4PSA Hosting Manager

[Cranky]

Hi,

I'm looking for some feedback on 4PSA Hosting Manager. Does anyone use it? What features do you feel are missing? What would you change?

Any feedback on the product would be very helpful and appreciated. We're considering offering it to our clients (rather than using it ourselves as we use HSPcomplete) depending on user feedback.

TIA

 

[poke]

Hey Cranky,
I have Master and Slave dedicated servers running Hosting Manager. With the latest release, I can't think of anything myself that needs fixing.

It's very straight forward software and the interface is nice and pretty. Also, plesk like....

The interface scripts make it easy to fetch zones from almost any control panel. I haven't had any problems, but I didn't implement it until it was perfected (since 2nd release)....

I am a 4PSA reseller and can give you a deal on the hosting manager. Let me know

Best Regards,
poke

 

[poke]

Hey Cranky,
I must have had to much to drink last night. I totally confused the Hosting Manager with the DNS Manager

I actually had the HOSTING MANAGER installed on a box and had it removed. I just didn't like it, I really don't know why. I just ordered it to try and felt like it was unnecessary for me.....

Sorry lol

 

[Redah]

I am currently testing Hosting Manager... I've gotten a temporary license key (nice folk @ 4PSA), to see if I could integrate it into for example PayPal for payments, and OpenSRS for domain registrations.

Hosting Manger in itself is... I don't know. It's not an all-in-one solution, if that's what you're expecting. You'll have to setup your own signup process, then pass that data to Hosting Manager, which will then setup the relevant items in Plesk for Linux or Plesk for Windows.

I personally expected it to be a script with templates for automatic domain registration, payment gateways and such... it's not that. So ppl would logon to the site, and they could signup, pay, and be billed by Hosting Manager. But Hosting Manager does nothing more than control templates which you can use in your own signup process.

Perhaps I'm missing the entire point of it, but for me it currently takes too much work from myself to justify $129 or whatever the price was.

Hardweb could probably give you more information on what it exactly does, instead of me saying everything it doesn't do.

 

[Cranky]

Originally posted by poke
I am a 4PSA reseller and can give you a deal on the hosting manager. Let me know

Thanks for the offer, but I think we'd be doing enough volume to make going direct the best option.

Originally posted by Redah
Hosting Manger in itself is... I don't know. It's not an all-in-one solution...

Do you know if they have any plans to improve it so that it's more of a billing solution than what it is? It just looks like a simplified API to me at the moment.

 

[Redah]

Originally posted by Cranky
Do you know if they have any plans to improve it so that it's more of a billing solution than what it is? It just looks like a simplified API to me at the moment.

I actually asked them that but didn't get a reply on that specific question (asked many questions in the e-mail correspondence), so my guess is they either overlooked it or simply do not know if this will happen in future.

But you're correct in saying it's a simplified API at the moment. Here's a quote from my e-mail correspondence:

RB> Hello,

RB> Thanks for the offer and information. I am having trouble finding any detailed information on the 4PSA website (or perhaps I am not looking hard enough), so I have some more follow up questions:

RB> Is Hosting Manager able to 'talk' with the OpenSRS/Tucows interface for domain registration? In the demo and user manual I could not find enough info on this.

Yes, it ca work with any domain registering system. You can not manage the domain in it, but if you have another application or custom script that performs the domain registration it will be able to register the domain based on its return code.

RB> But from what I understand, hosting manager should be able to register domains as well, correct?

It does not perform this functions.

RB> If I have to do this myself, do you have any indication on how hard this would be or what the steps involved are?

The application is easy to install. It's like a payment gateway. You send the output from the domain registration to Hosting Manager and it will be able to create the domain in Plesk, based on user preference.

I am currently trying to let a test install of Hosting Manager talk with the OpenSRS API and PayPal payment gateways.. but have way too little time to get things done right.

 

[Cranky]

Thanks for the information.

Do you know what the client module is for?

Edit: It seems it's not what I thought it was. It sounds to me like this has the potential to be a really great product, but at the moment it's limited to those with advanced scripting knowledge.

Perhaps they should develop modules to support popular payment or domain gateways in order to make the product popular.

 

[Redah]

Originally posted by Cranky
Do you know what the client module is for?

It's basically just a login form, the one we administrators would see in Plesk. The customer enters personal information, selects a template, and Hosting Manager sets it up in Plesk.

It's a 1 page thing... but yeah, I agree with you, add-in modules would be nice. Then I would definately be interested, now it's... well, it doesn't justify the money just yet.

Make that 1-page thing a 3 page thing (choose domain, enter personal info, make payment) and they have yet another great script in their hands. If they keep it simple as it is now (the layout/setup is really simple to use/customize), and add payment/registration modules (opensrs/tucows, paypal,god knows what), it could kick some competitor's ***.

 

[Cranky]

We evaluated Modernbill for our own use, hated it as it's far too complex compared to what is needed and seemed buggy so we wrote our own. We're now migrating to HSPcomplete for ourselves but I'd like to find a solution that we are confident offering free to our reseller, vps/dds and dedicated clients (4PSA products I have confidence in despite only using them on the odd occasion) ... maybe this will be it in a few months, but it looks like it has a long way to go unfortunately.

 

[Cranky]

I've found a solution if anyone's interested.

... I'm working with ClientExec team to create a Plesk plugin. Any suggestions of things you'd like it to do?

 

[hardweb]

If you have suggestions for Hosting Manager, you can send them to devel AT 4psa.com. Hosting Manager is build on our new PHP engine and currently implements about 30% of all the features we had in mind. The integration with other modules is coming, using the Hosting Manager API that will be available in the new version.

You are welcome to send suggestions for it.

 

[Cranky]

Do you have any plans to implement any billing systems or similar? Or will this always be essentially an enhanced API with a web interface?