Recently I have been testing out a new WHMCS plugin called CloudMGR. CloudMGR allows you to provision Amazon EC2 servers from within WHMCS. This has opened up the cloud services vertical to our web hosting offerings.
CloudMGR has a straight forward interface for adding cloud servers to your product list. Their offering includes popular servers like WordPress appliances, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu and even Windows servers. A simple wizard driven interface allows you to pre-define the instance size, storage and even the data-center to deploy the image in. There is even an interface for importing your own custom images into the system. Once you complete the wizard, you have the opportunity to go directly to the product setup to customize all the other options, such as welcome emails and additional pricing terms.
The plugin integrates quite well with WHMCS, including the provisioning of servers, through to the termination of service (the catch there, rightly so, is that terminating a product does indeed delete the server and all data in the cloud). The other unusual feature of the plugin is that provisioning does take up to a minute to complete. This is due to the way Amazon issues IP addresses. The plugin must wait until the server has started up to acquire the IP address from Amazon. Because this is needed for the welcome email, this does introduce a long period where the order screen is just sitting and processing, with no indication it is actually doing anything. Because of this, you may want to set provisioning to happen manually, rather than after payment has been received, as there is no way to indicate to the customer that you are waiting on the server to be built.
The support I have received has been outstanding, usually responding back with a fix for any bugs I did find within 24 hours. The only drawback to their support has been that they are Australia based, so responses come in after hours – by the time you can respond in the morning, their offices are closed for the night. This will shortly be rectified as they are opening a US based sales and support office.
CloudMGR is looking to add even more features to their plugin over the next few months, including the provisioning of S3 cloud storage and Amazon backed DNS (Route53) and domain registration. Although these last two are not of benefit to myself, as I already have the DNS and domain registration infrastructure in place, I can see them being of huge benefit to someone starting up a new hosting company, or looking to bring web hosting management in-house. I am eagerly looking forward to their cloud storage solution, especially if it can be integrated with a backup solution.