Best Way to Start a Website Hosting Service? 164
Kwirl writes "Lets say that I wanted to start a small business endeavor, namely reselling my server space and offering pre-built websites. What resources would I need to start something like this on my own? What hosting service would best suit those needs? What would be the best way to manage a subdomain-level service that provided a basic forum, registration, a web site and some controlled administrative access for my friends so they couldn't easily terrorize each other? I'm curious to know if I could start something like this on my own, and without much more than just my own server space, time, and creativity. I'm not looking to make a living out of this, its mostly just a way for me to more efficiently manage having several friends each wanting me to built or run a web site for them, and perhaps make some small residual income if a market exists. The Slashdot community represents such a broad swath of experience and expertise that I'd like to know how you would approach a project of this nature."
Plesk (Score:5, Informative)
But, if you insist..
Set up a simple box running Plesk. It automates most of the tasks of handling users, billing and maintenance. It also allows them to mange their own accounts.
Quick, simple
Re:CPanel (Score:5, Informative)
I work at a web hosting company and I find InterWorx to be the best at doing a little automation without making a mess of everything.
That said, if you know how to use Linux, don't use a control panel. You'll find it easier to manage things yourself. Short of the MTA, these things are really rather easy to configure.
Control panels + advice (Score:5, Informative)
It's more annoying than you might think. I've done it, all my friends have done it, my cousin's done it and our dog will be doing it soon.
Don't don't don't. It's a VASTLY under subscribed and overly competitive market. Once you think you're the best, and you're successful, you become too reliant on a core group of customers who won't last for ever.
There are reseller accounts available with lots of ISPs, but few are on a commission basis (ie: you're the one who has to cover your client's costs and invoice them). Flat fees are usually available to dedicated servers licensors @ £50/m+ - but the market is changing and I'm not at all surprised if they're cheaper.
Plesk [plesk.com] - possibly the worst thing I've ever used. Convoluted backend I couldn't hack on to extend pop-before-smtp the way I wanted.
CPanel [cpanel.com] - the original but very costly 6 years ago when I last used it. Has some impressive addons
Ensim [ensim.com]DirectAdmin - Not one I've used personally, but I hear its ok.
VHCS [vhcs.net] - Freeware. Never used it personally. But there are many OS projects and forks [isp-control.net] out there if you look [freshmeat.net] hard [sourceforge.net] enough [digg.com] ]
Cubepanel and BlueQuartz worth a mention.
Most of these project offer "lite" versions which are free for restricted personal use. The only major difference between the free and paid versions is that the latter has multi-user and reseller capabilities.
I'd recommending taking up a decent Linux or BSD distro with a proven track record of security fixes. "apt-get update" is sufficient for the home user, but realistically, you want to track purely security updates. Consider an enterprise OS (CentOS?!)
Matt
Like everybody else says (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to play with a server environment, get a mainstream linux distro and install it with all the web capabilities from the beginning. Then learn how to administrate it, install and modify php, learn apache control mechanisms, learn about chroot jails, even consider virtual servers (as in VMWare type of virtual).
Then if you're still up for it, rent a virtual solution from somebody else, and play with it a bit more. The costs to entry are very low, but there is almost no return.
Build your friends website by all means, but you're better off hosting it on a third parties hardware, and let them take the strain of running the hosting business. You still get admin access, but all the tools will already be in place.
I've been doing this for years (8+) and I get more hassle from the users than from the sites. You need a call centre just to explain to people that there is nothing wrong with the site, maybe their net connection is down. Or they're not getting their email, because their isp is blocking it, or the page doesn't look right because their browser is still caching it from last month etc etc etc.
I have someone who questioned why their site costs money each month to run. "To pay for the server" I replied. "Oh, I thought that once you had uploaded it, it was out there, on the internet" he replied. *Smacks hand to forehead*
Oh, and if they want to offer downloads, then make it clear that they will be charged for bandwidth, over and above any monthly fee. Do not give shell access out like candy, and don't allow anonymous ftp.
All in all, don't bother, unless you really are a masochist. By all means build sites for friends, but set them up with a host somewhere, and let them get on with it. 90% of people don't keep up with updates to sites anyway, and you get left with crap lying around on your server(s). I have 1 guy who bought a domain name through me around 6 years ago. He has never had a website for that domain. Every year I hit him for the renewal fees and he pays up, but it will never be a real functioning site. He is the best kind of customer. Beware of people who want stuff, especially those who think they know what they want.
Overall, realise that this is a huge subject with many many intricacies that you find as you go along. Do you really want to go down that road, or would it be much better to take the blue pill now and forget about it ?
Sure, go ahead. Here's how. (Score:4, Informative)
You'll need Ubuntu Server, Drupal, Webmin and Virtualmin. All are F/OSS and usable out-of-the-box with large and friendly support communities. Good luck, have fun.
Re:How to succeed in 10 easy steps (Score:4, Informative)
That's a great idea.
I originally setup xen-hosting [xen-hosting.org] selfishly because I wanted a decent root access level of hosting for myself, but didn't want to pay for a big machine.
Within a week I'd found enough users to bring the cost down to an acceptable level, primarily because a few people know me and trust me, but the intention was always there to document it fully and have people setting up similar things.
Two years on I'm not aware of anybody who's replicated the setup which is a real shame, I think there's a lot of space for a kind of "cooperative" hosting setup, each one with maybe 10 users.
Re:Control panels + advice (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.webmin.com/virtualmin.html [webmin.com] (free/gpl)
and its commercial 'pro' version..
http://www.virtualmin.com/ [virtualmin.com]
Re:If it were me (Score:2, Informative)
Something else, too (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not your lawyer, and this isn't legal advice, but you really should seek some out.
$15 per month buys you a shake-and-bake web host (Score:5, Informative)
$15/month got me a reseller account with a very very nice host. When I was just their customer they treated me like royalty, I love their service. The $15 bought me space, bandwidth and access to WHM, the admin side of Cpanel. I was free to slice it up any way I wanted, and each of my customers would have their own cpanel.
The smart ones knew how to install whatever they wanted without the cpanel automation.
The rest were self reliant enough so cpanel was actually useful.
One of two idiots just couldn't pay attention if their lives depended on it, so it wouldn't matter which method they chose.
The second problem was domain names. Almost everyone was sick of the Netsol prices, but most got burned buying discounted domains elsewhere. Almost by accident I ran into a small domain wholesaler based in India, the reseller account was free so I decided to give them a try.
They are fantastic, four years later and hundreds of domain names purchased and NEVER a problem that could be blamed on them. Every single problem we have had could be traced back to a bad discount registrar trying to screw a customer out of transferring out.
The main problem with doing this is that customer support does take time. I made a point of always being available to anyone that used my services. I was always willing to IM or talk on the phone regardless of how stupid the issue was. Because of it my attrition rate is literally nonexistent.
By "accident" my previous boss overheard that I had my own domain registrar, and that my domains were less than $10 instead of the $35 he was paying.
Overnight I had nailed a 30+ domain customer.
The funny thing is that my hosting provider kept increasing the quotas for my plan, but kept the price frozen. That means I still pay my $15, but now I have 10x the disk space and at least 100x the bandwidth I started with 4 years ago. This allows me to be generous when a customer runs over bandwidth and I let it go "just this time."
They feel like I did them a favor, when all I did was use up a tiny bit of the extra capacity that was not drawing revenue.
Do I make money out of this? It pays itself, and I get some extra cash left. Many times friends ask me about cheap hosting for a family member, so I usually sell them the domain name and give them a small hosting account for free. If I botch something, I give them extra hosting, if it was a BIG screw up I give them a free domain (I don't remember giving away more than 2-3 domains in the past 4 years).
I also play with the allowances just to see how people react to it. For example, I may set a basic account so it has up to 5 parked domains (these point to the root of the account), 5 add-on domains (these are stand-alone within the account), etc. This costs me nothing but when they ask nice I say "just because you are a good customer
Then there are the miscreants. I had one customer overseas, I have no idea where he came from but he immediately bought the biggest plan I had, which was expensive and ate 25% of my resources (and I was not overselling, he DID get 25%). A week later his site auto-shut down due to bandwidth use.
He came back to complain, I explained to him what he had done. He asked how much. I honestly wanted him to go away, so I offered him to temporarily bump him by 1GB for the rest of the month for $100.
He said yes, and paid on the spot.
Less than a week later he was back. Same deal. Another $100.
$300 later he moved his site elsewhere and I never heard from him.
Another customer, also overseas, was good for about 5 domains per year and maybe $200/year worth of websites. The problem is that she IM'ed constantly, and for stupid crap. Every week she would reinstall what
hard, quite hard to deal with a hosting biz (Score:3, Informative)
however it is not easy to:
1- wake up at 2AM because a customer in Spain (we are in latin america) screwed the whole system
because of some sort of rabbit process or 2- same.. with databases going wild and crashing
3- customer calling EVERY day with problems with their emails.. emails that are for sure sent but never arrive... you check the logs and mails are there..just that they somehow never readed it. This is the biggest problem.. mails not arriving, customers unable to check themselves or to read what: quota exceeded, or error dest@domain.com> unbalanced >, or user unknown.. it is a royal pain.
4- resellers? A royal pain, we are getting rid of them and hosting or direct customers.. resellers pays little, demands huge and move to another service as soon as they find the other place gives them 50c/mo disscount.
5- invoicing customers? getting payments from them? IT IS HARD. We have a motto: if the customer does not want to pay on time, then he does not consider our job and must be suspended.
We warn the customer 4 times 30,1 5,7 days before expiration and the day of expiration.. We suspend them 1-3 days after the expiry date... hardly any one can pay before the expiry date.
The funny thing comes later: "you are trying to blackmail me because you suspended my site", "I never got the mail (we keep copies of the warning mails)", etc... in any case, most of them pays.. quite upset because of "the blackmail".. and I wonder myself.. did they call the telco and say the same things when they forget to pay for the phone bills? And the electricity company? We have detected that some of the customers ask you "reactivate me and then I will pay" this is the usual phrase(ok, in several flavours) to say you: "I wont pay you, I just want to take my site off you and ran away" it is a pain, actually.
6- spam: oh god.. this is hard... "why Im receiving spam?" "Im getting like 5 spam mails/day, this is unbeareable", etc, etc, etc.. then setup an antispam service (let's say greylisting): "why are my mails delayed for days?" (days, not minutes... they always exagerate the issues).
7- lack of evidence: NONE of the emails accounts from NOBODY of my company works: This is the most useless phrase I have ever seen.. like if exagerating the problem is the right way to solve it.. at the end, when they explain the problem it is something related to point 3 in one account not in every. We then tend to ignore other claims from the same customer as we know it is a false positive.
They never call, except for complaining.. your server could be working 24x7 for, let's say 10 months.. then your server hiccup because of a bastard running an unoptimized sql query... be ready, calls will rain... specially the "Im running a 10000usd/hour business, you do not have idea of how much I have been affected by this 5 minutes of downtime" we wonder, in front of them "why if you are having such a profitable business will you run your website on a 48usd/year shared hosting"? why dont you rent us a dedicated or vps? Some of them have rented it.. other immediatly start whinning: oh, money is so scarce, we actually are almost broke, etc, etc.
profits are nice, in our case... dealing with the technical details are quite nice... we learn a lot, we get in touch with a lot of interesting customers and situations... but dealing with support is a pain in the ass.
sorry for such a long post... but I was actually needing to let all this shit come out...