User domain changes and billing

C

clearview

New member
Joined
Sep 9, 2011
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2
Hi,

I've been thinking about moving over to DA in the future. Our current control panel doesn't allow a normal user to change/add/delete a domain. I'm wondering how people bill their customers.

At the moment, when we invoice a customer, the domain associated with the hosting account is listed on the invoice. This seems quite important when the user has multiple hosting accounts.

Also, from a management perspective, we can just search for a domain in the customer database and quickly find out what server the domain on.

So, it you have multiple machines and customers with a fair number of accounts, how do you manage them? Does DA update your billing system with the domains currently listed on the account. Do you list the username on the bill or do you just use the domain they initially signed up with?

Very interested to know what method DA admins use.

Thanks.
 
Hello,

Directadmin does not know anything about any billing system, it's up to you if you want trigger your billing's API on different actions done in directadmin cp. You can use POST/PRE scripts for the purposes, you determined, but you will have to do some coding or find a person who will do it for you.
 
Hi, Thanks for your response. I had noted, whilst looking at past forum posts that POST/PRE scripts might be an answer if we wanted to go down that route.

I just wonder what the normal practice is when it comes to billing customers. Letting the customers change their own domain isn't something I've come across before and doesn't really fit into our current business model.
 
Here's what we do:
At the moment, when we invoice a customer, the domain associated with the hosting account is listed on the invoice. This seems quite important when the user has multiple hosting accounts.
Click to expand...
In he billing system we list the main domain the client gave us when we set up the account, unless the client asks us to change it.
Also, from a management perspective, we can just search for a domain in the customer database and quickly find out what server the domain on.
Click to expand...
We've created a file whichserver.html in /var/www/html.

The file looks similar to this; change the all uppercase text to what you use to identify the server:
Code: 
<html>
<head>
<title>
HOSTNAME.EXAMPLE.COM
</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href=https://
HOSTNAME.EXAMPLE.COM:2222>
HOSTNAME.EXAMPLE.COM</a>
</body>
</html>
Of course we give it the right ownership/permissions to work in /var/www/html.

Then we create the following link in our httpd-alias.conf file:
Code: 
Alias /whichserver "/var/www/html/whichserver.html"
and restart apache.

Then to figure out where a domain is hosted all we need to do is use this URL in the browser:
Code: 
http://example.com/whichserver
and we'll see the servername, as a link, so we can go directly to the DirectAdmin page if necessary.

The limitation is it won't work for expired domains or domains with bad DNS, since they're not pointed to your server.

Jeff
 
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