Engineering notes from the team building the platform.

"Payment failed" is a category, not a reason. Underneath sit seven different events with different recovery rates — and most dunning sequences are written for the wrong half.

Ilinca Bostan

Annual billing is the most reliable retention lever in hosting and most providers offer it badly. Two months free is a convention, not an analysis — and often wrong in both directions.

Ilinca Bostan

Every WHMCS self-hosted and Cloud price for 2026, what the 1 January increase added, and what 250, 500 and 1,000 clients cost a year — read from whmcs.com on 25 September 2026.

Mario Marin

Most providers carry legacy customers below cost because raising the price feels more dangerous than absorbing the loss. It usually is not — and it usually only needs to reach forty people.

Ilinca Bostan

The first datacenter is simple. The second breaks the assumption that an IP address, a price and a piece of hardware are properties of a service rather than properties of a place.

Mario Marin

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