How Helm 4 Works

Designed for growth, whatever your size

Helm was written from the ground up specifically to cater for the widely different types of hosting businesses in the industry. Helm has a flexibility that is unbeatable and has been proven to dramatically reduce support time, administrative time and provide growth capabilities unparalleled by other control panel systems.

Multi-Server Management

Helm has the flexibility to support any sized web hosting company by being able to provide its full range of services across thousands of servers or all on just one single machine. Adding and removing servers as you grow is easy and Helm has the ability to distribute your web sites across multiple servers insuring that they are used as effectively as possible.

Helm has the flexibility to support any sized web hosting company by being able to provide its full range of services across thousands of servers or all on just one single machine.

All webhosting providers have to start somewhere, and it's usually on just one or two servers. Being able to grow to hundreds or thousands of servers is very important, and Helm will support this growth every step of the way.

What makes Helm unique is that it will offer more than just adding a web server. Service distribution is a very powerful feature of Helm.

All webhosts know that the market is continually fluctuating, and, although growth is always a preference, not being able to reconcile servers to save on hardware expenses or to upgrade obsolete technology can be very costly to a business. As well as helping support growth in a simple and efficient way, Helm can support the ability to reconcile servers and reduce, what used to be, unavoidable additional expenditures.

Helm is a powerful multi-server capable system. The in-built server manager allows easy tracking of the servers that are available on a network. The ability to simply add a server makes Helm a massive advantage for scalability.

With Helm's powerful resource distribution whenever servers become close to full utilisation, an administrator can add further servers to increase the total capacity. Whether a reseller is setting up hundreds of domains or just a few, no server will be overloaded, nor under utilised. This can save a web host company from wasting an unprecedented amount of time and money.

The above example shows how easy it is to extend the web resources to cater for growth. This type of scalability doesn't just work for web services but for other services such as mail, database services or even DNS.

Helm has a unique, powerful service distribution facility that is capable of running any services on any server including mixing and matching services from different providers.

It is almost impossible to determine whether a reseller may set up hundreds of domains or just a handful. It is recognised that assigning a reseller to a server is, therefore, a far from effective way to best utilise server resources. Assigning a reseller to a server would mean that some servers will likely become heavily, if not overly loaded, whilst others become under utilised. Helm's ability to distribute resources will mean that this will no longer be a problem.

Administrators can assign a set of services for each of the servers at a datacenter. A reseller package can have more than one of the same service for which the administrator can assign a distribution method to evenly spread resources.

Helm handles all of the services' facilities. Website owners and resellers do not need to know what servers they are using nor what product type the service might be. Helm provides a standard interface for all the services. Even if you have three types of mail server, all the website owners will use the same interface no matter which service they are distributed to.

User Management

Helm's user hierarchy allows higher level users to access the accounts of their customers below. Administrators can drill down into any reseller account, their customer's account and finally their individual domains. Administrators are given access to all of the features and functions of the reseller and customer level.

Benefits

One Centralised Control Panel
By providing a single control panel for all your users it becomes much easier to manage your customer base. There's no need to log into multiple locations to manage your users as every account is accessible from your administrators login, even if your customers sites are setup on remote servers.
Keep in Touch with your Customers
By providing a single system for all your users Helm allows you to easily keep in touch with your customers. The integrated Messaging System allows you to send all your customers important notifications. Helm will handle many of your day to day communications with your customers such as sending invoices and payment reminders.

Features

Manage all users from your administrator login
Drill down into a resellers account, their customers' accounts and individual domains
Access all features and functionality of resellers and customers
Create new users manually
More..

Automated Billing

Helm has an extensive billing system. Administrators can set up billing for their resellers and draw sales reports. They can view outstanding customer invoices, amend the amount of tax charged to resellers, create custom invoices to send to resellers (and specify delivery settings), and create payment receipts that get sent automatically once a customer makes a payment. They can also set up payment gateways for customers to allow quick and easy payments, and also generate payment reminders for late-payers.

Benefits

Bill for Any Type or Number of Services - Helm allows hosts to bill for any type or number of web hosting services. Complex service bundles can be configured with any number or type of service, enabled, activated and billed with one itemized invoice.

Automatic Recurring Billing - Helm allows you to automatically charge your customer for the services they use on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or one-time basis.

Offer a choice of Payment Methods - With Helm you can offer your customers multiple payment options including credit card, PayPal, cheque and bank transfer.

Features

Bill customers in ANY Currency
Store credit cards and automatically bill your customers
Send your customers customisable invoices, receipts and payment reminders
More...

Personalisation

You can include your own custom HTML headers and footers for your customers. Helm will even allow you to provide custom links that will appear on the customer's side bar to go to any location you like such as helpdesks, forums or contact pages. This means that you can change the look and feel of Helm to fit more in line with your own website branding, whilst losing none of Helm’s functionality.

Reporting

Helm lets you generate reports for reseller, customer and domain bandwidth usage over specified periods. This expands on the basic statistics that cover two default time periods.

Learn more about Helm's functionality here..