Howdy all,

Ever wanted to register domains right from Virtualmin? Of course you have!

Now you can, with the Virtualmin Domain Registration plugin. I've just rolled it out for all platforms, and once installed, and enabled, you can manage your domains directly in Virtualmin.

Here's the documentation, including installation and configuration:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/id,domain_registration_with_virtualmin/

Two caveats:

It currently works with Register.com only. They were enthusiastic about the plugin, and were willing to work with us on their API. Others will follow over the next few weeks, as we find other APIs that match our requirements.

You currently have to setup your reseller account directly with the registrar (it'll be included in the next version of the plugin, as soon as Register.com gets their part of the API working). The steps for doing so are covered in the documentation.

Give it a try, and as always, file bugs in the tracker if you run into anything weird.

I take it you have discontinued Mandriva urpmi support since its not in our repo.

No, it's in the universal repo--it ought to be available for all RPM-based distros (and it's also in all Debian/Ubuntu repos). Something must be broken. I'll look into it.

It's showing up in the file list for Mandriva. Are you getting any errors or anything?

This is interesting news. I was actually just looking into options again for automating domain registration/management and billing. I'm glad to see there is development on this front, especially since it seems like the existing solutions have been pretty stagnant over the past year or so, but I really hope to see other registrars added soon.

Register.com doesn't have such a good reputation in the hosting community, and my personal experiences haven't been so good either. On top of that they are one of the most expensive, in line with NetSol. I can't imagine paying $35 for domain names when almost every other registrar does it for less than $10, but obviously it works for their business, so more power to them!

I have seen a lot of positive comments about ResellerClub (Directi) and Enom. Here is some info on their APIs, which are both pretty open, flexible, and extensive:

http://www.ResellerClub.com/features/api/

http://www.Enom.com/resellers/Interfaceinfo.asp

It would be great to have support for GoDaddy as well, but I'm skeptical about their API.

Speaking of this, have you heard of Solid-State?

SolidState is an open-source (GPL) web-based billing and customer management solution for web hosting providers. It is written in PHP, uses MySQL, and is fully templated with Smarty templates. It is built on-top of a modular framework with support for third-party payment gateways and domain registrars.


It appears to be a fairly new (or revived) project, and it seems like it would be a perfect compliment to Virtualmin. It still needs some work, but it has a nice clean interface, an open thorough API, and it already has modules for both Enom and ResellerClub on the domain registration front, as well as payment gateways through Authorize.net and PayPal for billing. See here:

http://www.Solid-State.org/

http://API.Solid-State.org/

Why reinvent the wheel if there is a perfectly good (and free) one already available that just needs a little work?

Register.com does not charge resellers $35. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how much they do charge their resellers...but it is competitive, and leaves you as the hosting provider room to make some money. ;-)

But, we will be adding other registrars, for sure. Register.com is just the one for whom we had a contact that would work with us to make it actually work. It's still not perfect--you can't register as a reseller through Virtualmin, which would be the ideal situation. But aside from that quirk, everything else works fine.

Solid State looks awesome. I dunno if it works, but it looks great. I'll have to see if we can't get some sort of working relationship with them. We'd love to be able to recommend a few other billing options.

Okay, I guess I jumped the gun assuming their reseller pricing was as high as their end user pricing. But part of the reason for that assumption was that they don't clearly publicize the reseller pricing. I looked for about ten minutes and then finally found it hidden in one of their terms documents, which I had to read carefully to figure out the actual pricing. While it is more reasonable than what I expected, it is still somewhat higher than competing reseller plans. In my case, we would have to raise the prices that we've been charging our customers for the past 5 years just to break even. I'm not looking to make money on domain name registrations, but I don't want to lose money either or have customers start asking why our prices are higher than everyone else's.

That said, I do appreciate the fact that they were willing to work with you to make it work, and it does sound like a good solution. But I am really looking forward to see support for other registrars, especially ResellerClub, or better yet tight integration with a decent billing/management solution (like Solid-State) which handles both the registration and billing aspects at the same time.

Okay, I guess I jumped the gun assuming their reseller pricing was as high as their end user pricing. But part of the reason for that assumption was that they don't clearly publicize the reseller pricing. I looked for about ten minutes and then finally found it hidden in one of their terms documents, which I had to read carefully to figure out the actual pricing. While it is more reasonable than what I expected, it is still somewhat higher than competing reseller plans. In my case, we would have to raise the prices that we've been charging our customers for the past 5 years just to break even. I'm not looking to make money on domain name registrations, but I don't want to lose money either or have customers start asking why our prices are higher than everyone else's.

That said, I do appreciate the fact that they were willing to work with you to make it work, and it does sound like a good solution. But I am really looking forward to see support for other registrars, especially ResellerClub, or better yet tight integration with a decent billing/management solution (like Solid-State) which handles both the registration and billing aspects at the same time.