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That is what mod_security rules are for!
tl;dr The problem is their backend billing system. In previous years, let's say it took X amount of server processing power per client (tens of thousands of clients). But this year, after the billing system changed the way they handled stuff, it now takes like 5X (who knows, 2X, 8X, whatever, its way more than feasible) on top of them having way more customers than ever before. So the demands on the server over previous years are exponential and a bottleneck.
So the solution is to either keep throwing more horsepower (more and faster servers), or fix the code so it doesn't require so much processing power to handle basic tasks.
Both solutions take time and money. Lots.
If you’re trying order stuff and/or make payments, you’re a bit out of luck right now but if it’s VPS management, remember that you can just access SolusVM directly for that. Look in your welcome email for the username for your VPS. If you don’t have/know your password, simply reset it with the username and it’ll send you a password.
I actually prefer it that way, to be honest.
How many of their services are deployed using integrated control panel into WHMCS which would therefore require service information and management usually handled by the likes of SolusVM to be handled by the WHMCS DB, i’d imagine this is a highly likely reason why their billing has grinded to a halt as well...
WHMCS replied and pretty much confirmed that the new query they do on newer versions pretty much take a second each, with a single person doing it, just to authorize/confirm a single user (to run the query I mentioned above.)
They stated however that it's not the query itself that's bad, but it becomes difficult once there is more than one person doing it...
They suggested we just throw more power at it instead of fixing their code, "and optimization can only do so much to make the software itself as efficient as possible." They completely ignored the fact that we ran fine on a much smaller server before these queries were being done. Whatever, we're bringing back the panel out of maintenance mode and not continuing with the sale for the time being. In about 8 hours we will need to place it back in maintenance mode and we'll try to do some type of clustering and hopefully, if all goes well, resume the sale at 6 PM.
If any developers are interested in working on an alternative to WHMCS for us please private message me, we can probably at the very least help fund your project if it fits our needs (because it seems like we need to go from a server that costs $50/mo to us, before any markups, to servers costing $1,000/mo just to run this terrible software from just one version update.)
Edit: I noticed here on the very helpful article they linked, they did their high availability using AWS so to do a similar setup, it would cost about $10,000 a month to run their billing software for a company our size.
@VirMach why don't you rollback WHMCS to the previous version?
@VirMach can you please reactive the invoice of the $8.88 offer for people we were not able to login to pay. thank you
if you really want to move out,
why don't you try blesta or @Jord billingserv maybe?
At this point, it'd have to be something open source. We've had our fair share of everything breaking from a license not working in the past as well.
That's pretty much the quality of replies we get from vendors who receive 100k+ per year for "support" and "maintenance" from my employer. They obviously have no pressure at all to maintain some kind of quality standard.
Open Source IS the way to go, but such a project needs to have more than one or two people backing it up.
Maybe we should start the lowendbilling project ?
@VirMach Just write a tiny little flash sale app on a separate server that can be pre-stocked with single use promo codes and aggressively defended against bots. Could even have a delay between when they win and when the code is mailed to them to spread out the load, if still an issue.
I have something similar to that proposed to him in PM 2-3 days ago, and I am able to work on that and make it happen in a short time, but no replies as usual
Sometimes it is not that a temporary solution doesn't exists, so I guess I shouldn't be a busy body?
And now you will have coupon code reselling and more drama. You will need a way to fight that. Not sure what is possible with WHMCS thought.
About 99% of all the ideas we ever have been chucked out because "oh right then someone could ruin the fun by doing this, this. and this."
Would it be possible to place the orders via this tool which then generates the services and invoices in WHMCS asynchronously to reduce the load on the WHMCS panel? Just a thought...
Instead of promo codes, just save the purchased flash sales into a queue of orders to be placed, and then have a separate service that syncs the queue into WHMCS. That way, customers are not directly touching WHMCS themselves, and things shouldn't break. Give customers an expected time frame (eg. "you'll receive an invoice within an hour") and deal with WHMCS in a throttled way.
That's more or less what I proposed
- Of course, people can still potentially change the email address, sell the email account etc but we can try to make it more strict by imposing more limits (such as limits on IP address as well)
And what about single use coupon on a external platform, but only usable for customer with existing service ? It would still allow reselling, but people will be way less confident to do it I think.
waiting queue anyone? Just slow down the requests going via the order links.
@VirMach Is there any chance to save my unpaid bf-19 vps from termination. Would you consider to freeze unpaid VPSes termination process until billing panel is up and run again?
It is going to be hard to keep someone from selling the email account along with the service. I can see problems on the IP limit because someone might be assigned a dynamic IP or on mobile. Maybe impose a reasonable time limit to pay the invoice (12-24 hours), but discourage resellers.
Billing panel is up again.
EDIT
Ok before writing this comment I checked and was able to login to billing panel. After writing this comment I checked again and it is now down.
We've already extended terminations to like 3 weeks later, don't worry.
Keep in mind this will be changed to normal once we have everything operating smoothly but I'll still wait 1-2 days before we do that after everything's returned to normal.
And now it's up again.
and now it's down again
Hello, so I tried to contact you guys multiple ways (on phone, by submitting ticket etc) without any luck. Now, as I read the comments I see that you are working on the client area maintenance so I won't bother you about that.
I would just have 1 question regarding a package I ordered, because I'm unable to use it even though I paid for it a week ago.
So, I ordered a KVM-SPECIAL (40x IP Marketing Proxies) package and I'm unable to find the 39 additional ips other than the main one. My email is [email protected], Invoice number 1122054. If you need any details regarding the order please let me know.
Please excuse me if I posted this in the wrong section, I just cant find any other way to reach you guys and this is pretty urgent.
Thanks in advance for your kind help.
Is this even a product offered by Virmach ?
What if this plus requiring an account to have specific amount of store credit ($5 maybe) at a specific time (Dec 7, 00:00 GMT), make a list of those account (IMO doable with a simple query?) and only allow them to join the coupon app?
iir they have (had?) some strange/shady proxy/SEO there in offers, just wait for panel to be up and dive into 'other services'