Bogdan Pop : Web development , Photography , Dj

How many of you are in this box? I think there’s thousands of ModernBill users, which since few years ago, when they started using their services, have gone mad over and over because of the poor support, buggy web applications and so on.

Ooops, did I say poor support? I mean, inexistent support! You actually get to there support ticketing department, and they redirect you to their FAQs or knowledge base, which is badly written, with dead links, describing features that are not where they are described to be and so on.

Now, assuming that you are really stuck in the tracks, and there is not a single user who has experienced your same issue, and to “show and tell” it on their official forum, you are pretty much doomed. What is stupid, but funny, about their forums, is that they state it loud and clear that the forums are NON-SUPPORT (with allcaps). However, having said that, I must add that there is no other place where you can get actual support!

Let me brief you regarding my company’s experience with ModernBill. We started using MB back in 2005 if I recall it correctly. I haven’t had many issues. I ordered, paid, got my license, installed it, and everything worked smooth. Yes, there were some small exceptions, minor things easily sorted out with some support (which replied after days), and their forums. Thank God for those forums. If it weren’t for these forums, their support technician replies would have been dust in the eyes.

Now, serious issues started to rise when we switched datacenters, back in November last year. Imagine that we have carefully backed up everything. As any smart, normal man would do it anyway. We restored the account on the new server in the new DC. Everything worked fine, except ModernBill, which worked, but banned people from logging in. In fact, for correct username/password you got a blank page, but if inputed incorrectly, you knew that from their fancy error system.

I tried over and over to search for an answer on the forums, no luck. In fact, there were a lot of others like me. So, eventually I had to renew my support subscription (at ModernBill you pay to get stupid answers 48 hours after you ask the question). I had to pay for the support I wouldn’t have needed. They needed my server access details to fix this serious issue themselves, which of course they couldn’t so they had to tell me, upgrade!

So I upgraded to their latest version of the software. As their upgrade scripts were faulty, corrupting hosting plans, client information etc, I had to drop everything, start again from scrap and input all the information manually. Just as a head-up, their app uses 215 SQL tables. Yeeeeey!

After I finished this, I started using it. It worked very much ok! Until things started to go wrong, and they keep going wrong. It all started around 22nd of February when I realized that I had some overdue invoices, and their application was not sending out notification of overdue invoices which will trigger client account suspensions etc.

I contacted support, got some “valuable” reply 3 days later. The actual solution came on 3rd of March, from Blake, one of MB developers. However, it was not such great as they updated custom email templates. This actually means that all emails which will now be sent will be in English, not Romanian, the language of my customers.Great! Once again, modify them all manually. Yeeeeey!

Then, there are no notification mails sent what so ever, even as I am writting this post, the issue is not solved. Moreover, the ordering process sometimes creates duplicate entries. One orders one package, but I get 3 duplicate orders in the database. Yeeey!

Finally, one order few hours ago, everything ran smoothly, but when the automated scripts attempted to create the package on the server, I got a “username” too long error. Their service is configured to use 8 letters from the domain name for the username, and replace/remove some if there can be duplicates. Then, why the username too long issue.

So, it is 6th of March, 15 days since first contact for this issues, no real good solution. In fact their last reply (which was Blake’s reply) was 3 days ago. Yeeeey!

So, if you are looking for a hosting management system that works when it works, uses a lot of RAM, is filled with bugs, has unfinished features (by this I mean stuff like create some config and being unable to modify, reverse it, delete it etc, if you do not know SQL and MB database, so that you can perform it by queries), if you are looking for poor down to no support, you want your heart to spike up, and are eager to pay big $ for it, go ahead, buy ModernBill.

But perhaps you should buy a holiday in Mali, or any other exotic place for the change.

Cheers!