Selling physical machines breaks assumptions that shared-hosting billing platforms are built on. Seven questions to ask, what each vendor answers, and the four scenarios to test before you buy.
Mario Marin7 min readSelling dedicated servers puts demands on a billing platform that shared hosting never does. You are not provisioning an account on a shared box, you are allocating a specific physical machine with a serial number, a rack position, an out-of-band address and a switch port — and the invoice has to stay attached to that machine for its whole life, including the day it is decommissioned.
Most billing platforms in this category were designed for the shared and reseller world and treat hardware as a text field. Here is what to check, and which platforms actually answer it, using vendor figures read on 18 August 2026.
How this was sourced. FluxBilling publishes this guide and sells one of the products in it. Competitor figures were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 18 August 2026 and are linked at the end. Prices are quoted in the currency each vendor publishes with no exchange rate applied. Where a vendor publishes nothing readable, this guide says so rather than estimating.
Part of the FluxBilling guide to web hosting billing automation software.
Generic evaluation checklists miss all of these, and every one of them turns into an operational cost if the answer is no.
| Platform | Hardware inventory / rack | IPAM | Entry cost for it |
|---|---|---|---|
| WHMCS | Not published — needs a DCIM product | Not published | Licence + second subscription |
| Blesta | Not published — needs a DCIM product | Not published | Licence + second subscription |
| Clientexec | Not published — needs a DCIM product | Not published | Licence + second subscription |
| HostBill | Inventory Manager, Data Center edition | IPAM app, Enterprise edition | $1,599 one-time |
| EasyDCIM | Yes — it is the product | From Basic on the dedicated ladder | $69/mo, plus a billing platform |
| FluxBilling | Every tier | Every tier | €4.95/mo |
"Not published" means the vendor does not present the capability on its pricing or feature pages, not that no third-party module exists.
For WHMCS, Blesta and Clientexec the answer is a DCIM product alongside. EasyDCIM is the usual choice and its own pricing page names WHMCS and HostBill as its billing integrations, which tells you that is the intended architecture rather than a workaround.
EasyDCIM's dedicated-server ladder is $69/month for up to 50 devices, $99/month for 100, $299/month for 300 and $799/month for 1,000. IP Address Management appears from the Basic plan at $99/month, so a dedicated provider who needs IPAM is looking at $99, not the $69 entry. Add that to the billing licence — WHMCS Plus at $34.95/month for 250 clients, Blesta Monthly Branded at $17.95, Clientexec Branded at $16.95 — and you have your real monthly figure.
Then add the part that is not on any invoice: an integration between two systems that both hold a record of the same server, which you own the maintenance of.
HostBill puts the capability in its edition ladder. The IPAM app is in Enterprise at $999 one-time; Inventory Manager and Colocation Manager are in Data Center at $1,599, with updates and support renewal at $125/year after year one. For a dedicated or colocation provider, $1,599 is the real entry price and the $599 Startup edition is not a configuration that does this job.
That is a genuinely consolidated answer with a perpetual licence, and for a provider past the point where subscriptions make sense it is a strong option. We compared the two routes in detail in EasyDCIM vs HostBill for colocation billing.
Run these four scenarios in a trial or a demo environment. They are where bare-metal billing actually breaks.
The fourth is the test most platforms fail silently, and it is the exact shape of the "invoice disagrees with the rack" problem.
This is the segment FluxBilling was built for, so treat the following as an interested party describing its own design rather than neutral analysis.
Hardware inventory with out-of-band credentials, SNMP, IPMI and Redfish discovery, rack and U-space with chassis and blade support, power tracking, OS installation, IPAM with allocation on provisioning and release on termination, and an allocation engine that matches a paid order to a physical machine are all included on every tier — Lite €4.95/month (10 clients, 5 servers), Starter €24.95/month (250 clients, 50 servers), Professional €34.95/month (500 clients, 100 servers), Business €44.95/month (unlimited clients, 150 servers). Additional servers are €0.75 each per month. There is no Data Center edition to buy into and no IPAM gate. An EasyDCIM importer ships on every tier for providers leaving the two-product setup, as does a WHMCS importer. No free trial; 14-day money-back guarantee.
Where the alternatives are ahead: EasyDCIM's feature depth exceeds ours, particularly advanced monitoring, DNS management and its remote-agent tooling, and it is a specialist with a longer record at this exact job. HostBill's integration catalogue is far larger and its licence is perpetual, which we do not offer. FluxBilling is pre-1.0. If DCIM depth rather than integration is your first criterion, buy the specialist.
See DCIM, IPAM, what we are building and what is missing, and current pricing.
If you rack machines, the billing licence is the small number in your decision and the infrastructure layer is the large one. Price the whole stack — billing plus DCIM plus the integration you will maintain — and then compare. A platform that looks $20/month cheaper and needs a $99/month second product beside it is not cheaper.
All product names are trademarks of their respective owners. This guide is published by FluxBilling for evaluation purposes and is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or reviewed by any of them.
If you want to own your billing platform rather than rent it, these are the two options — and beyond that they are almost nothing alike. One product versus four, and where each wins.
Below about thirty clients WHMCS is cheaper — a fact usually left out. Above that the gap runs the other way and widens. What the difference actually buys on each side.
A thousand customers paying four euros is a different billing problem from forty paying four hundred. Per-client pricing, support load and involuntary churn decide this segment, not feature counts.