In the last week of 2023 we’re not publishing a release (no need to worry, you’ll be surprised to see how many we released this year!) Instead, we’re publishing the summary of the whole year – it’s time to reveal the numbers, show off the achievements and reflect on the future!

2023 in numbers

At HostBill we always focus on our weekly release cycle, delivering new functionalities and bug fixes to our clients every week. But in 2023 the number of releases was way higher than the number of the weeks in a year – we published 65 releases, which gives us 1.25 releases per week!

It was quite a busy year and we are proud to say that we introduced more new features than the previous year – 503 (compared to 441 in 2022) and 75 additional changes. Bug fixes also kept our Team occupied, resulting in 1052 bug fixes this year! When it comes to the modules we launched 17 new integrations. Rest assured – we had no plans of stopping – only speeding up in 2024!

New integrations

Among new integrations you’ll find 5 new provisioning modules: Enhance and SPanel to sell Shared Hosting, Xolphin for SSL resellers, VMManager VPS Hosting module and OPSSHIELD License reseller integration. There are 6 new payment gateways, including 1 crypto-currency (Cryptomus, NowPayments, PayNow, CH DataTrans, Przelewy24, Bambora Checkout Token) and 4 new domain registrars: ConnectReseller, Bnamed, ResellerInterface and Virtualname.es). We also launched the PostalServer Mail transactional email plugin and Maxitel mobile notification plugin.

New features

With such a huge number of new features introduced to HostBill this year it’s hard to list them all, but there are definitely some worth mentioning. We’re definitely proud of the new Hybrid billing model – a mix of pre-paid orders with post-paid upgrades. Billing is one of the most important elements of HostBill and the new billing model helps to cover any possible billing requirements to meet your specific business needs. 

Another important aspect of HostBill is flexible product configuration. We have some quite big news in this area as well: quantity-based products and products with a 0.00 base price with monthly pricing from Form fields. For products we also added a new order type – Internet Services and custom product expiration notifications. There is a new coupon type in Promotions and the possibility to define discount expiration date and set up discount expiration notifications. Custom discounts can now also be set in Order Drafts!

If talking about products, we also need to mention HostBill Forms. This year we added (among others) admin only description to Form fields, ability to specify the form logic per item, new configuration option to decide whether fields should be shown in invoice and the ability to restrict access to non-billable Form fields.

When it comes to pricing, billing and invoicing, now in HostBill you can send $0 total invoices and convert the order draft into a free order. We added options to fast multiply pricing cycles in admin panel and recalculate account prices on changing billing cycles. There is also a new Public access setting for Estimates.

This year there were multiple improvements in the Ticketing System: new ticket types (project, delivery, billing), ticket filters based on registration fields, “Moderate” department notifications, ability to make all new tickets internal, new options in Ticket Notifications and many more.

Admin panel has a few new widgets and plugins: Staff Online, which shows staff online, their usernames, gravatars and IPs, Client IP Whitelist Management plugin, “Warn about first order” module and Stripe, Coinpayments and Mollie balance widgets.  RSS feed & News now have multi-language support and Downloads allow to create multi-level categories. A few new ACL (staff privileges) and notifications were added. For Client Management we introduced internal client statuses, ability to merge client profiles and the feature called Client Service Groups.

Quite a lot of new features concern DNS: we added support for LUA records, ability to make the DNS template Private, DNS Templates can now be assigned to clients and products, ree subdomain A-record autocreate, define Subdomain creation rules, to auto-add A/AAAA records to allowed DNS zones and more. Additionally, All DNS modules now support quotas/metrics features, allowing to bill for the amount of active zones and trigger automation actions based on it.

Let’s not forget the modules and plugins updates. Affiliate System update featured private affiliate campaigns, selecting commission plans manually or automatically and the ability to set more than 100% commission rate. MultiBrand update allows to set a different set of registration fields for each brand and set access for staff members per brand. In Customer Rewards you can now reward customers with a free product, additionally, each reward can be applied automatically or manually. That’s just to name a few, but it’s best to browse the changelog of each of the module to follow the changes.

Last but not least this year we also launched new API docs & Hooks docs pages.

As you can see – we put a lot of effort and hard work to deliver the best solutions and improvements and keep the wheel of innovation spinning. And we promise to continue doing so in the next year. If you have any suggestions for what to add and what to change – let us know in the comments!