom automation task conditions
If you’d like to find out more about product automation in HostBill please refer to our documentation.
This week’s HostBill release introduces some changes into client quicklist and DNS zone import, new features for Password Manager and AD/LDAP plugins and more!
Order drafts
In HostBill, you can create orders on behalf of the client from HostBill admin area. Order drafts can be later converted into invoices. For easier access order drafts are now listed in client profile’s quicklist. The ‘orders’ section is now divided into ‘Regular orders’ and ‘draft orders’ to help you easier manage them!
DNS zone import
For DNS zones import we’ve added the possibility to import DNS zone either from file or by AXFR request directly from HostBill client portal. In HostBill, you can choose the preferred import method either when adding a new zone, or once it’s already added, in the zone details. The import from zone file uses a widely used format described by RFC 1035, while AXFR transfer is a method of a direct name server to name server transfer of a zone file. Once the import is set by the client/admin, HostBill will start a background task and submit a AXFR request to indicated NS. If the request is successful HostBill will paste the zone content to the target DNS.
AD/LDAP
AD/LDAP module for HostBill was built to enable staff member authentication with Active Directory / Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. The module allows to connect with multiple AD/LDAP hosts to authenticate staff members against them. Staff profiles that are missing in HostBill can be created automatically using a template. Now, when adding an AD/LDAP administrator to HostBill it is also possible to assign an administrator to admin team. When configuring the module in the ‘Admin team’ field you can select admin team (or none) from your HostBill that newly created staff member not present in HostBill will be auto-assigned to.
Password Manager
We’ve recently also worked on our Password Manager module, that helps you to manage your passwords from HostBill and share them with selected staff members in a secure way. It gives you control over who can view, edit and delete password at the per-password level. Our recent improvement gives you the ability to search for a password from Password Manager UI.
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For the full list of new features and bug fixes please refer to our changelog.
New HostBill release is ready for download! This week we’ve got for you Bancontact payment method support, new password settings, new data retention option, SSL widget for our Plesk module some further improvements to admin area navigation and more!
Password settings
In HostBill, to ensure maximum password security you can enforce your clients and staff members to set the passwords according to the pre-defined rules. You can set minimum password length and allowed/required characters. From now on, we’ve also added option to set blacklisted characters for random generated passwords. Characters set in the ‘disabled characters’ field will not be present in random generated password. To manager your password settings in HostBll go to Settings -> General Settings -> Security Settings -> Passwords.
Password settings
Automation
The GDPR regulation introduced last year by the European Union gives individuals the right to control over how their personal data is being collected, stored and used. HostBill has introduced a set of tools to help our customers comply with the regulation. Now we’re adding another option: to automatically delete terminated account after configured period.
In Settings -> Other -> GDPR -> Data Retention you now have a new option to: automatically remove terminated accounts X days since termination. If you enable this option HostBill will remove:
account billing / general data
account logs
related local vps cache data (if any)
account addons information (if any)
account relations (sub/parent relationships)
account tags
Related invoices and orders will not be removed. The account removal will be logged.
Data retention settings
Bancontact payment method
New HostBill release comes with dded support for Bancontact payment method for Buckaroo gateway. Bancontact is one of the most popular payment methods in Belgium. A payment with Bancontact is very simple for your clients. On the payment page the consumer selects Bancontact, following this a secured connection is created which lets the consumer select their bank. Following that, the consumer is directed to their trusted internet banking environment, where they can log in. In the following screen the payment can be completed. Due to the real-time connection with Buckaroo you will always be informed of the status of your transaction.
Plesk module
Plesk is a multi-functional and multi-level control panel with a wide range a features to easily manage all aspects of a hosting business. With Plesk module for HostBill you can build a complete hosting platform and give your customers the opportunity to manage all aspects of Plesk hosting directly from a single pane of glass billing interface, without the need to login separately. With the latest release we’ve added a SSL Certificate management client function. With the Plesk SSL widget you can now easily manage the domains.
Other news
We continue to improve admin area navigation. In this release we’ve added number of pages to display per listing in client-related quick-lists (services, domains, invoices, estimates, recurring invoices, orders, transactions and tickets quick-lists).
In this release we’ve also added support for importing Godaddy domains & DigitalOcean droplets! Speaking of DigitalOcean, customers can now re-use their SSH key on multiple VMs. We’ve also added the support for SSH cart form resulting auto-creating vm after order.
Some enhancements have also been added to OVH Dedicated Servers module: a selection of OS templates in the product configuration that will be available in the client area. The list of OS templates has also now been sorted.
For the full list of features added and bug fixed please see our changelog!.
Running a business in such a competing environment is no easy task. Winning customers often means providing high quality services and products with a competitve pricing. Using a standardized price list that remains the same for every customer not always works. Sometimes you need to provide tailored prices for the specific products or services a customer wants to buy. Or sometimes you simply don’t want to reveal your prices. And here’s where HostBill steps in providing you with the ability to create and send quotes, easily convert them into invoices and turn leads into deals!
In HostBill you can create quotes either manually from HostBill admin area or automatically via Order Quote plugin.
Creating Estimates in HostBill
When dealing with undecided clients, when you want to offer some extra products/services to your clients or when you want to attract customer with a personalized discount you can use HostBill estimates option (in HostBill Admin -> Payments -> Estimates) to create estimate orders for your clients.
HostBill estimates are client-specific – created for a particular client. Each estimate has its own “expiration date” – if the estimate will not be accepted or invoiced until that date it will be set to Dead status. This gives your potential customer another reason to buy – installing a sense of urgency is a path to increased conversions.
Estimate can include products/services from your portfolio as listed on your website (quickly choose from the dropdown menu) or completely new items. List out each product and service with the associated price (with all addons and components), to help your customers understand what you are providing and what they are getting. Your offer may come with a personalized discount – a fixed amount off the total price.
Not all quotes are the same – if there are any special details that your customer needs to know you can include this information in the quote in the “Public Notes” section so there is no confusion. You can also add internal, admin-only notes that will not be visible for the customer.
Creating Estimate in HostBill
The estimate can also be created from an order draft (in Orders -> Create New Order). When adding products to the order, you can quickly choose from the client’s existing products (and for example change their price) or from other products from your portfolio. You can also set discounts – fixed amount or percentage. Once you create the order draft you can turn it into an estimate simply by clicking on ‘Generate Estimate’ option.
Creating order draftGenerating Estimate from an order draft
When the estimate is ready you can either send it straight to the client or download it in a PDF format. Estimates are sent using a template (Client: Estimate email). As with every HostBill document and email template you can easily customize it, can add your brand identity elements such as logo, change fonts, colors and more.
If the estimate gets accepted by the client, you can convert it into invoice with just one click of the mouse and send the invoice to the client. Just await the payment and voila, your sale is closed!
HostBill Order quote plugin
Order Quote module is another tool to sell customized services that have unique prices per customer. Using this module you can switch order pages to a draft mode to display product/service specification and hide price information. Clients will be able configure the packages and send a quotation request to enable your sales team prepare a price offer tailored specifically to the customer individual needs.
A smooth quoting process like this one will help you land more business and work more efficiently!
New HostBill release as on every Monday brings in new set of features! This week: flavor billing improvements; new features for Password Manager, smart search, statistics and more!
Flavor billing improvements
One of multiple billing models available in HostBill is flavor billing, which allows to create pre-defined VM sizes (flavors) and set hourly price for each of them. With the newest release we’ve added support for VM power on/off pricing for Cloudstack, Openstack, Amazon EC2 and OnApp3 modules. This means that in product configuration you can enable the option to bill only for the VMs that are actually on. In our Flavor Manager we’ve also added the option to setup flavor pricing for powered down servers.
Payment gateways
In the recent release we’ve added Bancontact payment method for Buckaroo payment gateway. This week we’re adding Bunq to the list of available banks in iDEAL Buckaroo. iDEAL is the most used payment method in the Netherlands, which processes payments via e-banking environment. Buckaroo ensures smooth and secure communication between the systems of the bank, the consumer and the merchant.
Admin area
In HostBill admin area we’ve made a little improvement to our Smart search, which can now search through credit notes with custom numeration format.
A little change was introduced to HostBill Statistics. Now, the support tickets “Replies by staff” statistics shows only staff members who responded to the tickets.
Our Password Manager module was also equipped with a new feature: admin with password edit privilege can now change password ACL.
For the full list of new features and bugs fixed please refer to our changelog.
Invoicing requirements and common billing practices are different in Europe and USA or other countries. HostBill invoicing system offers a range of sophisticated options that will help you to comply with all requirements and automated tax calculations to help you run your billing operations with ease.
The main difference between invoicing in European Union is using pro-forma invoicing. Pro-forma invoice is a preliminary draft of an invoice sent to buyers in advance of a shipment or delivery of goods or services. Typically, it gives a description of the items concerned and notes the amounts to be invoiced along with other related details. For some parties, it is used as a quotation or estimate. The final invoice is generated only when the payment is received.
In HostBill you can easily switch between Default invoicing method and EU invoicing method. If you choose the EU invoicing method you will have additional billing configuration options available.
Invoicing settings in HostBill
Invoice numeration
In Default Invoicing method the invoice numbers are generated sequentially, regardless of their status while in EU Invoicing method the pro-forma invoices and paid invoices have separate numeration. You can set the invoice numeration and prefixes and you can also choose whether or not to reset invoicing numeration, and if yes when (each month or year).
Generating Final Invoice
In HostBill you can choose if you want to generate final invoice number immediately or to wait after the payment is received. If you choose to generate the invoice immediately, the invoice ID will be assigned regardless of the payment status or payment date. By default pro-forma invoice is updated to final invoice right after payment. However, you can enable “Final Invoice Delay” feature and as a result automation will wait certain number of days before updating invoices to final.
PDF Invoices
HostBill automatically generates and sends out the pro-forma invoices to your customers. You can choose if you want the pro-forma invoices to be sent in a text-only format or as a PDF attached to the email notification. The PDF invoice generated by HostBill can be either a one-page original invoice document, or consist of an original and copy of the invoice in one document (copy as a second page). You can also choose to store all the PDF invoices on your server (for later use for download). Optionally you can choose not to generate PDF invoices automatically but only on request.
VAT
Another important requirement concerns VAT numbers and rates, as all invoices in EU should contain: customer’s VAT identification number (if the customer is liable for the tax on the transaction), VAT rate applied, VAT amount payable and breakdown of VAT amount payable by VAT rate or exemption. How to handle all of this? Simple! Use our VIES VAT EU plugin – it’s a must-have for every EU business! This extremely helpful tool will allow you to check whether VAT number provided by the customer is valid based on European Commission tool: VIES (VAT Information Exchange System). If the number is valid the plugin can automatically switch-on tax exemption for the customer and apply reverse-charge note to related invoices. Invalid VAT-id entries will be automatically removed and all VAT field or tax-exempt changes will be logged, enabling you to prevent customers from your country from getting tax-exemption. Thanks to this module you can also auto-set local tax rate for B2C customers.
In HostBill you can contact your clients via a support ticket, email or text message. Now we’ve added a new feature: Client portal notifications – that will allow to notify your customers automatically/manually about events important for them by notifications in their client area.
Why use client area notifications? They are displayed in the client area dashboard and unlike emails, which we tend to get hundreds of daily, they are hard to miss. You can use them to notify your clients about important events, that may require the customer to take the action or when you want your customer to pay attention to a certain issue.
How to enable client notifications?
To turn on client portal notifications you need to go to Settings -> Other -> Client permissions -> Portal Notifications. When enabled, your customers can start receiving notifications directly in their client panel. Notifications can be created and sent manually by staff members or automatically by HostBill upon certain pre-defined events.
Once you update your HostBill to the newest version Client portal notifications are by default turned on, however the client area template code needs to be updated.
Manual client notifications
Manual notifications can be sent either from client profile or via “Notify Clients” option in admin area “Clients” menu. Both features allow to choose the preferred contact method: you can choose to contact your client either via email (Send email) or via a support ticket (Open new support ticket) or via a Portal Notification in client area (Send portal notification). The “Contact Client” section in client profile is a quick and easy way to send a message to the specific client, while the “Contact client” option in the Clients menu allows you to compose messages either to one or to multiple clients at once.
The client area notifications can also be sent automatically upon certain events in HostBill, just as email notifications. The notifications can concert certain client account, invoice, order, support tickets, service and more. HostBill comes with a list of templates (available under Settings -> Email Templates), but you can also easily create your own template. Templates are divided into groups: General, Billing, Support, Product, Domain and Custom – pre-defined templates are assigned to a particular group, which however can be changed according to your needs. To enable certain notification, choose the template and in its details click on “Post portal notification” which will trigger the notification while the related event occurs.
Sample Email/Notification template – sent once the new invoice is created.
Client Portal Notifications Log
All Portal Notifications are logged in HostBill System Logs. Portal Notifications log lists all notifications that were addressed to your clients, allowing you to inspect generated message, check their status and possible failure reason. You can filter the results by client, subject, message body text, date, type (direct or broadcast), reference type (whether the notification concerned the account, order, domain etc) and whether or not the notification has been seen.
Portal Notifications log
The notification list sent to a certain client can also be viewed directly in client portal. The logs tab now includes the list of emails and notifications sent to the client. Apart from this, the log tab also lists client activity.
Client profile logs
Notifications: Client UI
In HostBill client portal notifications are displayed in the client dashboard, under the bell icon. It shows the last 5 notifications – the unread notifications are highlighted. Clicking on the message marks the message as read. The list of all notifications is available under Account -> Notifications.
Notifications in client panel
In client area customers can set (in Settings -> Notifications) what kind of notifications they want to receive. They can choose to receive emails related to billing, support, services and domains. By default all notifications are on and displayed to the main client account. The client can also set which notifications are visible for client contacts in contact ACL. The contacts can receive notifications related to billing (concerning invoices, estimates and orders), support tickets or particular services or domains (set per each service separately).
Setting client contact privileges.
Notifications: UserAPI support
As we’ve added these new features, our UserAPI module now supports new calls to receive and acknowledge notifications. New API calls include:
Get ALL notifications to get all client notifications. It can be narrowed down to notifications related to certain type
Get NEW notifications – gets only new (unseen) notification (can be narrowed down the same way)
