PureEvil Posted May 9, 2008 Share Posted May 9, 2008 Howdy all: I've been reselling hosting for many years now, but I've always used someone else's servers running cPanel. My questions are many but I will limit them to a few for now. 1) I'm looking to get away from paying someone else to possibly running my own server(s). I've "used" cPanel and now Plesk over the years, but I've never really had to setup them up and administrate them myself. How hard would it be to setup a server and manage it? Are there any good books / websites anyone could point me at that you may have used to get started? I have limited administration skills, as in I can do it, just haven't sat down and learned everything there is to know about LAMP yet. 2) Is the above even a good idea? I have about 100 customers currently. All but ten are on cPanel driven web hosting while 10 (my newest customers) are on Plesk VPS being hosted by Network Solutions. I'm really starting to like Plesk over cPanel from a user stand point, but I'm not sure if administrating one is harder than the other. I would like to just move all my customers over to Plesk from the cPanel hosted side of things but the Network Solutions reseller accounts are all limited to 256mb of ram which makes them nearly useless for what I'm trying to do, resell hosting. 3) Hardware, what should I look at for 100 customers? I have many duel 800/1000mhz HP Prolient DL360 G1/G2's with 1 gig of ram each at home that I could use. Also bringing a T line in to the house wouldn't be tough either. I will leave it with those simple questions instead of using up everyone's day =P If you believe you have some information that would be helpful to the above questions please let me know. I thank you for any and all of your help... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zq29 Posted May 9, 2008 Share Posted May 9, 2008 I think it depends on what service you originally sold to your clients and if they are willing to re-negotiate their service level. Don't forget, almost all professional hosting companies have, or rent space in, a data centre. This comes with such luxuries as controlled climates, state-of-the-art fire suppression systems, backup generators, backup network infrastructure, multiple direct connections to internet backbones etc. All helping to promise this 99.9% uptime that so many of them shout about. When running your own servers, you also need to be keeping on top of all the latest software patches, security exploits, resource monitoring. I'm sure you wont be just running a web server either, no doubt you will need to be running other servers at some stage too (mail, DNS, etc.) - Not to mention the hardware angle, you'll need quick access to replacement hardware should anything fail. Don't forget about your other running costs too... Software licenses (cPanel, Plesk), electricity (running multiple servers 24/7), connectivity (1:1 connections aren't cheap, in the UK, anyway), numerous IP address leases... Why not set up one of your spare servers with LAMP and run a website on there for a few months and see how much work is involved in keeping it secure and well maintained. It can be done cheaply; with connectivity through a consumer broadband connection and a dynamic DNS service such as dyndns.org you could at least get a fair insight into public web server administration. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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