Engineering notes from the team building the platform.

The gap between a signed colocation contract and a customer who is racked, powered and billing correctly is where operators lose time and sometimes the revenue entirely.

Mario Marin

Colocation breaks generic billing software because you are selling physical space, a power envelope and a set of hands. Four or five recurring lines, each measured differently.

Mario Marin

Power is what a datacenter actually runs out of, and it is the line item most often priced badly. Bundle it and you subsidise your densest customers with your sparsest.

Mario Marin

Ubersmith combines billing with device monitoring and targets infrastructure providers. It is also the hardest platform here to evaluate, for one specific reason: no published price.

Mario Marin

Hosting providers assume GDPR is the customer’s problem because the data is on the customer’s server. For your billing system that is exactly wrong, and it is where a subject access request lands.

Ilinca Bostan

A PDF is a picture of an invoice, not an electronic one. Why cross-border hosting businesses get caught by rolling national mandates, and the identifier data to start collecting now.

Ilinca Bostan

Sell hosting to a consumer in another member state and the place of supply moves to them. The threshold is lower than most providers think, and the platform requirements are specific.

Ilinca Bostan

Data centre and cloud services sit in Annex I, which makes qualifying providers essential entities on the strictest tier. Scope tests, the 24-hour clock, and the parts that touch your billing system.

Mario Marin

You will not run out of IPv6, which is exactly why its allocation goes undocumented. Meanwhile IPv4 leaks onto dead services. Both are billing problems, not just network ones.

Mario Marin

"Export the invoices" is at least three different operations with three different shapes. What breaks in the handover, and why you should do it in March rather than January.

Ilinca Bostan

A customer upgrades on day twelve of a thirty-day cycle. What they owe, when, and what the next invoice says differs by platform — and sometimes by which screen you used.

Mario Marin

The payment succeeded, the provisioning failed, and the invoice says paid. It is unavoidable — the question is whether your platform notices, or the customer does first.

Mario Marin