By Travis Whidden on 1/26/2008 1:38 AM

Well, I have been quite pleased with ModernBill lately.  There are still some quirks.. but overall I am very pleased.  It has handled our business the way we have expected.  Now, the hardest part is to get all of our customers moved.  Our old billing system is so screwed up, that its hard not to have Garbage in, Garbage out.  I am waiting on a new release of their software which will include some long needed fixes.  They still have problems with Plesk and creating 2 or more accounts for one user.  I have done a lot of complaining about it, but we are not very pleased with Plesk anyways, so we may dump it. We noticed that hostgator is running an older version of the software (4.x) and we are running 5.x.  That made us happy to see that a major competitor to us is using software that has been "questionable" at times.   I am hoping that this will continue to become a solid product over the years, as we are making a considerable commitment to use it and move all of our customers into it. Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 8/12/2007 10:56 AM

Just reported this new bug to ModernBill about a bug that I found. If you register a domain say for 2 or 3 years and pay for it via their interface.  The cycle and everything gets set correctly within MB, but the registrar only gets one year added.  I reported it, and I hope they find a solution fast.

Other then that.. MB has been dong very well for us. We have been holding out upgrading to 5.2 because they are having a few problems with it.

By Travis Whidden on 6/12/2007 11:50 AM

Even though I get frustrated at some of the kinks I run into, I am just so impressed with how MB is setup. It really will revolutionize our business.  I just did a simple transfer of an existing package in the system to another customer, and it even confirmed with me what billing account to use for it.  My grade keeps moving up for it.  Their support team, though slow sometimes, almost always comes through for me. 

By Travis Whidden on 6/10/2007 11:32 PM

The latest version of ModernBill was a nightmare.  After updating it, it actually broke my creation of Plesk accounts. I reported it immediately and I got a fix for it the following day.

There are some other issues that I have noticed such as all new customers now get text emails instead of HTML, and there are some smarty template errors that seem to be happening.  I have bugs out on all of these.

I almost wish I did not updated this code base.  I really don’t think they do a deep QA check, and their customers are their QA team.  There are some superstars I feel over at MB.  Kris, Ben, Andy and a couple others.  They have been very good at responding to my emails. 

I think MB is a great product, but I recommend it to anyone who can be patient with support and upgrades that may do things you don’t like.  I just upgraded to their 10,000 user license, and they don’t even have a way to provision them and had to create my license key manually.  Ouch.

I am at the point where my product rating is about a middle C. I see progress each time though, so I expect in a few months I will see a “B” rating.

By Travis Whidden on 5/29/2007 1:56 PM

Well today I spent the morning updating my server with the latest version of ModernBill (5.1.7.0).  I had to do this because when I started to import a couple customers and update their billing, a major problem would occur. The problem was that a client ID for a customer would be updated and given a new one when  you added a new payment account. Ouch.  Thank god I only did a couple of them and called their support line.

Anyhow after a few manual SQL calls to fix the problems we updated the software and it appears to be working ok now.

By Travis Whidden on 5/25/2007 6:23 PM

When an existing user goes to order a new domain name from the system, a small non-critical bug occurs.  When they click "login" right before they check out, the Primary Contact Information will be populated correctly including the Service Username and Service Password, but the Confirm Password field is not filled in. 

By Travis Whidden on 5/25/2007 6:15 PM

You might be asking... "Why does this guy write about ModernBill. What the heck is it and why do I care?"

Well, the most likely answer is: You don’t need to know and you should not care unless you use it yourself.

I am currently running a web hosting company in Reno Nevada. We have 10,000 customers and we use the oldest and slowest billing system known to man (Quick Books).  When we took over the company, we realized that we were not going to make it with 3 billing guys and a completely manual process for our admins and even the customers.

We decided to research the correct billing system that would scale with our business and we could extend on with our own systems.  We evaluated Tucows Platypus and ModernGigabyte ModernBill software package.  There were several others out there, but these two were the ones that actually responded and acted on our phone calls and gave us a great demo.

Over the last few weeks, I have been preparing our systems so we can make a smooth transition to the ModernBill System.  I attended a workshop in Kentucky and learned a lot about what they have to offer.

This blog will talk about my experiences during the ModernBill migration.  I will have tips and tricks, along with bugs (associated to a version number) and anything else I find interesting.