Way back in my December 2019 blog post I said that we were looking into developing our own Customer Billing Platform, and again in my June 2020 6 month update I said that we were still working on this.
Well today, we actually have something that we can show you…
… I know, I know. Its only showing, but the section that has now been written (I think anyway) works very well and looks really smart and clean.
The new Portal is being written using the Bootstrap framework for the front end of the Portal but we are writing everything else by hand ourselves, in house.
So, where exactly are we then?
Well as you can see from the two images above, the whole of the Login/Logout, Signup and Lost Password section has been completed along with the section that allows you to add, remove and verify your telephone numbers and postal addresses. Along with changing your password inside the portal (once logged in) and we have also added the option for enabling 2-Factor Authentication.
That’s all of the Customer Details bit done and dusted, so then we started on the ‘Your Services’ bit next.
Well we had to work out where we were going to start (well I had to be somewhere right).
So we picked a service that we no longer offer to the public anymore (what a great idea). We do still have a couple of customers that have Dedicated Servers with us and after talking it over with some of them they very kindly agreed to give us their feedback once we got this far.
We tried to cover as much of the configuration of their Dedicated Server as possible and at the same time giving them the control and ability to make changes or to make it as simple as possible to make changes or to report issues with the Hardware.
During this build, we worked with each of our main hardware units to get the IPMI integrated and we have also handed over the changing of the Reverse DNS entries to the user, instead of it being raised as a support ticket to us.
As we developed this section, we have learnt loads from working on this first part of what has now become a massive project with an ever growing list of things that we want to make possible in our own platform. We have actually created a ‘Lets Look at that later’ queue too.
So what are we doing now that this section is done?
Well we are still talking to our few Dedicated Server customers making sure that we have everything that they need, and while that has been going on we have nearly completed the creation of the billing for the Dedicated Servers that are currently in the platform. The downside for us is that you can’t pay us – but we will get there later.
Seriously though, our next step will be to look at getting Domain Name registration and renewals working as we see this as one of the biggest sections that needs to be done with some many different providers and different rules around each TLD so at the moment we have are drawing pads out and pencils trying to work out the best design layout for the Domains page we need it to be full of all the information you need along with all the tools you need to manage and use your domains.
If you have any ideas or would be interested in ‘having a look over’ the new redIT Customer Portal please let us know and we will be more than happy to invite you when we need some more reviewers or testers.