Unlike most "reseller systems", our API is a totally custom platform allowing all our clients to interact with almost every aspect of their services by remote software applications. Plus it's totally free of charge! Example actions which can be performed using the API are:
- Servers (dedicated and colocation)
Check traffic statistics and obtain bandwidth graphs, request IP addresses, customise reverse DNS entries, action remote power cycles and request KVMoIP sessions. - Monitoring
Manage your contacts, add new monitors and alter existing tests, retrieve status summaries, per-node details and uptime statistics for every monitor. - Accounting
Check our product catalogue, stock levels and estimated setup times, place orders and process renewals, check your account balance/statement and download invoices as PDFs. - Authoritative DNS
Easily add and remove zones and configure resource records of all common types inside our resilient cluster of DNS nameservers. - Support
Raise new support tickets, reply to existing threads and check notifications and maintenance windows (notifications and maintenance coming soon).
The hosting API is continually expanded as we launch new services: our intention is that all aspects of your services can be controlled through the API! Our API is site- and vendor-agnostic: regardless where your server is located or who provides a domain or SSL certificate, our API exposes the same interface to you... so your client code is simple and you don't need to waste time interfacing with radically different systems!
Uses for the API
Here are a few example cases where the API can benefit our clients:
- Reseller hosting
Since you can place orders, process renewals, obtain statistics and generally control all aspects of your service with us, you can pass this functionality seamlessly on to your own customers via your own control panel etc. - Integrated enterprises
You may already have software you use for systems management, accounting or CRM. With our API, you can interface that software with your hosted services: process new orders, renewals and control your services from the same system(s) you already use! - Automated tasks and response
Perhaps you have one of our monitoring packages and use our authoritative DNS services for a load-balanced service. In that case, you can monitor your primary server and if it becomes slow to respond, automatically update the DNS records for the zone to change priority to the backup! You could even set-up an HTTP monitor for your server (checked from 3 nodes to avoid false positives), have your external system check it via the API, and if it goes critical your system can take the appropriate action immediately!
As the number of services which can be managed by the API expands, the number of use cases also increases. If you've got a requirement not currently covered, please get in touch!
Technical Details
The API is exposed over HTTPS (secure) using the Representational State Transfer (REST) Web services architecture. We have chosen REST over other Web services technologies (such as SOAP) due to its minimal dependencies and both ease of understanding and speed of programming. Most queries to our API will require request/response data to be passed to/from our server(s). For reasons of widespread adoption, simplicity and portability, we encapsulate all such data using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). JSON is a subset of the object notation found in JavaScript, so will be familiar to many. It is also more compact than SOAP and has tiny syntax parsing libraries available for almost all languages.
We also provide an almost-complete client library (SDK) in PHP and Java, so you only have to download the library, configure your API username and password and begin calling the functions!
Existing customers can request the full API documentation by raising a support ticket through the Management Console. For security, access to the API is also restricted by an IP access control list, so you will need to specify your client IP address(es) in your ticket.