Bamboo Invoice
Hosting
Install Bamboo Invoice in one click on our fast, reliable UK web hosting. Fully managed with free SSL, daily backups, and dedicated expert support.
What is Bamboo Invoice?
BambooInvoice is an open-source invoicing application written in PHP using the CodeIgniter framework. It was originally released in the late 2000s as a free, self-hosted alternative to subscription-based invoicing services. The project is licensed under the GPL.
The application is deliberately lightweight: a clients table, an invoices table, line-item records, simple PDF export, and email delivery via the host\'s SMTP. There is no built-in time tracking, no expense tracking, no project management, and no multi-currency support beyond a per-invoice currency string. Templates are HTML-based and can be customised with logo and colour overrides.
BambooInvoice is a maintenance platform in 2026. Active development is minimal, the CodeIgniter version it ships with is older, and most freelancers and small agencies have moved to FreeAgent, FreshBooks, Xero, or self-hosted alternatives like InvoicePlane. It remains useful for owners who installed it years ago, run a small client list, and don\'t want a monthly subscription. The 365i one-click installer keeps it available for that audience.
365i’s editorial review of Bamboo Invoice
BambooInvoice is honest software. It does invoicing, it does it cheaply, and it doesn't try to be a CRM, a time tracker, an expense manager, or a project management suite. For a freelance designer or a one-person consultancy with twenty clients and a handful of invoices a month, it's still a perfectly reasonable choice if you want to own your data and skip the £15/mo subscription to whatever the current invoicing flavour of the year is.
I've kept BambooInvoice running for a few of our long-term hosting customers. They installed it sometime around 2012, got used to the workflow, and have stuck with it. The data is theirs, the install is on hosting they pay for anyway, and the maintenance burden is essentially zero once it's set up. That's a hard combination to walk away from.
What works well: the install is tiny, the database schema is small enough to fit in your head, and the PDF export does the job. Email delivery via your hosting account's SMTP is fine for the volume you'd normally send. The admin UI is plain but readable, no animations, no unwanted dashboard widgets, no upsells.
"BambooInvoice is the kind of software you forget you're running. Once a month you log in, generate invoices, hit send, log out. That's the whole workflow. No subscription, no data lock-in, no surprise feature additions. There's something genuinely freeing about that."
Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting
What's annoying: it's effectively unmaintained, the underlying CodeIgniter version is dated, and PHP 8.x compatibility takes a bit of patching for stock BambooInvoice. We've patched the most common issues for our customers but we don't ship a maintained fork. There's no API. There's no Stripe or GoCardless integration, you mark invoices paid manually. There's no recurring invoice automation. If your client base grows past around 50 active clients, the admin gets unwieldy.
Hosting notes: BambooInvoice is happy on PHP 8.1 with a few patches we can apply, MySQL 8, and runs comfortably on our shared hosting from £5.99/mo. It uses essentially no resources, you'll never come near our unlimited LVE limits. Daily backups protect your invoice data, and we'd suggest periodically downloading the database dump to local storage as well, in case you want to migrate later.
If you're a new freelancer or starting a small agency in 2026, I'd genuinely steer you towards FreeAgent or InvoicePlane (the modern open-source successor in spirit). Both are actively developed and integrate with current payment processors. If you're already running BambooInvoice and it works, leave it alone. If your monthly invoicing time has grown to more than an hour, that's the signal to migrate. We'll help with either decision.
Why Host Bamboo Invoice with 365i?
Our web hosting is built for PHP applications like Bamboo Invoice. Every plan includes everything you need to launch and grow.
One-Click Installation
Install Bamboo Invoice with a single click from your control panel. No manual configuration, no FTP uploads, no database setup.
Free SSL Certificate
Every site gets a free SSL certificate, automatically configured and renewed. Keep your Bamboo Invoice installation secure from day one.
99.9%+ Uptime Track Record
Enterprise-grade data centres in the UK, US & Asia with redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity. Shared hosting runs on autoscaling cloud infrastructure with a 99.9%+ historical uptime record; Managed Cloud Servers target 99.99% uptime; our VPS products carry a contractual 99.99% network availability SLA with service credits.
Daily Backups
Automatic daily backups with easy one-click restore. Your Bamboo Invoice data is always safe and recoverable.
7-Day Expert Support
UK-based hosting specialists available 7 days a week including evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. Real people, real help.
SSD Storage
All plans run on fast SSD storage for snappy page loads and responsive admin panels. Bamboo Invoice performs at its best.
Where Bamboo Invoice Fits
Best for
Freelancers and one-person consultancies with under 50 active clients who want to own their invoice data, skip monthly subscription costs, and don't need integrated payment processing or recurring invoice automation. Long-running BambooInvoice users who installed it years ago and have a workflow that works.
Watch for
Effectively unmaintained, no Stripe or GoCardless integration (manual mark-as-paid), no recurring invoices, no API, and the admin gets unwieldy past around 50 clients. PHP 8.x compatibility needs patches. For new freelancers in 2026, InvoicePlane or a hosted service is usually the better choice.
Web Hosting for Bamboo Invoice
Get Bamboo Invoice up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
- 1 website
- 10 GB SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 5 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
-
Timeline Backup/Restore
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 10 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
-
Timeline Backup/Restore (Pro)
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
Need More Power for Bamboo Invoice?
For high-traffic sites, large catalogues, or mission-critical deployments, our fully managed cloud servers give Bamboo Invoice dedicated resources and enterprise-grade performance.
- Dedicated CPU, RAM & SSD storage
- 99.99% uptime
- Fully managed by our team
- Choose 365i, AWS, or Google Cloud
Servers
Servers
Servers
A Bamboo Invoice case from our books
A solo design consultant in Greater Manchester came to us in early 2025 with a BambooInvoice install on a defunct host. Their previous host had gone offline without notice and they were running the application from a six-month-old database backup, in a fresh BambooInvoice install on a friend's web space. The consultant raised around 14 invoices a month at an average value of roughly £680, so they had real money tied up in the application.
We migrated their data, applied our PHP 8.1 patch set, configured SMTP through their existing email account, and set up free SSL. Daily backups went on by default. We also set up a separate weekly database export to their cloud storage, which they\'d not had before.
The whole migration took us around three working hours. The consultant has been running BambooInvoice on our shared £5.99/mo plan ever since, raising and sending invoices on the same day each month, with no further intervention from us beyond the standard hosting platform updates.
What we would tell anyone in the same spot: BambooInvoice will outlive its developer if you give it a stable host and a backup strategy. We see it work fine month after month for low-volume billing.
Anonymised at the client's request. Industry, scale, and timeline preserved.
What we look for in invoicing systems hosting
Self-hosted invoicing apps are small and well-behaved technically, but they hold real money records and they need to be backed up properly. We back up the database and the document store together, daily, with thirty days of restore points, because finding a missing invoice from three weeks ago is a routine support request. We also run the outbound mail with proper authentication so the invoice itself reaches the customer, and we set the timezone correctly because tax filings are unforgiving.
More applications you can install on 365i hosting
Beyond Invoicing Systems, our one-click installer covers 79 open-source PHP applications across 27 categories. A small selection from across the catalogue:
Bamboo Invoice Hosting FAQ
Common questions we hear from people running Bamboo Invoice on our hosting.
BambooInvoice runs on PHP 5.6 or later, but for security and SMTP reliability we always run it on PHP 8.1 with a small patch set. MySQL 5.5 or later is fine, our MySQL 8 instance handles the small schema easily. 64MB PHP memory is enough but we give 256MB on our shared plan. SMTP access is needed for invoice email delivery, included with all our hosting accounts. No special server config beyond standard LAMP.
Yes. BambooInvoice is in our application installer. The installer creates the database, sets up the files, and applies our PHP 8.1 compatibility patch set. From the install wizard you set your business details, currency, and admin login. Total install time is under 5 minutes. After install, configure SMTP under settings > email so invoices can send, and add your logo under settings > business profile.
Up to around 50 active clients with a few invoices each per month, the application is fine. Beyond that, the client list view starts to feel cramped, search becomes more important, and you'll wish for filters and tags that aren't there. If your active client list is heading past 100, that's the signal to migrate to InvoicePlane (open-source, actively maintained) or a hosted service like FreeAgent. We can help with either migration, your invoice history exports cleanly to CSV.
Hosting-layer support 7 days a week with evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. We'll handle PHP, MySQL, SMTP, file permissions, SSL, backups, and migrations. Our PHP 8.x compatibility patch is applied at install. We don't add features to BambooInvoice or write custom invoice templates as part of standard support, that's development work. Datacentre infrastructure is monitored 24/7. The BambooInvoice community is small, so for application-specific questions, we'd generally suggest evaluating InvoicePlane instead.
Yes, free of charge. Send us your existing host's FTP details and database export. We'll move the install, apply our PHP compatibility patches, configure SMTP through your email account, and test invoice email delivery before we hand over. Most BambooInvoice migrations take us 1 to 3 working hours. If your existing install is on a very old PHP version (5.6 or earlier), we'll do the migration plus the version bump in one pass.
BambooInvoice doesn't store payment card data, you're marking invoices paid manually based on bank receipts. That removes the biggest PCI risk. The admin should sit behind HTTPS, free with all our hosting plans, with a strong password. The application itself doesn't have two-factor authentication, so we'd suggest IP-restricting the admin URL if you only invoice from a known location. Daily backups protect against data loss, and the GDPR position on a self-hosted invoicing app is straightforward because you control all the data.
Ready to Host Bamboo Invoice?
Get started with Bamboo Invoice on our fast UK web hosting. One-click installation, free SSL, and dedicated expert support included.