Hi, I was looking at some good hosting company websites. I noticed that they have some order form that basically gets the plan set up for them and they can pay right then and there. Does anyone know where I can get this and how much it would cost?

Are you referring to an automated billing software like WHMAP (Web Host Manager Auto Pilot)?

Take a look:
http://www.whmautopilot.com/(WHMAP)
http://www.whoiscart.net/ (Whois.Cart)
http://www.modernbill.com(ModernBill)

There are a bunch of scripts. You should check out the billing and accounting forums. Some names of these scripts are: ModernBill, WHMAutopilot, Whois.Cart, and there are plenty more.

I'm really not a fan of WHMAP. We purchased an owned license of it, and have had nothing but problems with it.

It uses direct SMTP port 25 to send mail. The problem with this is, you will open your server to spammers, by opening your server to allow WHMAP to use this.

whmAP will not assist in fixing the app, in our case. They tried to blame it on the server configuration. I have to admit, we secure our servers tight, so yeah, it's our fault whmAP doesn't work. They tried to convince us that opening port 25 for any script to use is perfectly safe. After I proved that theory wrong.....they went silent.

I'm overall very disappointed with whmAP. I suppose it would be a very nice application, but you get it to work properly, then you really need to check your server security as far as your mail server is concerned.

Enough ranting my thoughts about that.

I have heard that ModernBill is nice software, but I have never had the pleasure of using it.

There is however a free alternative to all of this as well:
- phpCoin
- Nixt whmManager

You miay want to give those a try as well.

Even with the purchase of these control panels, you'll probably still need to pay someone with experience with the software to install and configure it so it works for your site and doesn't look out of place.

I find that alot of template-sites (which are unfortunately usually linked to hosting companies), have the basic striaght-forward billing software template, which often looks really awful and has no link with the actual templte site whatsoever. It sometime leads people to think that the site they are 'paying' or 'checking their account on' is not linke to your site, causing them to bugger off and go elsewhere, which is obviously what you DONT want.

For that reason, I would reccommend that you purchase a decent billing software package and then let someone with experience manage the installation and configuration.

I can reccommend that you ask on these Forums for that, or make a post on a new forum that Open-Source developers in South Africa will soon be using which is : www.LinuxOnline.za.net (go to Forums).

Regards,
~Equinox

We have been using modernbill for years now and have been very happy with it. It's constantly being upgraded with new features. A little hard to setup but once it's set your good to go.

We're actually trying out ModernBill, doing the 30 day demo - had it for two days and already know we're going to purchase it.

Wow thanks for the suggestions guys. I think im going to go for the modern bill.

I have tried modernbill and found it too bulky for my purpose. I later tried a few more and finally settled with clientexec. You may want to check them out.

phpcoin was just added to Fantastico, so we just started using it (we like to use the same scripts we offer our clients so they can get a feel for them). I really like it a lot. Check it out http://phpcoin.com