WHMCS - Registrar Module FAQ

27 September 2023 13:35

Additional Domain fields

I am unable to register special domains like .ca, .de, .it, etc,. Your API gives an error message: Missing the required information. How can I solve this issue and be able to register domains?

Firstly, follow the below steps to ensure your WHMCS System is correctly set up with our integration:

Ensure to keep the default additional domain fields file untouched! /resources/domains/dist.additionalfields.php
WHMCS 8: Use the latest version of our ispapi registrar module. Ensure to not have a custom configuration file in place /resources/domains/additionalfields.php or at least not to have TLD configurations related to our integration as part of that file.
WHMCS 7: Use v5.1.12 of our registrar module. Ensure to have a custom configuration file in place: /resources/domains/additionalfields.php.

For building up the custom configuration file, refer to our sample file here. This is as mentioned only required for WHMCS 7 and lower using our Module in v5 and below. NOTE: Newer module version are not compatible to WHMCS 7 and below.

NOTE: Our latest ISPAPI Registrar Module Version comes with translation files that need a special one-time installation step. Read about it here: WHMCS - Module Installation & Upgrade.

Grace & Redemption Period

The Redemption Period is nothing but a Restorable period aka ‘Deletion Restorable Period’.

These settings are now part of TLD Import & Pricing Sync Feature of WHMCS v7.10 (aka. Registrar TLD Sync). Find it under Utitlities > Registrar TLD Sync.

Releases < WHMCS 7.10: You can find the duration of the redemption period on our wiki for each TLD. For example, check ‘Deletion Restorable Period’ here. Pricing can be found in the control panel. Navigate under your account > BILLING > Prices & costs > Domains > see ‘Restore’ column for pricing.

Related: Registrar TLD Sync Support

Registrar TLD Sync Support

This feature is supported since WHMCS 7.10 and by our registrar module. Please upgrade to the latest registrar module version. Feel free to forward further related question to us.

Registrar TLD Sync
TLD Pricing Sync

Some additional Hints:

ensure to increase max_input_vars in your php.ini to 10000 as a lot data is being submitted by whmcs
Although we also return if the TLD requires EPP/Auth-Code for transfer, it doesn’t update the setting in section Domain Pricing. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature of WHMCS. In case the EPP code settings got manually configured before, this won’t get overwritten. So to activate the sync for EPP code, you’ll first have to completely drop your old domain pricing configuration.
In the pricing popup you might recognize -1.00 prices which are placeholders in WHMCS for being disabled. No need to worry if you sell then under your own costs! From WHMCS Support:

For example, transfers are generally only good for 1 year, so for years 2 and onward the price appears -1.00. Likewise if you opt to disable renewals for a certain length, it’s perfectly legitimate to do that there as well. In particular, it’s very difficult to renew a domain name for 10 years unless you do it at precisely the right time on the day of expiration, so 10 year renewal is frequently disabled with a values of -1.00.

Promotions are not part of that pricing sync. We are investigating in that point to find the best way to bring this to WHMCS too.
The TLD & Pricing Sync isn’t perfect - I see 0Y / costfree transfers still missing and unsupported in WHMCS Core
We in general return the registration periods. Some exotic TLDs support those periods just partially or not for renewal. That’s the downside of the built-in Importer. It would have been better having the possibility returning registrartion, renewal and transfer periods completely separated to WHMCS. But this isn’t desired by WHMCS’ Design. We addressed this multiple times.

Availability of ID Protection, DNS Management and Email Forwarding

Yes, HEXONET provides these Add-On services. Find the Pricing for ID protection in our Control Panel by navigating through: BILLING > Prices & costs > Add-ons. DNS Mangement and Email forwarding are free if the DNS Zone is managed by us.

NOTE: In our Registrar Module Configuration, you’ll find the checkbox Sync Id Protection that you may want to activate. It allows for importing which TLDs are supporting the ID Protection Service. This isn’t natively supported by WHMCS and a custom feature of our integration.

Adding Nameservers

After registering the domain name, navigate to Domain management page of the domain on the client area. Click on ‘Private Nameservers’ and register your nameserver by providing relevant information.

Please give the WHMCS - Registrar Module article, chapter "NS & DNS Management" a in-depth read.

Invalid attribute value; X-ACCEPT-WHOISTRUSTEE-TAC not supported

In case this error happend for a domain registration, then you made the Id Protection Service available for a TLD where this is not supported at all. Please turn of the checkbox of DNS Management in the Domain Pricing Overview for this TLD and Save. Turn of this Addon for the Domain and then retry the registration via Utilities > Module Queue.

NOTE: We have a registrar module setting that you may use for importing which TLDs support the Id Protection Service. You may activate it so that the next Pricing Import is taking care of this.

Move a Domain to a different Customer in WHMCS

You can cover this as described here.

Domain Portfolio Migration to WHMCS

If your domain names are not yet managed by HEXONET, you have two possibilities:

(1) Transfer every domain by “Single Transfer” into WHMCS (“Transfer” button on the entry page of your WHMCS instance). This is the best way if you just have a few domains.

(2) If you have a lot of domains to transfer, you may want to use our WHMCS - Domain Migrator Addon for WHMCS.

If your domain names are already managed by HEXONET, then use our WHMCS - Domain Importer Addon. Let us also point to the built-in, but manual way of importing single, non-premium domain names to WHMCS. Read here for more details.

Wrong Availability Check Results

Ensure you’re using our ISPAPI Registrar Module as Lookup Provider
Ensure to have the pricing correctly configured for the related TLD
Ensure to have the latest version of WHMCS and our registrar module in use
Check if you’re eventually connected to the OT&E System (TestMode activated). Find the Setting in our registrar module settings. In case the TestMode is activated you’re connected to our Demo System which is NOT representing the real world, but can be used for integration tests.
The TLD is eventually not supported by us - please reach out to us.
The Domain Name you provided is eventually not valid. e.g. xxx.pro. The minimum required domain name length for .pro is 4. Some registry provider are in addition restrictive regarding supported characters / IDNs. Check the related TLD in our wiki to identify if there are such restrictions.
In case of a Premium Domain Name, ensure that the underlying Currency of the Registry Provider is configured and available in WHMCS. Find the currency out by executing the following command in our Control Panel (> 'API ACCESS' > enter the command > submit. Find the currency in the API response. WHMCS enforces the pricing to be returned, which is only possible if the related currency is configured.
```
COMMAND = CheckDomains
DOMAIN0 = mydomain.com // your domain name here
PREMIUMCHANNELS = *
```

WHOISTrustee vs. Trustee

For Domain Registrations, some ccTLDs require a registrant and/or admin contact with local presence/physical address in a particular country. This might require a so-called local presence / proxy / trustee service. Using our trustee service (which is NOT free of charge), would allow you to order such a ccTLD domain name if you’re not located in that particular country. WHMCS is not supporting this Domain Addon.

The WHOISTrustee Service is our ID Protection Service and can be ordered via WHMCS. Read FAQ #13 for more details.

Purpose of ID Protection Service

This service (aka. Whois Privacy / WHOISTrustee Service) cloaks your personal or company details from the publicly accessible whois database.

When registering a domain name, you are enforced providing accurate contact details which must be verified. These contact details are then stored in a publicly accessible database called the ‘whois database’. Unfortunately hackers, spammers and fraudsters have been known to use this information to target domain holders. This service protects you from this by acting as a proxy, the detail listed in the whois database rather than being your own are that of our proxy services.

It is available for the most gTLDs and nTLDs at least, but using the Service got superfluous as of GDPR.

Nameservers / Contacts not updated after Transfer

In general HEXONET’s Backend System / API does not apply the requested nameservers after successful transfer. We of course accept the transfer requests including nameservers, but that feature has just been introduced there for exceptional TLDs that allow this on registry-side - so registries that do not follow the EPP Standard. The EPP Standard itself does not offer a way in the transfer process to include nameserver changes. For historical reasons (to stay downward compatible) the decision was made to not change this in the way of a post-processing step on API-side. Still, I can forward that we plan to work on a new Middleware App (WIP) that will focus on such topics.

Now to the better news: We worked on this in our WHMCS ISPAPI Registrar Module as WHMCS itself allows such post-processing. In case you’re using an updated version of our ISPAPI Registrar Module, and have it configured accordingly (see Registrar Module Settings), we will process a domain update after successful inbound transfer to take over the requested nameservers and contact data changes.

Basically, this has to be used with caution as of WHMCS’ bad design. So, how does WHMCS cover this itself? In the transfer order process, the customer can provide new nameservers - by default your configured default nameservers are provided in the form (The Namserver Configuration in “General Settings” in WHMCS). This means: WHMCS will always provide nameservers - if the customer wants to change them or not! I tested this and even if the customer does not provide nameservers (removes them from the input fields), WHMCS makes a fallback to your configured default nameserver set. This is the bad design I mentioned. We on registrar-side don’t get any information about who has provided the namservers to the transfer order - the customer or WHMCS itself. That’s why the setting we introduced has to be used with caution. Using it might fit to some customers, but probably not all of them. I hope you were able to follow me here in this point.

Multi-year Registration Pricing calculation

In our Frontend aka. Control Panel, access your pricing details by clicking on your username at the top right and than navigate to “Billing > Prices & Costs”.

Domain Registration Prices are calculated by considering Setup and Annual Price Price Portions. The Renewal price is nothing but the ‘Annual price’ here.

The below explains the calculation formula:

price = setup + (term * annual)

In the most cases the setup portion is 0.00 and is therefore not “problematic” regarding WHMCS’ Pricing Import aka. Registrar TLD Sync. Our Pricing Import Integration in WHMCS as importing as follows. There’s no better alternative based on possibilities provided by WHMCS.

price = (setup + annual) * term

WHMCS just allows for specifying a single registration and renewal price and is multiplying it with the given terms. Check FAQ #32 regarding pricing import issues.

More DNS Resource Record Types

WHMCS doesn’t support many resource record types yet e.g. SRV - upvote the feature request here.

Our ISPAPI registrar module offers support for SRV and more records in WHMCS. Please read WHMCS - Module Installation & Upgrade on how to make them available (hint: Child Themes).

Domain got unexpectedly renewed

You have to set the global domain renewal mode in your account at HEXONET to AUTOEXPIRE. Already existing domains have to be manually updated in that direction.

The global setting just applies to new domain registrations, transfers and not to your existing portfolio.

Please give the WHMCS - Registrar Module article, chapter "Domain Renewal Mode (Preventing Automatic Domain Renewal)" a in-depth read.

Continue Reading with the next point.

Autorenewal not correctly reflected

The API-side autorenewal setting is not related to the WHMCS one! That's why changing it on API-side has no impact to the setting in WHMCS and vice-versa.

Public Whois shows “1API GmbH”

1API is our in-house registrar company for HEXONET.

Renew/Transfer Automation not working in WHMCS

Check if you correctly configured your TLD Auto-Reg Settings for this TLD (via System Settings > Domain Pricing)
WHMCS checks for the credit balance of your client to automate transfer/registration operation triggered by him/her. Without the client’s credit balance, the transfer would not be triggered automatically.
Your HEXONET account should be with enough funds (The account specified in the registrar module configuration).
A bug of the Payment Gateway Addon eventually (not auto-processing correctly)

Register .ONG domains via WHMCS

.ONG domain registration is a special case. You need to register .NGO domain to get .ONG domain. Both TLDs are technically bundled. For more information please have a read here.

.ONG domain can automatically be registered when a .NGO domain is registered. But .ONG domain cannot be (seen)/maintained in our system. Since .ONG and .NGO are bundled, managing .NGO domain also affects the .ONG domain maintenance automatically.

If you want to particularly manage/have it in your account a .ONG domain, the domain should be using HEXONET nameservers and DNS zone. If that is the case we can manually import the .ONG domain into our system and make it possible for you to maintain it(Contact Backend for this).

Whois lookup not supported for .africa

This is the warning we are getting:

WHOIS Lookups cannot be performed for the TLD .africa

The whois URL for .africa provided by WHMCS is outdated. Please create /resources/domains/whois.json (for WHMCS version >=7.0) and add the following code:

[
    {
        "extensions": ".africa",
        "uri": "socket://africa-whois.registry.net.za",
        "available": "Available"
    }
]

Note: DO NOT modify dist.whois.json. For more information, have a look at here

Hostname changed in DNS Resource Record

e.g.

help.hexo.com -> help.hexo.com.hexo.com.

Why my zone is added at the end of my hostname? How can I fix this issue?

-> Ensure that any hostname end with a “.”. So, in this case “help.hexo.com.”.

Nameserver Change for a .DE Domain

How can I update nameservers on my domain name in case it fails with something similar to:

`Command failed; 53300102912 Nameserver error [ERROR: 901 Unexpected RCODE (target\, entity\, RCODE) (ns3.test.ch./130.211.50.255:53\, er-ert.de\, REFUSED)]`

Before you can update the nameservers via WHMCS, you need to create the zone at your nameserver (using our Control panel) It’s a DENIC specific case. DENIC does nameserver checks.

For additional information, read:

Once you’ve created the zone, you will be able to update the nameservers for your domain, even via WHMCS.

Registration using external Nameservers failed

I received the following error for my domain registration:

"#31125 - host association mapping references a nonexistent host name; host_name"

The reason is that your nameservers do not exist yet. Register your nameservers and try again to register your domain with your nameservers. Check the "Private Nameservers" feature of WHMCS.

Cronjobs in WHMCS

When you upgrade PHP version in your system, cron may stop running. Always check if the cron is running properly after every change you made in your system.

Running WHMCS cronjob in your system is important for automation of operations(eg: domain transfer sync) There is a limit to the WHMCS cron. Each time it runs it automates (say 50) jobs. It may take time to update the status of your transferred domains. It depends also on how many numbers of jobs to automate created in your WHMCS.

You can also manually execute the crons in your system. Eg: php -q <PATH-TO-YOUR-WHMCS-CRON-FOLDER>/cron.php do --DomainTransferSync

Read the WHMCS Docs for additional information.

Built-in WHMCS Module or your Module?

The HEXONET registrar module is natively shipped with the WHMCS Software and maintained by the WHMCS.com Team. This module can't therefore be supported by us as we have not access to the underlying source code. In case of bugs, please reach out to WHMCS via whmcs.com.

The ISPAPI registrar module is not shipped with the WHMCS Software, but available for download at Githb. It is maintained by CentralNic’s Middleware Team and coming with the latest features and patches.

We highly recommend using our ISPAPI registrar module. In addition, all our addon modules are linked to the ISPAPI registrar module to establish a connection between our API and WHMCS. So that you can register and manage all HEXONET products in WHMCS. For example, SSL certificates and DNS Zones and RRs, etc.

Read: WHMCS - Module Installation & Upgrade

.UK registrar/IPS tag support in WHMCS

For more general information, have a read here.

First create a transfer request at the gaining registrar. Then request the Domain Release a the loosing registrar by navigating to domain details page in WHMCS’ Admin Area (one way: Clients > select your client > Domains > select your domain). There, click on the ‘Release Domain’ button. A pop up with a text field for Transfer Tag will appear. Specify the registrar tag of the gaining registrar in that text field. Click on Submit.

Our tag is “1API-DE”.

Manual Domain Sync

If you want to trigger your Domain Synchronisation Process manually, you can do that by

/usr/bin/php -q {PATH_TO_CRONS_FOLDER}/cron.php do --DomainExpirySync --DomainTransferSync

NOTE: The Path to your PHP Binary might be different. Find it out by which php. Replace {PATH_TO_CRONS_FOLDER} accordingly to fit your WHMCS installation. This covers the Domain Synchronisation including the Domain Transfers.

WHMCS - Connectivity Issues