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No matter what kind of online business you're operating you will need a billing solution to charge your clients, your clients will also need an interface to manage their account stuff. Here I'd like to talk about the most popular billing softwares used in web hosting and find out which is most suitable to your business.

TOP web hosting billing softwares

Actually there're many outstanding billing softwares developed by smart programmers. Here're 3 of the most popular ones on the market: ClientExec, Hostbill, Whmcs.

ClientExec — It's a Linux based commercial billing solution and is developed by NEWEDGE Services, Inc. Basically, this software has included all common hosting billing tasks modules/plugins such as domain registration, payment gateway integration and fraud protection etc, you can also integrate clientexec to many third party technologies

ClientExec official site: www.clientexec.com
ClientExec online demo: http://www.clientexec.com/demo.html

Hostbill — Hostbill is a simple and powerful billing solution for web hosting companies, Administrators be able to manage clients, billing and support in one place from anywhere in the world. The most outstanding advantages with hostbill is everything is being processed automatically from pre-configurations.

Hostbill Official site: www.hostbillapp.com
Hostbill online demo: http://hostbillapp.com/demo

WHMCS — WHMCS is by far the most popular billing solution on the market and accepted by most web hosting companies. WHMCS is featured for secure and max compatability for most control panels. To learn more about whmcs you can visit this whmcs hosting posting.

WHMCS official site: www.whmcs.com
WHMCS online demo: http://whmcs.com/demo.php

ClientExec vs Hostbill vs Whmcs

Since all the three softwares are highly rated, which is actually better from user feedbacks? Let's check out this table list first about their features

As you see, ClientExec and whmcs are almost the same price structure as well as technical parts, however clientexec is only working for linux services while whmcs is compatible with both linux & windows. the hostbill is working with both OS but has to be paid anually which might not be good solution for small companies. From all aspects comparison, whmcs would be better choice no matter if you're running a small hosting company or large business.

Hosting control panel doesn't require separate billing software

If you searched around the web, most hosting service are cpanel based and always need separate billing system to manage your account profiles. Is there an all-in-one solution for all about this? Yes there is, Vdeck is the best one where you can manage web hosting, billing and domain registration etc under the same interface. However since it's still an inhoused product, you can't purchase it anywhere, if you would like to sign up Vdeck hosting plan you can consider Fatcow or iPage since they're the leading name for this product.

Go to http://www.fatcow.com for hosting details
Visit http://www.ipage.com for vdeck hosting plan

Payment Gateway Introduction

Before we introduce the most popular payment gateway used by web hosting companyes, we need to understand what payment gateway is. Payment gateway is a type of service which is used to handle online payment. as long as you would like to sell or purchase something online you will need payment gateway to receive money.

Popular web hosting payment gateways

Web hosting has no difference like many online business so the payment gateways solutions are more or less the same, Here I'll list out some most popular names and compare which is used more for both security and convenience.

• Paypal — Paypal is absolutely the most popular payment gateway solution for online business. It's easy to get and easy to integrate with your website shopping cart. The most important is you can withdraw money if you find a doubted transaction, this definitely protects both the seller and their clients. Till present paypal has been serving in most countries and districts in the world, it's the leading online payment service which is liked by most people. The only disadvantage with paypal is the high transaction fee.
• 2Checkout — It's another online payment solution for your shopping cart, it's working in various ways and compatible with many credit cards such as Visa, America Express, Master Card etc. It also claims to deliver turn-key payment services. If you're going to accept credit card payment from shopping cart, 2Checkout is perfect solution. The disadvantage with this gateway is the complex for setup.
• Powerpay — This payment solution allows you to choose what kind of service you will like to integrate on website and the fee will be different, thus if you're running a small business you don't have to sign up for the large term service in order to save money. The only disadvantage is the monthly fee with this service.

Of course there're many other online payment gateways such as autherize.net, moneyorder, worldpay. Depends you technologies and budget you can integrate any of them to your shopping cart. But as long as you like to accept credit card payment you will always need a merchant account to accept payment.

Which payment gateway liked most by people?

Of course, paypal is most popular one according to user experience over the world. Since it's purposely to protect shopper's money, you never worry the payment goes wrong because you can always get it back. Also because of the easy to integrate solution, paypal is not only used by web hosting or other large business operators but also used by 100% personal ecommerce sites. For opensourced ecommerce CMS, paypal is default option for online transaction.

Any other payment gateway gaining popularity?

Yes there is, Alipay is the most competitive one in the world. Alipay is developed by a Chinese company — Alibaba, it's currently mostly used in China. But since China is the largest market, more and more international companies are doing business over there so a good Chinese payment solution is needed. Alipay is by far the most popular one and integrated with 100% Chinese ecommerce websites. For web hosting companies who like to get Chinese customers they may also consider to add this gateway.

Which web hosting company offers Alipay gateway?

By far, only two large web hosting companies have integrated this gateway solution — Godaddy and Ixwebhosting.

Godaddy is standing as the largest domain registrar in the world and serving a large amount Chinese Clients, it's normal for them to add Alipay to their website, If you check godaddy official site, alipay is listed there clearly to approve they're caring about their business in China.

Visit http://www.Godaddy.com for details >>

Ixwebhosting is also loved by Chinese customer for IP issues, several biggest websites in China are currently hosted on Ixwebhosting server. The best of the best with Ixwbehosting service is they could offer merchant account service which is not available with other web hosting.  So if you're looking for perfect ecommerce solution, ixwebhosting is highly recommended.

Visit http://www.ixwebhosting.com for details >>

Just a while ago, the cpanel Inc released their windows hosting control panel – Enkompass. Due to the popularity of cpanel control panel, this new product announced hot discussion on the internet and many people or groups are ready to try it out. So is Enkompass good? What's actually included with this release?

How does the Enkompass look like?

Since the enkompass is developed by Cpanel group, they still use the cpanel theme for user friendly purpose. The functions, navigation etc are much the same like you have experienced in cpanel control panel. As you see on the right picture, you might think it's just cpanel at the first look.

The purpose of enkompass is to offer windows hosting providers the best control panel solution with powerful management over all services with the least effort.

What's actually included from Enkompass?

As enkompass is developed for windows hosting specially, it fully integrated with windows server technologies side by side, the most new feature with this product is it's working with Windows Active Directory. With Enkompass you can complete the following tasks.

• Multiple Servers Management – Enkompass is designed to be used in a distributed server environment. This means that one or more Enkompass server(s) will be able to manage many web servers across a Windows domain, allowing for easy automation and maintenance of a set of servers — up to an entire data center.
• Database Management – With Enkompass you can manage both Mysql and Sql server database creation, backup and restoration. Latest Mysql and SQL server are supported for default.
• Email management – The best of the best is Enkompass integrated the management of Smartermail — the leader of windows mail server. Except for Smartermail, you also have the option to use mailEnable which is optional choice according to your experience.
• Reseller Management – Enkompass is developed based on Active Directory, user information and reseller privileges are safely stored with scalability in mind. The reseller structure includes multi-level reselling; in other words, resellers can sell to resellers.

What's Good of Enkompass?

The user friendly design is absolutely the best of this product. With the same interface of cpanel, you don't have to learn everything from scratch and you'll be able to manage the hosting product professionally. Enkompass is designed with the latest technologies based on the group's 10-year-experience in cpanel development. So the security would be enhanced comparing to other hosting control panels.

The goal of enkompass is to earn the windows hosting marketing and replace the most control panel products by offering leading solutions and support.

What's the disadvantage of Enkompass?

Like most new softwares, Enkompass is not verified yet by the industry. that means no much experience can be found about how to optimize the product for best use. Because of this, enkompass is not introduced to most windows hosting providers yet. There would be a long journey to go if enkompass like to be as famous as cpanel.

Enkompass works with windows active directory, means it's not choice for single server purpose. Based it's complex structure and setup procedures, webmasters will not take the efforts in using this software. Also, more and more hosting companies are using cloud system for best performance and uptime, the enkompass has to be improved a lot to work with this service.

Best Enkompass Hosting Provider?

After reading above explanation, most web hosting providers have not introduced enkompass to their hosting plans yet for it's newness. Because of the new (new born and new technology) and use of AD, enkompass might not be affordable for personal use purpose. From enkompass release newsletter, it's only good for dedicated server, that means you have to pay a lot in order to try out this product.

UPDATE: Enkompass already offered for free and cPanel inc stopped further development to it.

What to Use Beside Enkompass?

Since enkompass is not affordable for personal use and not introduced to most hosting companies yet, the best existing choice would be Dotnetpanel (WebsitePanel) which is an open sourced producted and always get improved by a large communites. So before enkompass get approved by a number of hosting companies, dotnetpanel is definitely the best choice.

Who's the best dotnetpanel (websitepanel) hosting provider? With our years' hosting experience and user feedbacks, Arvixe.com is the top one we recommend to our clients. By hosting your website with arvixe windows plan you get following hosting features

• Free Domain name registration and multiple domains hosting
• Free SQL Server database and Mysql support
• 24 x 7 professional US support
• Up to 60 days money back guarantee and 99% uptime guaranee!

Beside WSP, Plesk is by far the best paid control panel software with it's reliability and secure design. For very a long time, plesk is considered the windows hosting standard offer. If you need plesk support for your windows server, hostgator is absolutely the best choice today. Hostgator windows hosting fully utilize the windows server 2008 R2 advantages with leading performance.

Visit http://www.HostGator.com for windows hosting features

Hosting Ccontrol Panel Overview

Hosting control panel is the system used to manage your web hosting account such as website management, database management, domain management, email management etc. It also helps system admin configure the server properly in short time. For web hosting provider, hosting control panel is a must to provider qualifying hosting service.

TOP Hosting Control Panels

cpanel, Plesk, Dotnetpanel and Directadmin are the industry leaders till present. When people search for a qualifying web hosting service provider, the four names are always included in their concern because it will save your time to put up your website quickly.

TOP Free Hosting Control Panel Softwares

Yes absolutely, since the paid control panel softwares are mostly used for live hosting services, it's not the ideal choice for personal use for it's complexy and high price. Here I'll introduce four free hosting control panel, they're user friendly and pretty powerful to manage your server system. No matter if you want to use for local environment or live server, they will be the right choice if you would like to save money.

A. VHCS — VHCS is open source control panel for Linux based server management. VHCS manage Web, Mail (POP and/or IMAP), FTP, DNS, Databas, Quota, Traffic and offers graphic user interfaces for the administrators, resellers and domain owners.

VHCS is recognized as free version Cpanel on the web and by far the highest rated free hosting control panel.

VHCS Official site: http://vhcs.net

B. ISPConfig — ISPConfig is an open source hosting control panel for Linux. ISPconfig is capable of managing multiple servers from one control panel. ISPConfig is licensed under BSD license. Based on free software, ISPConfig design has all basic functions included such as Http service, DNS service, Mysql service and SSL service and more which is required for hosting account management. You can also configure ISPConfig for Administrator, Reseller and regular users which will be functional perfectly.

ISPConfig Official site: http://www.ispconfig.org/
ISPConfig Online demo: http://www.ispconfig.org/ispconfig-3/online-demo/

C. Kloxo — Kloxo (formerly known as Lxadmin) is a free, opensource[1] web hosting control panel for the Red Hat and CentOS Linux distributions. Kloxo allows the host administrators to run a combination of lighttpd or Apache with djbdns or bind, and provides a graphical interface to switch between these programs without losing data. Kloxo Enterprise can transparently move web/mail/dns from one server running Apache to another running lighttpd. It is also known as a good free alternative to cPanel hosting control panel.

For Kloxo powerful management and User friendly design, it's included as free add-on service for many VPS or dedicated Hosting service providers.

Kloxo Official site: http://lxcenter.org/software/kloxo
Kloxo online demo: http://demo.kloxo.com:7778/

D. Dotnetpanel — Dotnetpanel (Websitepanel) is a line-of-business application and the benefits of using an open source development model as a more agile and flexible way to meet the growing needs of the web hosting community. dotnetpanel is the only high rated asp.net hosting control panel. If you are dealing with a windows server, dotnetpanel is your best choice.

Dotnetpanel was started as commercial release for web hosting companies. As for it's fast development and their team wish more great ideas to be added, in year 2009 they revised the DotNetPanel codebase and posted that new code under the new name “WebsitePanel” to SourceForge.NET as an open source project. you're welcomed to download dotnetpanel freely and install as many times are you like.

Dotnetpanel Official site: http://www.dotnetpanel.com/
Dotnetpanel Knowledge base: http://help.dotnetpanel.com/

E. Zpanel — ZPanel is a free and complete web hosting control panel written in PHP scripting. Zpanel is compatible for Microsoft Windows and Linux as well as MacOSX servers. It's available as a small installer that can be setup in few minutes by anyone. With only few clicks or commands you will get a light weight but very powerful hosting control panel for managing over all hosting services like Web server/FTP server/Database and all common tasks. Learn more about zpanel at this zpanel review page.

zpanel official page: http://www.zpanelcp.com

VHCS vs ISPConfig vs Kloxo vs Dotnetpanel vs Zpanel

After reading the documentations and user feedbacks, VHCS would be the best if you're going to offer hosting service to other people since it has everything included in order to launch live business and it has great support if you got into any problem, there're thousands of vonlenteers on the web to troubleshoot VHCS related problems.

ISPConfig is really only suitable for personal use for it's simple design.

As for Kloxo, it's great but it has 48 domains limitation for free version license. If you need to host more domains you have to purchase the unlimited domains license. If you're going to offer services to people, a paid version is must required in order to promote your business.

As for Dotnetpanel, it's completely asp.net based and 100% right choice for windows hosting, it's by far the top rated hosting control panel for both commercial and personal use purpose. Especially when their team put it as an open source project, the dotnetpanel users are growing rapidly among the competitors.

Zpanel is completely different from all above softwares. Zpanel can be installed on multiple server platforms according to your management skills. As we see from the software market, most are designed for linux and very few ones are designed for windows OS. Zpanel is outstanding there for it's across-platform compatibility and small size.

Conclusion: The above solutions are designed for different purpose. To determine which control panel is the best really depends your actual needs. After reading the comparison above we should know which one will be suitable for our plans.