Helping hosters move to the cloud

London-based OnApp has been providing management tools for hosted services providers for some time, and has also been helping them, when the opportunity arose, to add the provision of cloud services to their portfolios of service offerings. Now, it has decided to go all out to push the hosting community into becoming full-blown Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

Working in collaboration with WHMCS it has released a new integration for the latter’s client management, billing and support tool that creates an end-to-end cloud management, billing and support platform for hosting companies and other service providers.

With this combination, service providers can now offer fully automated cloud, virtual private server, CDN, DNS and reseller services through a single control panel, giving them an easy way to enter the cloud market. T“With OnApp and WHMCS, service providers have a fully automated system for cloud hosting, from orchestration to service design and support, and now WHMCS customers can sell an even wider range of services based on OnApp.”

he new integration modules automate the entire range of functions needed for a fully-featured cloud hosting brand.

“WHMCS is an incredibly important billing and support platform for hosts, especially in the midmarket,” said Carlos Rego, OnApp’s Chief Visionary Officer. “The development of the new module was heavily influenced by our customers, and the flexible WHMCS API let us deliver exactly what they needed.”

The new service is primarily aimed at WHMCS customers looking to step up to cloud hosting, or hosts looking for an end-to-end platform for everything from cloud provisioning to support. It also puts the pair into competition with the likes of Parallels, which already offers a similar cloud management environment.

"Combining WHMCS with OnApp brings together two great products for a customer base that demands complete automation," said Matt Pugh, WHMCS CEO. "With OnApp and WHMCS, service providers have a fully automated system for cloud hosting, from orchestration to service design and support, and now WHMCS customers can sell an even wider range of services based on OnApp."

These include Cloud Servers with fixed monthly pricing plans, or by-the-hour utility pricing, Virtual Private Servers (VPS) with fixed and flexible pricing plans, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) where CSPs can charge for fixed-rate global CDN packages or on a flexible basis, according to traffic, using OnApp’s federated cloud, DNS Zones charged on a per-zone basis, and reselling capabilities, where CSPs can use WHMCS to resell OnApp-managed infrastructure to other providers, so they can offer OnApp cloud services without requiring their own deployment of OnApp.

The integration was developed by OnApp over a five month period, with technical assistance from WHMCS, and input from OnApp customers whose test results and requests were fed directly to the development team.

The OnApp WHMCS module is available free of charge to OnApp customers. Development of the module will continue with the addition of OnApp’s new bare metal server and smart server provisioning capabilities to WHMCS in a future release.