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hosting providers, need your ideas on something
What I actually want from this post is honest opinions from people who run hosting businesses for real.
- What annoys you most about WHMCS or whatever you're stuck using now?
- What have you had to build yourself because nothing out there did it properly?
- Anything you paid for a module for that honestly should've just been part of the panel to begin with?
- If you switched panels tomorrow, what would actually make you do it?
- What's a feature you've never seen in any panel but always wished existed?
- How much of your time gets eaten up just fighting your current panel instead of running your business?
- Is there anything you've straight up given up on because no panel handles it well?
- Security wise, does your current panel actually give you confidence, or are you just hoping nothing breaks?
- Anything else you'd want to say, complaints, ideas, or just general thoughts?
Not selling anything, don't even know if this turns into a real product yet. Just trying to build toward actual problems instead of guessing blind. So yeah, what's missing out there? What would make you go "finally"?
Backstory, I started building my own billing panel about 4 months ago, mostly because I was looking into reselling shared hosting and got fed up with WHMCS everywhere I looked. Felt old clunky, everything's an addon you gotta pay extra for. So I just started building the core myself. Figured while I'm at it, might as well build something that covers VPS too, not just shared hosting, so it's a complete system rather than half a solution. My actual background is Python and machine learning, so PHP has honestly been kicking my ass a bit and slowing me down more than I expected. Getting there though.
The Proxmox side of it came out of a chat I had with a hosting provider recently, he brought up Proxmox and said pretty much the same thing about WHMCS, and I was like yeah screw it, let's actually do proper Proxmox integration instead of relying on some paid module. Still figuring out the right way to approach that part, so not saying much on it yet.
Side note, I've had this daydream for a while about running my own VPS hosting company, don't ask me why. Started this panel months ago just for fun to help a friend out, then somehow it turned into my brain's version of a business plan ( maybe 
).
Core stuff is solid, billing, auth, roles, plugin system. I'm also going harder on security and some more modern touches than what I've seen in most panels currently out there, figured if I'm building this from scratch anyway, might as well not cut corners on that side. Proxmox integration is the next big piece I'm working through.
Happy to hear the good and the bad 
Comments
Not a provider. But the core stuff itself is incomplete. Plug-ins exist, but it should be usurped by core long time ago.
Oh no... please please please don't tell you you are working an yet another AI slop panel 😭
We had a couple dozen here already and all of them got embarrassed really fast.
yeah that's kind of the whole reason I'm doing this, way too much stuff gets treated as a plugin when it should've been core forever ago. trying to actually fix that here, if it's something most hosts expect out of the box, it's going in core not tacked on as an addon.
not that. for hobby projects I don't really use AI, kills the fun honestly. just your average 20 hours screen time guy at this point.
EDIT: also just to be clear, I don't use AI all the time, only when needed. since this is PHP and my background's Python/ML, it's a bit rough when errors pop up, that's really the only case I lean on it
I don't know about your experience, but you should have bigger goal.
AFAIK, many big tech reimplement libraries (notably java) to avoid legal/licensing issues. That's something I know even I'm not a lawyer.
They are not stateless.
Databases and files need backups that is extra work.
We built a module for playing rickroll upon user clicking the signup button.
Currency conversion between 🥭 and pushups.
If the new panel is open source and has all the features.
IPv9 assignments.
All of it.
We gave up on selling interplanetary transit service.
Isn’t the whole hosting industry based on greed and hope?
Mentally strong people do not buy panels.
more about actually making something feature rich and modern compared to what's out there now. first VPS I used was on Hostup, then went through a bunch of other providers since, and yeah the interfaces still look straight out of the 2000s. and it's not just frontend, backend's honestly the bigger focus for me, all in one thing, no addons needed for basic stuff or no more.
not fully decided on open source yet, might do it down the line. but planning a licensing system for now, and like 90% of whatever comes from it goes to donations, mostly around where I live, toward students who don't even have a proper place to stay. the other 10% goes back into developing this further. and honestly if the dev costs end up being basically nothing since I'm building this in my free time anyway, it's all going to donations
ok. yeah fair on stateless/backups, that's actually a real one I'm taking seriously, no interest in building something that turns backups into a whole side project for hosts.
open source with all the features, noted, still weighing that one for real. IPv9 assignments though, gonna need you to file that as a feature request separately
I think the biggest thing for us was the performance on WHMCS.
We ended up building our own tools and integrating them with Proxmox.
Honestly, WHMCS works until it doesn’t. Performance gets rough, half the useful stuff needs extra modules, and every update makes you wonder what broke this time.
Solid Proxmox integration and less custom duct tape would already be a huge win.
yeah performance keeps coming up in this thread. good you went the own tools + Proxmox route too. was there a specific thing that made you build it yourself, or just got tired of tweaking WHMCS around it
"works until it doesn't" pretty much sums it up. update anxiety's real too, shouldn't have to worry what breaks every time something ships. good Proxmox integration and less duct tape is the whole point here.
what else needed extra modules for you guys? curious what falls into that duct tape category. also domain integration, don't know much about that yet, registrars and stuff. figure I'll sort it out later, not there yet
I guess another thing is that I just don’t like not owning our core functionality and tools. Maybe it would be different if they were open source, but for something that’s so important to our business, I don’t want to rely on a third-party vendor.