It’s been a week – so time for another updrade from HostBill team!
Lets take a glimpse of today-released, all new, HostBill 3.1.4:

Further OnApp improvements

Our already great integration with OnApp Cloud just get better! Your client will now have access to new backup-related features, including:

Backup->Template conversion
If you offer cloud/vps backup space, you can now add them ability to convert their backups into re-usable OS Templates from HostBill interface with just few mouse-cliks – simple as that!

Backup Schedule
If you enable Schedules in related OnApp user roles your clients will see new option in their clientarea interface – Schedule Backup. With this option your customers will be able to manage their automated backup schedules, allowing them to create daily/weekly/monthly/yearly backups.

New ticket department permissions

Now you can use additional settings in your Ticket departments including:
- Allowing staff member to reply using email
- Prevent customers from closing ticket opened by staff member
- Prevent customers from re-open ticket closed by staff member

Of course there is lot more in new version For full list of changes/fixes go to hostbillapp.com/changelog/

I’d like to take the opportunity and wish our valued customers and friends Happy Holidays and a New Year from HostBill team. Its been amazing year for us, full of great integrations, major HostBill improvements and number of great new customers to work with.
See you in 2012!

A lot has changed since last post on this blog – our development yet again gained momentum and we’ve introduced number of cool new features in HostBill. Lets take a quick tour of whats new in HostBill:

Invoice templates

Everything is marketing – even invoices sent to customers. Make sure your invoices will stand out! With new HostBill feature – invoice templates – customizing your HTML & PDF invoices sent from HostBill is really simple! Just use built-in editor to create your own, professional looking invoice, and impress your customers! No programming skills & file edits required! Learn more here

Translation tags

Now HostBill is first and only, 100% Multilingual billing system! Each aspect can be translated to your customer native language – product names, email templates, registration fields, form elements, news, knowledgebase & much more! With easy to use translation tags you can generate tag, that will be replaced with value in visitor language – simple as that! Learn more here

PowerDNS integration

PowerDNS is best Open Source solution for Managed DNS hosting available. Now with our feature-rich integration you can give your clients ability to manage their DNS records in fast and user-friendly way trough billing system interface. Learn more about this integration at PowerDNS Feature page

OnApp module re-built

Our integration with OnApp is already known as best-one available, we’ve decided to make it even better by introducing fresh clientarea template & set of brand new features. Make sure to check our OnApp feature page to learn more about recent improvements.

Want to build module for HostBill? Not a problem!

We’ve been working recently on DevKits, documentation and examples so you can integrate virtually anything with HostBill now!

Whats possible?

- Hosting/App/Provisioning modules

- Connecting forms with provisioning modules

- Payment Gateways

- Plugins

- Using API

- Domain Registrars

- Custom Product Types (work in progress)

Stay tuned for next updates – I’m off  trying to hook up coffee machine API with HostBill

Kris

HostBill users recently reported issue with OnApp 2.1RC4 module.

Problem:
When creating billing plan using API its not possible to create machine as client, as OnApp throws HTTP500 + bad response error.

Solution:
We’ve created patch for OnApp Full-Featured module 2.1. To apply it please download your copy of module again from our clientarea, and extract archive contents
in main HostBill directory.

Patch drawbacks:
This patch hard-codes clients’ cpu-shares to unlimited (its not setting cpu-shares limit in OnApp), and for new machines created from HostBill clientarea it sets cpu-share to 1, despite of slider settings.

Please note:
This is temporary patch, once OnApp will fix this bug with next RC/Stable version we will upload regular version of module with working CPU-Shares limit.

…has just been released. Make sure to check out new features

Stay tuned for next updates – version 2.2 will be released later today! What to expect from new version? Major cPanel focus! Just take a look how your shared hosting client section might look like:

What else to expect? Mmake sure to check http://extras.hostbillapp.com/ as using it we will inform you about new contributions for HostBill – there are just dozens of tasks in hosting industry that we’re going to automate with HostBill! Make sure to subscribe for future updates.

It’s been 3 hard working weeks since last version was announced and its about time to release brand new, shiny HostBill version 2.1!

Don’t waste time and check out what’s its all about:

Quick Tour: http://hostbillapp.com/2/index2.1.html

Release Info: http://forum.hostbillapp.com/showthread.php?t=554

Order Now: http://hostbillapp.com/order/

Read all entry »

New Order Pages:
1. Dedicated Servers – Please stop looking like a company from 1999. Please STOP!
2. Collocation – Allow clients to customize Rack Unit, Amps, Network Port and more.
3. Bulk domain registration – Add several domains to a single order.
4. OnApp – First commercial Cloud platform. Now you can compete with big companies too!
5. One Step Order Page – Quick and attractive order page.

See all details at: http://hostbillapp.com/2/index.html

Improvements:
New Domain Management, Pricing Groups
Client Area – New look and feel
Email templates – new look and great functionality
…and much much more!
See Demo of new version: http://demo.hostbillapp.com

New Domain Registrars:
NicDirect
RegDom
IntaServe
dotTK
co.za registrar

New Hosting Modules:
VMWare
ResellerClub Hosting
OnApp

New Payment Modules:
Dineromail
iDeal
USA ePay
iTransact
Amazon Payment
SMSWS

Itʼs the end of the month, so itʼs time for a new HostBill – version 1.4.6 is out and available to download. Introducing Admin Privileges, Ticket improvements, Free domains, PDF Config,  MoIP, QBMS, BrainTreePaymentSolutions payment gateways, Nominet, ISPConfig 3 and many other integrated third party modules. Go ahead and check out the new version now!

Weʼre like you – every day we work our way through hundreds of tickets, processing orders and managing accounts. Aside from development, we perform many repetitive tasks just like you, and weʼre always looking for ways of making these tasks easier:

- Why two clicks instead of one?

- Why have to scroll down instead of seeing everything in one place?

- Why travel miles with the mouse pointer?

You wonʼt be asking yourself any such questions when working with HostBill!

We spend hours every day, working out the best user experience. For example, I was arguing with Kris B. about a small 16×16 icon for an hour yesterday! A stupid icon that most users wouldnʼt care about – so why do we care? Because you will see this icon a hundred times every day, and to have it fit in, it needs to have purpose; it cannot be randomly picked.

Note that some of the features presented below will be released within 1–2 weeks in an update; others features are already implemented.

Letʼs go through some random little things that make a difference.

1. You wonʼt normally edit automatically-generated invoice item names, so what is the point of having N-input boxes? In HostBill you will see:

- OK, but what if I do need to edit it? Not a problem! What would your natural behavior be? You would hover over Description in order to find out if itʼs editable:- And guess what? It is! So, letʼs click on edit: Read all entry »