cPanel and WHMCS Partnership Q&A

[Travis]

cPanel & WHMCS Partnership to Provide The Most Complete Web Hosting Billing and Control Panel Solution On The Market



cPanel & WHM (WebHost Manager) is a control panel for the Linux operating system, allowing hosts, resellers, and end-users to work with their hosting accounts through a web-based browser. WHMCS (WebHost Manager Complete Solution) is a system that turbo-charges the provisioning of new accounts, client management, billing and support.

But while these two key-players of the web hosting world are often used together by millions of users worldwide, their distinct, separate nature previously forced hosts to use both tools separately to manage a single account. This adds to the administrative workload within a web hosting company, increasing expenses and affects the company’s ability to deliver fast and responsive customer service.
These two web hosting industry leaders are coming together. With the goal of creating a more integrated solution for web hosting providers, cPanel, Inc., and WHMCS Ltd. have recently announced a new partnership to deliver a more cohesive solution that includes both control panel functionality and billing.


What’s behind the decision to introduce an existing billing system into the cPanel & WHM experience rather than building your own?

For some time, a much-needed component for cPanel & WHM was an e-commerce solution to automate billing, account creation, and so on. Aaron Phillips, Vice President of Operations at cPanel, Inc. said, “The company began reviewing options about 18 months ago, discussing the idea of building a new product, pursuing potential acquisitions, or allowing pre-existing products to fill the gap. While cPanel Inc., has the resources and expertise to develop a new billing and support product from the ground-up, the feature set of WHMCS is so exhaustive, cPanel saw no benefit to investing in developing new software.”

Will cPanel & WHM continue to support other billing solutions?
Yes. While WHMCS is now cPanel’s preferred billing solution, cPanel, Inc., is committed to supporting alternative solutions. The cPanel team will continue to work closely with other billing system providers, helping them to deliver the best possible solution for their customers.

Will WHMCS continue to support other automation software?
Absolutely. While cPanel & WHM is now WHMCS’s preferred control panel, the WHMCS team will continue to support integration with a wide range of control panels same as always. And with the help of cPanel's resources and expertise, users of other control panels will benefit from the enhanced input and collaboration of the two companies, regardless of platform.

Give us some background on WHMCS, how it all got started and the benefits to cPanel customers.
Like cPanel, WHMCS was originally developed to fill a specific gap in the tools available to web hosting providers and web hosting resellers.

It was a natural progression from web design and development to hosting. Matt Pugh, CEO at WHMCS, began to look into hosting and, as his business grew, he went from a small reseller hosting plan to a virtual private server (VPS), then to a dedicated server, and then to several servers. He found more and more that he was being limited by the automation software that existed at the time, spending needless hours working with customer accounts. Matt wanted something that combined billing and support, but there seemed to be nothing that met his needs … so he wrote his own. WHMCS was born.

Using hands-on experience with existing automation software, Matt was able to quickly identify the features that would most benefit the web hosting industry. After the initial launch of WHMCS, he also considered the requests of other users to expand the functionality of the software and offer even more value to hosting providers.

With a combination of competitive pricing and very active development based on user requests, the WHMCS user base quickly started growing. WHMCS have kept their company very developer-friendly, so that it’s easy to customize and extend. In addition to the core features the company provides, a thriving community of developers has formed to offer great additional resources for its users.

Today, WHMCS includes automated account provisioning, domain management, email functionality, multi-currency billing, and order management. These features are offered with a full technical support system built-in including ticketed support, service announcements, and a hierarchical knowledge base tool.
WHMCS’s expansion, along with the new partnership with cPanel will help them to deliver more of what hosting companies want, need, and expect from their automation systems.

Will the partnership cause changes to the management at WHMCS?
Matt Pugh will remain the CEO and lead developer at WHMCS. The company will still operate independently and keep the same structure. WHMCS is still expanding its team in the UK, with Matt handling that process.

When will the integration process begin?
The integration process has already begun. cPanel’s integration team has begun working with WHMCS to clearly define the process and timeline. Once more information is available, updates will be communicated on both companies’ websites.

Will the two companies merge development efforts?
Under the new agreement, cPanel, Inc., will now have a financial stake in WHMCS Ltd. This strategy gives WHMCS Ltd. access to cPanel, Inc.’s vast business resources, and allows both companies to benefit from shared expertise under a “brain trust” model.

It’s clear how this relationship will add value and benefit the web hosting providers. How has the business relationship been working out?
Both companies share the same commitment to its product and ongoing, top-notch levels of support. WHMCS is one of the most respected names in the web hosting industry, but what the company didn’t know was just how closely its history mirrored that of cPanel. Both companies have taken this step to create a new partnership between the two brands based on both the quality of the application and the similarities in the goals and motivations of cPanel and WHMCS.

Both companies enjoy healthy market share and loyal relationships with some of the most prominent players in the industry. How does the partnership between WHMCS Ltd. and cPanel, Inc. have an impact on them?
Because of the striking similarities between the histories of these two companies, a partnership between cPanel, Inc., and WHMCS Ltd. enables two individual providers to work collaboratively toward a common goal. Both companies have similar business priorities and ethics, helping to ensure that the strategic partnership works in the interests of both parties and their customers.

With this new agreement, web hosting providers and hosting resellers can benefit from a unified approach, in addition to different resources and areas of expertise.

As a result, customers can enjoy tighter integration and an optimized exchange of information between the two individual platforms. Matt feels that this improved integration will eliminate one of the major challenges faced by his organization.

One of the main challenges WHMCS encounters relates to third parties and integrations. WHMCS is used in conjunction with a wide variety of control panels and other hosting related services, and updates or changes to those can lead to unexpected incompatibilities and problems. While WHMCS remains an independent company from cPanel, Inc., and their integration with other control panels is not changing or becoming any less important, the vast majority of its user base already use WHMCS in conjunction with cPanel & WHM. And those customers will be able to rely & depend on WHMCS more than ever following this new joining of forces.

Once integration is complete, will cPanel customers, including PartnerNOCs and Distributors, be able to leverage the cPanel licensing system to purchase WHMCS licenses via manage2 or the cPanel Store, similar to CloudLinux?
Both license systems have full API's, and both WHMCS and cPanel will be reaching out to Partners and customers to see how they would like this to work. While WHMCS and cPanel are two unique companies, the overall intent of this partnership is to work together to simplify the process and increase efficiencies any way possible.

Does this partnership mean cPanel will provide direct support to WHMCS customers?


No, WHMCS has a dedicated support team and will continue to provide expert sales, business and technical support for their product from the newly setup office in the UK.
Is cPanel looking to purchase any other third-party addons or announce any upcoming partnerships?
Attracta and WHMCS are both large-scale projects for 2012. Rigorous testing is required to ensure that partnerships and integrations meet our standards in programming, security, and testing functionality. cPanel Inc. is highly selective with its product diversification strategy, in order to continue to deliver the highest level of user satisfaction. As a result of these new integrations, cPanel will likely not make resources available for new integrations before 2013.

How will this partnership impact growth for both organizations and the web hosting industry?


The new relationship between cPanel, Inc., and WHMCS Ltd. allows both companies to work collaboratively toward new expansion of the WHMCS platform and its integration with cPanel. Until now, adding new features to WHMCS was largely dependent on how easily data could be sent to and from control panel software. For features to work correctly, WHMCS had to work toward compatibility with control panels, without direct support from their developers.

Now, as cPanel’s preferred billing and support system, WHMCS Ltd. can actively discuss development paths with cPanel, Inc., for additional assistance. This means the WHMCS team can finally realize even their most ambitious goals.

cPanel, Inc., has a strong management team and technical expertise. The company can apply this knowledge to help WHMCS with operations, development efficiencies, and expansion efforts in many areas. For both companies, this is a win-win situation. Together, both companies have the opportunity to build a stronger market share by giving customers the integrated tools they need to maximize their productivity and streamline their workflows.

With its newly setup office in the UK, local staff, and the help of cPanel, Inc., WHMCS hopes to be able to ramp up development. They can expand to cover new features, improve the quality control of its releases, and generally create the all-round most complete solution on the market.

[PPNSteve]

I'm liking this.

This would be an awesome addition to cPanel especially if there was a combo (not.. going.. to.. use.. the.. word.. bundle) and a discounted price (either monthly or owned) for existing cPanel/WHM users.

how about a special offering for the stand-alone versions before full integration is available.. or something similar to that.

[monarobase]

Sadly I have tested WHMCS a few times to try and avoid reprogramming our current system but each time there was a problem that I could not get around and made me abandon the idea of using WHMCS.

Here are a few of the short commings we encountered :

1) The invoicing system is not sufficient for France :

We did not find a way to have both paid invoices and invoices that have not yet been paid but will be paid and also count as a renewal.

2) The contact system is outdated, we need to allow our customers to create a contact address and this contact address must be able to be associated with products on other accounts. For example one of our customers creates websites for his customers and we need to be able to specify his contact as a technical contact for his customers hosting plan.

Alot of our suppliers have unique contact id's for domain names and we have not try to not create a new contact with the same information as an existing contact.

3) WHMCS is not expensive so long as you don't need to modify the way it works, if you want/need to have access to all the code then it becomes quite expensive.

What I dislike the most about WHMCS is the fact that I get the impression that they have been adapting the way it works to try and meet everyones needs but have been restrained by the fact that the product was initialy designed for an old generation of the webhosting business and it needs to be mostly rewritten from scratch to take into account the needs of todays webhosts.

[yamaharr1]

With the very very bad support WHMCS has this is very disturbing that CPanel would partner with them. Not even to mention the amount of bugs they release their updates with.

IMHO Cpanel should just do what they were doing and not cross this line with a billing company

[nibb]

This is just awful. What is cPanel turning into? A SEO Panel, a billing panel? A control panel server? A hosting company?

First Cloud Linux, then Attracta, now WHMCS.

What is wrong with letting your customers decide on their own what they want or need? Suggestions are ok, deep integration's with preferences over other products and services is not.

I said on the Attracta topic that cPanel was in financial troubles but now this is just the confirmation that cPanel is going bankrupt and they need to make a few bucks with everything that shines under the sun.

If you are afraid of other products having to many options, there is nothing wrong with making a promoting page where you can see all products and software that integrates with cPanel and maybe even pass some certifications where you make a buck out of it, but siding in a specific agreement with specific companies is just bad.

The only reason why cPanel was an option vs Plesk was because it was not bundled with so much crappy software like Parallels does, where they try to force you into their own products. cPanel is the most open and modular software, its a software that is completely open and free to hook up almost any billing software, server software, etc.

Now you are completely alienating software developers in droves with this decisions to not develop plugins and integration's with cPanel as you clearly are taking preferences into integration's.

I don´t have anything against WHMCS what so ever, but they are clearly better solutions out in the market, WHMCS just happens to be the most popular one and cheap one. Giving their recent security nightmares in the last 12 months, where allot of hosting companies are dropping them because of this, I wish cPanel the best of the best lucks once your customers servers start to get hacked because there is a security hole in WHCMS and since it will be deeply integrated with cPanel APIs, well just make imagine the rest...

Take this as a constructive critic because I love you guys, this is not bashing cPanel Inc but I just want to express my voice and opinion. cPanel has clearly lost management objectives. You don´t know where you are going, you don´t know if you are a service provider, or a hosting partner company, or a software developer. You have clearly lost the path, and it seems control panel software development or hosting platforms is not your core business anymore. You are spending way to much time making partnerships and integrating third party products instead of releasing core features into your own software. Just take a look at your own forums to see features requested by users. This is the real stuff that people need on a daily basis for management.

And since you already purchased a hosting company as well, nothing at all guarantees us customers you will completely stop selling cPanel in the future vs launching your own hosting service with your own products. Why does not CloudLinux, Attracta, WHMCS and cPanel just all merge into 1 single company to offer your own services in the hosting company you purchased? Stop selling this products to the core public and you will be in a unique positions with unique software and technology that the rest will not be able to purchase, and your services will be unique wiping all other companies that depend on this products out of the market? This just makes sense and this is where you seem to be going.

You are clearly imitating Parallels approach which made them lose so many Pesky customers. Myself included. I wish all of you the best of the lucks but next time before investing into any of this products, just think how much worth is your investment in terms of $$$ because with how unstable cPanel seems to be lately in their decisions it would not surprise to receive an email they where purchased or they are merging into another company leaving you all guys and your investments in the dark.

I know cPanel is going to take all my points down with a post that makes everyone feel safe and happy, but this is just what companies need to do, in order to keep customers calm. Its their actions that show exactly what is happening, and only a moron could not see this. Its clearly cPanel wants more money. And instead of just asking us, customers or hiring a consultant, they seems to try to partnership with third party developers, some of them which are very, very small in order to support the quality of cPanel customers and size.

If you want so much money from third party products, make a product page or "approved" cpanel software. To be in this list make this companies and developers pass a certification and charge them for that. Then charge them a yearly fee as well for future quality and stability tests. Not much, but money is money and its keeping everyone fair.

And on that page just make an Affiliate system, where everyone that purchases or is send to the order links of this products coming from cPanel gets a % share for cPanel, and you could even make them a bit cheaper from that page. Problem solved. You will earn more money, have a huge ecosystems of products that work with cPanel, lets customers and people choose, and be fair to developers and companies of this products.

If you are married to a specific company or product just imagine how competing companies of this products feel?

[nospa]

cPanel should focus on maintaining their control panel, spend some money to get better developers who will not be leazy to get updates and patches for PHP (especially 5.2) and apache. Right now PHP 5.3.15 with critical security fix for streams.c is waiting almost a week to be implemented into easyapache!!! THIS IS AWFUL! And you spend time to make fusions between attracta, WHMCS and any other fatal software! You should focus on developing your product, to produce cPanel without so many bugs! You should patch PHP 5.2 for your customers! We pay almost 35 USD each month for just 1 server and we do not get security updates for software we use!!!

Shame on you cPanel!!!

[monarobase]

With the very very bad support WHMCS has this is very disturbing that CPanel would partner with them. Not even to mention the amount of bugs they release their updates with.

IMHO Cpanel should just do what they were doing and not cross this line with a billing company

True about the support, cPanel should only partner with companies that have fast and good support.

24 hours for an answer is not at all in the same league as cPanel or CloudLinux.

[GIANT_CRAB]

Does cPanel has no money or something?

Attracta has tons of bugs, WHMCS has tons of bugs.

cPanel partnered Attracta and WHMCS despite of the bugs.

I assume that cPanel are not developers but marketing experts that 'steals' your money legitimately?

cPanel please.

[nibb]

Does cPanel has no money or something?

Attracta has tons of bugs, WHMCS has tons of bugs.

cPanel partnered Attracta and WHMCS despite of the bugs.

I assume that cPanel are not developers but marketing experts that 'steals' your money legitimately?

cPanel please.

This is because this are very small companies. Mostly 1 main developer guy ventures. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that as I know amazing software made by 1 guy, but they exploded in customer size and are not able to keep up the work in development and customer care. This is why people say they are full of bug because they cannot keep up the speed of development as things change.

Attracta personally is just a gimmick. There is absolutely no benefit in that services and nothing that free scripts don´t do. WHMCS is ok, for the 15$ buck hosting company, not for a serious business. Even when its used by allot of big companies, its because there are not alternatives in the market. There are cheap billing softwares and expensive ones. Parallels is expensive and buggy. WHMCS is cheap, to cheap to bring any quality to companies.

Their prices should costs allot more if they want to keep up with customer care and more serious development.

Hostbill is in the same league and I find it even better in terms of what it does and we need to say its pretty new.

AWBS is also a cheap one but its also better than WHMCS, it lacks documentation but if you look what it does and configure it nicely its very powerful and flexible.

Ubersmith, its costly, it lacks some features of the cheaper ones, but has big features which the others don´t, as its more geared to real hosting business, datacenters, servers, etc. Its the best one in terms of quality and its not a coincidence. They only focus on developing this only software, and nothing more. Similar to how cPanel was in the past, where the whole company was focused in 1 single product. If cPanel should had partnered with any billing software it should have being this done, because its the highest in terms of quality but I think the price is deterrent for most cPanel customers.

There are many more and I just named some of them.

If you want your business to success you need to invest on it, its simple. Go cheap and expect cheap.

cPanel is obviously not doing their job which is focusing on their core product. Security updates are not fast, they are slow, and this is why you pay a software like this. New features introduced are mainly very buggy, its getting slower introducing and adapting to new technologies. Where is the cPanel android app or mobile interface? Where is the DNS clustering between Windows servers? Where is.... I can name allot of things they need to introduce which they are not.

The point is that cPanel cannot live with massive customers base, and cheap prices. They keep lowering their prices in terms of reaching more markets instead of actually adding more features to attract the people that can pay the software. Cloud gimmick is going to be gone in some years. Its all very new and everyone wants to jump in, but the fewer is going to eventually calm down. Shared hosting is not going anywhere, servers are more and more powerful which means shared accounts are more and more powerful to the point less and less people actually need a VPS or cloud. They cannot handle it as its to technical. People always will need a service where they can managed it with point and click. Hosting for newbies.

Hosting industry is going to consolidate more into the coming years, in terms that allot of companies will merge and some disappear, but a market for hosted services is never going to go away. If you keep up with features and check what your customers ask what they need to make their life more simple, there always will be a market. Just look at some managed services that only give service for cPanel servers. This means they don´t offer any service if cPanel is not installed. Why? Because it cuts them hours and hours of sys admin time they need to do for regular stuff. cPanel more or less invented shared hosting as know. Now they need to adapt. I posted my ideas in the CloudLinux category. They need to try to transform the limited shared hosting into a pay per resources hosting, where customers of different sizes can use the same server, and each one pays their CPU share, Ram usage, etc.

Instead of wasting time in partnerships they should consolidate their product to be more powerful. Like an Android app, they don´t even need to develop one. Just purchase the company that did one already, yes, there are apps already but I would not trust them my server logins and I would also not recommend them to a client if I don´t know who is behind the app.

There is nothing wrong with partnering, but they need to do it only with hi quality companies and products. And sadly I can´t say that about some of their partnerships. And they can´t be exclusive on it, because they are pissing off other companies with similar products which will think twice now before still fully supporting cPanel. If I was a company developing a billing software that integrates with cPanel and tons of other servers, why would I still offer so much support and integration for cPanel if they are recommending officially my competition? Simple, I won´t. I will try to promote to my own customers the use of another control panel if possible.

[cPanelAP]

Hello,

Thank you for your constructive criticism on the cPanel & WHMCS partnership announcement. We appreciate, respect and look forward to your opinions as always.

We do enjoy discussing these sorts of moves with Hosting Providers and I personally get a lot of feedback from both larger and smaller companies on a regular basis. As some of you will recall from the Attracta discussion, I am always available to you if you’d like to connect with me directly via email or phone. Contacting our Customer Service Team via our normal avenues of contact is the best way to start that connection, anytime.
Contact cPanel.

As an Industry Leader, cPanel has made a number of strategic moves over the last 12 months that have been in the works for quite some time. We remain transparent with these company changes, our continued growth, and the various new and exciting features that we’re working on providing to the Web Hosting Community.

Over the last few years we have also invested heavily in our Development, Technical Support, and Quality Assurance Teams. We have in fact expanded in most every area of the company with the focus on core development of our product and extending its functionality. Throughout this process we have also spent a great deal of time working on several key partnerships that will help us to achieve this extended functionality to our product that Hosting Providers large and small can appreciate and have requested.

When I started in 2009 we had roughly 30-35 employees. cPanel, Inc. has grown quite a bit since then, we’re near 140 Employees strong, and still hiring!
Jobs

What I like about this thread and others like it is that we are able to gain insight from the community and the overall opinion from those who weigh in on these topics, here on our own Community Forums, at Hosting Events / functions and other channels of communication we have and make use of daily. We appreciate having an open discussion on these changes taking place, we want to hear from you, as always. Comments to the Attracta discussion thread from a few months ago for example resulted in a healthy debate, some great user feedback and some changes to the launch plan we had.

Constructive criticism is good, we expect it! What doesn’t fit in here though are some of the assumptions and speculations being made here as we saw in the Attracta thread as well. These over the top comments are not constructive at all and take away from the topic itself. Several of these inflammatory, unwarranted comments should probably be moderated even. Instead, I wanted to post here myself and address several of your concerns head on.

To be clear, cPanel has no plans to sell, be acquired, or launch a competing hosting company. We are all quite excited to be working in the direction we are headed, doing our part to make the Web Hosting Industry itself, better.

While it may be for some, entertaining to pull various bits and pieces together from an announcement like this and make some of these wild assumptions, I would ask that you please keep you comments respectful and professional. In developing a product that has become the most popular control panel in the world, we are unable to satisfy 100% of the users, 100% of the time. I think we can all agree on that.


@nibb, you make some good points and having these sorts of concerns and voicing your constructive criticism and feedback on CloudLinux, WHMCS, Attracta and Siteocity topics are not something we take casually. They are in fact some of the same questions we ask ourselves, as you might assume, while going through any evaluation process.

Several of your assumptions here in this thread though are not only wrong, but even a bit offensive to those reading them. Please try and stick to your real concerns so that we can discuss them in a professional manner.

cPanel as a company values healthy competition, we always have. We look forward to seeing nothing less from other competing products at providing better support, better software, and keeping the playing field both exciting and cutting edge.

cPanel most certainly values it’s customer’s opinion as well. We spend a great deal of time visiting with our customers, understanding their business needs, and attempt to stay in tune with the Web Hosting Industry as a whole.

We’re happy to know that you expect a formal reply that will result in easing the nerves of the general public and use your statements to prove points you feel are important. If we did not want to have this conversation with the community at large, this post would have been better served as a blog post on our Press Releases blog.
Press Releases | cPanel

Your expanded comments here are many and I won’t be able to reply to each individual statement. Instead I would like to suggest that you, and anyone else reading this who has concerns about the direction of cPanel and are curious to learn more about our product, to come to the cPanel Conference this year.
cPanel Conference 2012

We would enjoy having the opportunity to meet face to face and have more productive discussions and get your concerns noted properly without the speculations and accusations creeping into the conversation. The cPanel Conference is one of the many various venues we take advantage each year in which we sit with partners, customers and have open dialogs such as this.

I can’t promise that we will make decisions that satisfy every customer, but what I can tell you is that as a company, cPanel remains committed to providing a competitive product that continues to drive the Web Hosting Industry.

Endeavors such as CloudLinux, WHMCS, Attracta and Siteocity have already had a very positive impact on the overall future of the company as we continue to grow.

[crazyaboutlinux]

WoW its Awesome News

[GIANT_CRAB]

Endeavors such as CloudLinux, WHMCS, Attracta and Siteocity have already had a very positive impact on the overall future of the company as we continue to grow.

For cloudlinux, its a 'Yes', for the other 3, its a 'No, no, no'.

Cloudlinux is an operating system built onto CentOS. I have seen them release patches/updates efficiently.
For instance, when the PHP bug was found, before Redhat applied the bug fix, Cloudlinux took the initiative to actually fix it, impressive.

For WHMCS, slow updates, slow support, lack of features, ioncubed like crazy.
Really?
Do you really want to partner up with a company that protect their things so crazily?

There's a good and bad side effect to that - its harder to find security exploits.

Who knows? They might be hiding the security exploits or what so ever.


Attracta? Sounds attractive, actually not.
Attracta's support is really really terrible, it took them around 4 weeks to actually reply to my support email.
Really, is it that hard?
Site map generation is another issue, security issue.

Do you really trust a tool that generate files within your server - proclaiming that its for SEO?
Generating some "un-configurable" robots.txt file, seems legit and /not/ suspicious at all?

Speculations? So you take criticism that are not good as speculations?
Good job.

Also, I don't trust you for saying that it had a "very positive impact" on the overall future of cPanel.

I can’t promise that we will make decisions that satisfy every customer

Really huh. I would say at least 30% of us are unhappy with these partnerships, especially Attracta and WHMCS partnership.


To all of the readers of my post, have you ever wondered why the updates of cPanel are releasing slower and slower?

It used to be every week, until late May.

No, I don't want to hear excuses such as "We are busy with the cPanel conference".

[texo]

WHY OH WHY are you not concentrating on developing a better cpanel? Clustering, failover, php-fpm... and so much more that we want and need. But you're messing around with SEO and billing.

Can't understand this, really I can't!

[Infopro]

...that a large number of us hosts don't even want..

Got any statistics on this you can provide here?

This year we're seeing a lot of UPSELLING

Same for this one. I haven't been sold anything. Nor have you from this company, AFAIK.

I wouldn't call that speculation though, you're right about that. It's just incorrect.

[texo]

@Infopro do you have any statistics to show that cpanel clients have been asking for SEO tools and billing? Do you have any statistics at all?