WHMCS vs. 1Automationwiz

WHMCS is in many ways an all-in-one solution - it covers everything from payment processing and automatic hosting account creation to support and billing (and much more)

I haven't used 1Automationwiz before although I went on their website and it doesn't seem to be able to handle automatic account provisioning (including for VPS and a wide range of shared platforms) along with some of WHMCS's other features. Might be wrong though.

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keeping a billing system for your company.

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Hi Zach,

There is no reason you can't use your 1AutomationWiz account to sell websites plus hosting/maintenance packages. Just treat them like you would any other "product" when setting them up in the cart.

The advantage here is that you'll have a CRM component and customer data at your finger tips. You'll have the ability to cross market and upsell in a way you can't do with WHMCS.

Having said that, remember though that 1AutomationWiz is a shopping cart, so you'll still need WHMCS to do the actual set up of your new hosting accounts, and management of those accounts.

Does that help?

Another thing to keep in mind is, talk to your hosting company!!!

Why?

Some companies (like Hostgator) include a webhosting program in their reseller pricing. In some cases you have to ask them to set it up if you need it but they will and sometimes (like Hostgator, wink, wink) won't charge extra for it.

By the way, another hosting-related automation script is LPanel. It "integrates directly with WHM (Web Host Manager AKA CPanel) to automate many hosting functions such as account creation, suspensions, termination and package resource" management (from their webpage, Web Hosting & Billing Management - Lpanel - BannerView.com). Fewer webhosting companies offer this, but it is worth a look.

But I must warn you about something. Automatic account creation is a two-edged sword, and one that has its perils. For instance, a spammer can buy your services, and with auto-account creation they are on their merry way spamming away. By the time you realize something's up, damage has either been done to YOU or you are looking at major headaches undoing what they have done to PREVENT major damage from being done to you. It's not fun when a spammer has done enough damage to get YOUR hosting shut down before you can shut them down and now you have customers screaming about how they're down because of one guy...who just might have paid you with a stolen credit card or some other method that shorts you on the back end as well.