Feedback Upmind - Enhance: Page 3 - Enhance Control Panel

Feedback Upmind - Enhance

Mason

I'd much rather see the Enhance team's resources go towards the hosting aspects as they've been doing well there. Once you throw billing into the mix - even just a basic integration - that becomes a whole thing on its own with bugs, support tickets, feature requests, etc. It would slow development for things that matter.

I really do wish a good billing software existed though. I'm having to build an entire billing system from scratch to accomplish what I need. But that frees me from the headaches WHMCS has given me over the years.

Adrien

Mason Would you mind sharing briefly what were your let's say 3 biggest headaches using WHMCS? This will help me anticipate 🙂 Thank you.

JohnB

Mason That's a very good point about the support and everything. I'm curious about your from scratch billing system. Can you share more details?

I have hated Upmind and WHMCS for a long time. In my opinion all the billing systems are WAY too complicated and I have played with the idea of building a SIMPLE billing system for SMALL hosts but ultimately the quirky integrations with all the panels stops me. Integration with the payment processors and UI design is the easy part.

manu

It would be great if Enhance focusses on the hosting features first being a good hosting panel should I believe be the first goal. A lot of things like NodeJS support, WAF, Git etc are missing.

mendozal

Machiel92 Upmind recently updated their stripe integration to support rendering the credit card fields using Stripe JS, so you can enable Link, and other payment methods.

Adrien

JohnB Thanks for your message. I eventually went the WHMCS route and so far so good.
I gave up on Stripe integration for the time being.

MediaServe

Adrien You didn't ask me but I'll give you three!

New ownership raised prices 1100% (from lifetime purchased license, yeah right!, with $99/yr upgrade protection to $99/mo.
Years ago WHMCS added multiple payment methods, promised to develop it more so that clients could pay one service automatically from one card and another service from a different card automatically, but it never materialized. All you have is the ability to add secondary payment methods that are only available for manual invoice payments.
WHMCS provides OpenID support, but they provide NO support for it. I tried to connect the MiniOrange Joomla component with WHMCS and they refused any assistance, to the point they wouldn't even provide me the proper oAuth scope that should work. They're a bunch of shifty bastards IMO.

We still use it but at the first good opportunity I'll ditch that pile of shit and replace it with something better.

Mason

Adrien

It's a black box with a horrible API
It does not innovate or advance in almost any way [since Webpros bought it]
Adding functionality or making it look good involves purchasing a lot of expensive modules with yearly renewals

JohnB

The new direction we're taking would be very hard to accomplish with WHMCS - it would involve extensive modifications or a bunch of modules mashed together (which significantly reduce the stability & UX). We're building a unified system to handle billing, hosting, and other offerings. It just makes much more sense for us to build it from the ground up than try to make these neglected legacy tools work with modern features.

I really wanted Upmind to be good - they had a chance to start from scratch and seem to be fumbling a bit from what I'm reading here. But they're young and not owned by Webpros so my outlook for them is much more positive than WHMCS. But that doesn't help us right now - so custom it is.

Adrien

Thanks a lot @MediaServe @Mason for your interesting feedback.

From my side the biggest issue I am facing with WHMCS/Upmind and Enhance is handling server location provisioning.
I think Enhance team should add into their roadmap the ability to choose, in a simple way, a server location when clients purchase a package. If you still want to handle mutiple locations it's a total nightmare and you need to create so many packages in Enhance. It's not feasible as it is and leads to so much complexity.

I don't know how you guys go about server locations in your automated provisioning. This is holding back now.

PS: overall I def prefer WHMCS over Upmind because it is:

self hosted
Like WordPress super easy to customize
Upmind has recently become slow in page loading time (8s when you login - I've just tested on Enhance - i'm based in Switzerland)

So in this testing phase, I'd be curious to try Clientexec but they do not integrate yet with Enhance and they keep delaying V7.

I feel all these companies took a big hit post COVID. Things are super delayed.

Mason

Adrien

I have no idea if this would be compatible/feasible with Enhance (I don't have it connected to WHMCS) but I previously used this to manage multiple locations for Plesk servers: https://www.modulesgarden.com/products/whmcs/server-allocator

Modules Garden has 7 day trials on everything, though I'd recommend trialing things on a dev environment as to not muddy up your prod database.

Adam

With legacy panels, the billing system has to provision the website to a single server and therefore it needs to know the customer's chosen location.

With Enhance, this is set on a package level. You would therefore just need to create a package in Enhance with the correct server group containing servers for that location. I.e your package "UK hosting" might provision to a server group called "London 1".

We're expanding this functionality to allow hosting companies to offer multiple server groups on one package so the customer can choose at the point of website creation.

If you want to avoid creating additional plans in WHMCS, it might be that you can create product variants/configurable options, if there is some way to override the packageId.

Adrien

Adam Hello Adam, Thank you for you reply. I have some remarks:

Adam If you want to avoid creating additional plans in WHMCS, it might be that you can create product variants/configurable options, if there is some way to override the packageId.

With WHMCS, if you want to provision based on Configurable options, you will need to buy this add on: https://marketplace.whmcs.com/product/30-configurable-package-addon
Unfortunately it is only compatible with cPanel or DirectAdmin.

Adam With Enhance, this is set on a package level. You would therefore just need to create a package in Enhance with the correct server group containing servers for that location. I.e your package "UK hosting" might provision to a server group called "London 1".

This will be amazing and solve all the challenge of handling diff locations. Since it is not showing in the roadmap, would you mind sharing a rough deadline?
For the time being, we can do this manually.

Aliysa_Enhance

Adrien I think what you're looking for is "Package support for multiple sever groups with user ability to select server location" which is roadmapped for October. With the delay this is more likely to be released in Nov/Dec.

Adrien

Aliysa_Enhance Fantastic! Thank you Aliysa.

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