It sure ain’t out of love.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a company in the web hosting space who’s more despised than Oakley Capital, who owns WHMCS, cPanel, and Plesk.  Every year there’s another price increase, and they’ve strangled off lifetime licensees.  They’ve constantly turned the screws on their customers, restructuring their pricing tiers and moving all their products into a per-subscriber model that means you’re paying an Oakley tax for every customer you get.

The product itself is very functional, but unless you throw a lot of resources at it, performance can be sluggish, so that’s another invisible tax.  It is also very complex and takes quite a lot of time to setup and maintain.

And it’s not because of lack of competition.  There’s Blesta, Hostbill, BillingServ, and numerous others who’ve come along in an attempt to dethrone WHCMS.  They have market share, but nothing like WHMCS’s.

So why stay?

This question was posted on LowEndTalk and generated quite a bit of discussion.  The answers:

• It just works.  For all its faults, WHMCS does what it says on the tin.  Given the permutations of shared hosting panels, VPS hosting panels, and billing integrations, plus tax jurisdictions, keeping all of that functional and working is WHMCS’s main strength.  If there’s a new version of Solus or cPanel/WHM, you can be certain that WHMCS will issue an update that is compatible.
• Network effect. If you hire someone as a help desk tech, they’re likely to know WHMCS.  If you’re setting something up in your datacenter, you’ll find a lot more answers around “how do I do ____ with WHMCS” than “how do I do ______ with ClientExec”.
• Ecosystem.  The marketplace for modules and themes is much larger for WHMCS than it is for other competing products.  Likewise, if you need something custom, you’ll find a lot more devs who’ve written custom modules or themes for the product than for others.
• Inertia.  Moving off WHMCS to another product would be a big headache.  It means tons of disruption for you and your customers, and it’s easy to say “I’ll just pay the bill again for a few more months”.  Imagine all the hours it will take to setup and configure a new system, and then add the hours to move all of your existing customers seamlessly to it.  What’s the ROI on that?

So why do you stay?  Is it really out of love for the product, or one of the reasons listed above, or something else?  Let us know in the comments below!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.