WHMCS

WHMCS, also known as WHMCompleteSolution, is a commercial billing automation software program which is developed by WHMCS Ltd. It is an all in one, client management, billing & support solution for online businesses. It handles everything from signup to termination. It is a great business automation tool that puts you in control. It is easy to use because of its intuitive design. It has a simple setup and has a free ticket support which is available 24 hours a day. It imposes automatic bans if repeated login failure attempts are detected. It is designed to be easily extendable and customisable.

WHMCS is the best Web Hosting Billing and Automation Platform in the world. It provides everything that is needed to sell web hosting and related services with high levels of automation. It is a complete solution for web hosts. You can customise your system according to your needs, by a flexible and powerful templating engine and also many other built-in options. It is mobile friendly due to a responsive front end UI, i.e. customers are able to access, manage and place orders by their mobiles, desktop or tablet.

The products are backup with a Security Bounty Program increasing the security of them. In the starting, WHMCS was designed to integrate only with WHM and cPanel, but now it support a wide range of control panels, payment gateways, and other third party software. The license for it starts at $15.95 per month and it comes with a no questions asked 30-day money back guarantee. Licenses include update access and one year of support with the initial purchase, which can be renewed, if you want, at a cost of $59.95 per six months.

With it, your clients do not even need to visit your site for viewing their bills, as you can send them high quality professional looking invoices. Every invoice related email that WHMCS sends, has PDF versions attached with it. It contains invoice notifications and also payment reminder notices. You can bill and invoice your customers in as many different currencies as you want, and that too at the same time. Taking payments become easier with it as it is integrated with over 75 different payment gateways. It uses minimal server resources and is fully optimised, i.e. it is quick and efficient.

You can create custom pages to add additional info and functionality to both the client and admin areas. WHMCS comes with a great stand-alone portal look and you can integrate it as much as you want. You can change anything that a client sees by customising WHMCS through Templated Client Area. It has multiple languages with 10 translations included, which gives you a very friendly client area and order system. It provides you with statistical reports. You can have as much automation as you want like the automated setup, welcome emails, password change, upgrades, suspensions, etc. WHMCS is all about automation and integration, bringing together all the services you use into an easy to use combined single interface. It also features automatic invoicing, transaction logging, payment processing, payment reminders and cancellations/refunds. It has an integrated domain management functionality that lets your clients order and manage domain purchases with you in a fully automated way. It has an ability to automatically run checks on orders to ensure only valid clients get through and any potentially fraudsters are blocked.

System Requirements for running WHMCS 6.0 or later

It is validated to run in Linux based environments running the Apache web server. Other environments like Windows based configurations may experience compatibility issues and are not supported.

• PHP
• Version- minimum 5.3.7 and latest version is recommended
• Memory Limit- minimum 64 MB and 128 MB is recommended (depending upon the size and volume of activity in an installation)
• Curl Support (with SSL)
• JSON Enabled
• GD2 Image Library
• Database Extension- PDO
• (MBString and Iconv are also recommended)
• MySQL
• Version- Minimum 5.1.0 and 5.5.x is recommended
• MySQL Strict Mode Disabled
• Ioncube Loaders- minimum 4.6.1 and 4.7.5 is recommended

Installing WHMCS

1. Download the latest version of WHMCS.
2. Extract the contents of the zip file to a folder on your computer.
3. Rename the file named ‘configuration.php.new to ‘configuration.php’.
4. Then, upload the entire WHMCS folder to your website. If you face any problems, try uploading it in binary mode.
5. Now, you can rename the folder according to your wish.
6. After that, visit the installation script at URL, http://www.yourdomain.com/whmcs/install/install.php to run the installer process.
7. Now, you have to follow the instructions that come on the screen to install. They involve setting file permissions, setting up your primary admin account, and entering your license key.

File permissions that are required are:-

/configuration.php CHMOD 400 Readable
/attachments CHMOD 777 Writeable
/downloads CHMOD 777 Writeable
/templates_c CHMOD 777 Writeable

These permissions are required for all PHP except, suPHP and PHPSuExec. If you are using DSO as PHP handler, then 644 permissions should be used.

1. After completing it, delete the install folder from your web server, and CHMOD the configuration.php file back to 644.