Engineering notes from the team building the platform.

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

A chargeback is the customer’s bank deciding for you, taking the money, and charging a fee whether you win or not. Most are communication failures, and three small fixes remove them.

Ilinca Bostan

The gap between "this invoice is overdue" and "this server is gone" is a policy, not a feature. Most businesses never write it down, so it exists anyway as whatever the software defaults to.

Mario Marin

Getting money in is built carefully. Getting it back out is built in a hurry, and that is where the accounting goes wrong. Four operations that look like one.

Ilinca Bostan

A gap in an invoice sequence is a question you have to answer, and "the software did it" is not an answer. Where hosting businesses generate gaps and how to stop.

Ilinca Bostan

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.

Mario Marin

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.

Ilinca Bostan