How to replace Clickatell's service with your own SMS service

Clickatell provides bulk SMS services over HTTP. If your customers are unhappy with the service they provide, you can provide SMS service to them through a similar HTTP SMS API. In this guide we explain how this can be done.

Setup Ozeki NG to be able to send and receive

In order to provide an SMS service, you need to have Ozeki NG SMS Gateway installed on your computer and it should be able to send and receive SMS messages. The SMS quick start guide explains the initial configuration steps to take to setup Ozeki NG for SMS messaging.

Create a user account

Once Ozeki NG is installed you can provide an HTTP SMS service to your customers in a similar way HTTP SMS providers, such as Clickatell provide a service. To provide the service to your customer, first you have to create a standard user account for your customer. For example you can specify un1 as the username and pw1 as the password.

Give the HTTP API URL to your customer

Once the standard user account is created, you can give the following HTTP API url to your customer. This URL can be used instead of the URL provided by Clickatell: 

http://66.77.99.99:9501/api?action=sendmessage&username=un1&password=pw1&recipient={destination}&messagedata={text}

In this URL replace the ip address 66.77.88.99 to the IP address or the hostname of the server your Ozeki NG SMS gateway is installed on. You also need to put the username un1 and the password pw1 into the URL.

Note: The clickatell URL your customer would replace would look like something this: 

http://api.clickatell.com/http/sendmsg?user=somuser&password=somepass&api_id=111111&to={destination}&text={text}

Advantages to using Ozeki NG SMS gateway instead of Clickatell

If you use Ozeki NG SMS Gateway instead of a HTTP SMS service, such as the one provided by Clickatell, you don't have to worry about service provider failures and performance problems. You can build a redundant, reliable system with backup routing and load balancing.

You can also track messages and keep track of costs with the SQL Logging feature Ozeki NG SMS Gateway provides. The SQL Logging feature saves a copy of all outgoing and incoming messages into a database. This gives you the ability to create reports.

If your messages are sent and received through Ozeki NG SMS Gateway you have a much better control of SMS routing. You can use inbound SMS routing and outbound SMS routing to control where your messages end up. Routing can be done based on telephone number prefix or message content, such as keywords.

Another advantage is the ability to use custom sender address in your SMS messages.

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