WHMCS with Private Cloud Servers and Advanced Product Setup

With the steps of the previous articles complete, we now have the WHMCS Liquid Web plugin setup and enabled. If you followed the previous directions, you’ve successfully created the first product based on your VPS server offerings. We will now cover some more advanced product creation options.

Step #1: Create a Liquid Web Private Cloud Product

To create your first Private Cloud product you will first need to open the Product Setup Wizard page within the WHMCS interface:

1. Click on the ‘Addons’ tab at the top of the page.
2. Select the ‘Liquid Web Storm Servers Billing’ option.
3. From the sidebar on the left, click ‘Product Setup Wizard’.
4. Once loaded, select only 'Liquid Web Private Cloud' then click 'Next'.

1. If you already have a Private Cloud server continue to F, otherwise you will need to create a new Private Cloud server:
   
   1. You will see a 'Add New Server' dialog box come up, once the page loads.
   2. Select the Zone you'd like the server to be in.
   3. Review the available Private Cloud servers and select the one you'd like.
   4. Provide a hostname for the server in the 'Host Name' text input.
   5. Click 'Add Server'.
2. You may now create the Private Cloud-based product.

1. After adjusting the options as needed, click the 'Save & Continue' button.

Step #2: Advanced Product Configuration Settings

While the initial settings in the Product Setup Wizard are generally enough to accommodate most product creations, there are more advanced settings which might be useful when creating more complex product configurations.

There will be small differences between the advanced settings found within the Private Cloud settings and the VPS based settings, though generally they both have most of the same options.

To access the advanced product configuration settings you can either: click 'Save & go to Advanced mode' button when creating a new product, or by opening a current product and selecting the 'Module Settings' tab.

As seen above the advanced configuration pages are fairly similar in nature, this should make using these pretty simple once you've worked with either one. To further simplify understanding the options available, you will only find the following options on the VPS page:

• Default Configurable Options
  • Used to generate a handful of customer customizable server options, such as: VPS type, Backup settings, IP address quantity, and bandwidth quotas
• Zone
  • Determines the 'data center zone' that the server can be created in
• Config
  • Defines the specific server that will be used to create the product; e.g. 1G SSD vs 2G non-SSD

The following options are only on the Private Cloud page:

• Configurable Options
  • Similar to 'Default Configurable Options' above, this generates a number of Private Cloud specific options that can be exposed to customers upon checkout.
• Custom Field
  • Similar to the above point, this generates custom fields to collect data on customer checkout.
• Parent Server
  • Defines the parent server that this product will use when creating new instances.
• Available Parents
  • A list of available Private Cloud servers that are usable as a Parent server.
• Select Parent Automatically
  • When enabled the product should automatically select the parent server based on available resources.

On both Private Cloud & VPS pages you will find:

• Username & Password
  • These are the credentials used when connected to the Storm API - should be prepopulated with the credentials that were initially created.
• Template
  • This is the image used to bootstrap the server -- this determines the Servers OS, Management Panel type, and Server Management Level.
• Image
  • Allows the new server to be bootstrapped with a Storm Server Image if the account contains some images.
• Backup Plan & Backup Quota
  • These options determine if backups are enabled, what type of backup plan is used, and the quota applied to the backups.
• IPs Number & Maximum Number of IPs
  • Defines the default number of IP addresses to start the server with and the maximum number of IPs a single server can allocate.
• Bandwidth Quota
  • Allows customization of the Bandwidth quota applied to the server.
• Monitoring
  • Enables customers to control Monitoring services on the server.
• Firewall
  • Enables customers to control Firewall services on the server.
• IPs Management
  • Enables customers to control IP address allocations on the server.

With a multitude of product configuration options available, you can choose exactly how you offer products and services to your customers. By fully utilizing these more advanced settings you can allow customers to select from a very specifically tuned array of products, or to adjust product details as they wish during the checkout process.

Step #3: Working with Configurable Options

To expand further upon the ability for your customers to tweak and adjust services they are ordering you can take advantage of the 'Configurable Options Groups' within WHMCS. These 'Configurable Options' are additional options that can be presented to a user upon ordering a service.

By utilizing these configurable options with the advanced features discussed above you can provide customers a 'build your own' server experience, a variety of products to fit specific needs, or a mixture of both.

To begin working with 'Configurable Options' you will need to open WHMCS and go to the
'Setup -> Products/Services -> Configurable Options' page.
Once there you can see a list of the groups similar to the following screenshot.