Hey Alan,

DNS registration integration is such a truly excellent idea that it deserved its own post!

There's not actually much to say about it other than we'll definitely tackle this, and soon. It would be very cool to be able to check a box and have the domain you're setting up registered autuomatically with the right DNS entries, technical contact (the hosting provider), and other stuff. There are a few issues that would have to be dealt with:

We don't have full Admin/Billing contact information...so we'll need to add a form for that. It will also need to come into the API, since a billing app, like AgileBill, may be doing the provisioning and we'll need to be able to get all of the right information from the billing app.

Billing...I'm not sure how domains sold in this way are billed (i.e. whether the hosting provider buys the domain from the registrar and the end-user buys it from the hosting provider or the registrar does the billing and kicks back referral payments to the hosting provider?). Will have to look into it, I reckon. This also presents the question of whether Virtualmin reseller accounts should be able to "sell" domains on their own GoDaddy or OpenSRS account and get the commission instead of the top-tier hosting provider. Since billing integration will probably always be a top-tier thing, it's probable that the way the billing for the domains happens (i.e. host bills or registrar bills) will dictate whether we will even be able to give resellers that privilege.

I guess I'll just have to do the research and try it out!

BTW-This also brings to mind SSL certificates. Who do folks like in this space, that has a good reseller API?

That's great news! AgileBill looks like a great product, and I just downloaded a trial version to start getting familiar with it.

I guessed that AgileBill would be the product, since I already discovered their existing support for the GPL version. I actually e-mailed you about it earlier this month, so it must have been fun to keep the secret. :-)

Even though the press release hasn't come out yet, I noticed in their Announcements forum that they listed Virtualmin Pro as a "New Provisioning Plugin" in the AgileBill v1.4.91 Release, which came out two months ago (on 7/25/2005). Is this the best one to use for now, or is there a newer unreleased version that I should ask Tony about?

Thanks,
Alan

Well, now that the cat is out of the bag on AgileBill, I see that they already have a plugin to support domain registrations, including the two I requested (OpenSRS and GoDaddy), among a bunch of others. So, I would be happy letting them handle this part of the process, while you guys concentrate on the the core Virtualmin functionality. Of course, you brought up great points about the reseller options, so there may need to be some additions to both the Virtualmin API and AgileBill to allow this to function properly. I'm not sure yet how they handle it with the other control panels.

Regarding SSL certificates, I think you discovered this already, but they are also available via both OpenSRS and GoDaddy, among others. However, it looks like AgileBill doesn't support this feature yet.

Thanks,
Alan

Hey Alan,

Yes, AgileBill+Virtualmin Professional has been working for some time. I wasn't aware they had already made a release, but I suspect the latest released version is the full implementation. We are keeping Tony in the loop on new releases, so he'll be aware of API changes as they occur (the goal, of course, is not to change the API in incompatible ways...but new API functions might make new functionality available to AgileBill).

Hey Alan,

Yes, there is much to be said for letting apps do what they do best. And it does look like many billing systems support DNS and/or SSL reselling. I'm still in research mode on the issue...if it requires us to do anything that resembles billing, we will avoid it for the foreseeable future. We want to configure your servers (better than anyone)...we don't want to do your accounting or billing (in a half-hearted way, which is all we could afford to do at this stage of our development--we just don't have enough hours in the day to take on a second major problem domain...besides that, the "all-in-one" solutions in this space are universally lacking in very serious ways in either billing or administration areas, and it's probably better to choose the best of each and integrate them cleanly through a good API).