[ale] OT - Billing software for small time web hosting company

Nathan J. Underwood ale1 at cybertechcafe.net
Thu Sep 2 14:37:05 EDT 2004


Ok, I was using a spreadsheet to track what domains we were hosting, who 
the client (owner) was, what 'hosting package' they were using, when it 
was due, etc., and it quickly got out of control.  If I didn't look at 
the spreadsheet every day (we didn't think to setup billing cycles, so 
we had customers that were due pretty much every day), I got behind.  I 
went to freshmeat to try to find something that was free (we're in that 
'starving artist' phase of business right now), would keep track of who 
we were hosting, when they signed up, when they were due, and how much 
they owed up.  Also, I wanted it to email me when customers were $X days 
out, so I could send them a net 30 invoice.  Long story short, couldn't 
find anything, so I threw something together myself.  It's ugly, 
undocumented, insecure, etc., but pretty straight forward.  If there's 
anyone out there in a similar position (i.e. need something to track 
billing, and remind you when to bill folks ahead of time), if you 
promise not to laugh, I'll send it to you.  You pretty much just have to 
  do the following to get it up and running:
  - Create a database
  - Add your user to the database
  - add a 'use table;' statement to the top of the .sql file
  - run mysql < file.sql -u -p
  - unzip the files in a directory that your webserver can see

Again, I wouldn't use it anywhere that someone wearing a darker hat than 
you could get to it, but it works, and is helping me to keep my sanity. 
  If you're interested, shoot me an email and I can email it to you. 
The whole thing (zipped) is only around 56k.

If this is the wrong place to stick this, my apologies.  I just know 
that there are some other folks doing web hosting, and I wasn't sure if 
they were having the same problem.
--
registered linux user # 73046
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