I'm doing a research to create a web hosting company. I found this
newsgroup and maybe you could give me tips and useful links.
I need almost everything to found my company. I am reading books on Unix
Administration, the FreeBSD Handbook, and Networking.

I don't want the company to be yet another so-so hosting company. I want
to concentrate on customer support rather than on solving technical
problems. The least technical workforce I'll need the better. The idea is
basically "just" monitoring that everything works fine, updating once in a
while hardware and software easily and automatically on all servers.

What I want to do is a system that manages itself intelligently. For
instance, software updates should be done automatically (I just learned
how to do it with CVS + Cron).

I also need software for the end-user. I found cPanel+WHM, and there is
also Plesk. They're both very expensive, and I don't think they're viable.
Do you know an open-source solution? I always prefer open-source software
because you can contribute your way, it's good and stable software, and
you don't have license headaches.

I think it's critical to think about hardware and software failure that
happen early or late. I'm looking for a solution for both:
- Software: a monitoring system that sends an e-mail (or something else,
a pager alert...) saying exactly that machine X is having a DoS attack, a
freeze, Apache has stopped functionning, the connection to the Internet is
lost, etc...
- Hardware: pretty much the same thing, a monitoring system that says in
"real time" that disk ad2 has failed on server X, that a cable has been
disconnected for some reason, etc...
I guess there must be solutions that provide such service through SNMP...

I think it's also important to have a system that provides true redundancy
for 0 downtime: having 2 geographically seperated rooms with 2 independant
ISPs, and one room is the mirror of the other in real time, so that if one
ISP has a technical problem, the web site doesn't come down but the other
server relays the information. I think maybe it's possible to do this
through rsync (never done it).

Last but not least, is there a system that provides easy and intuitive
administration tools to create accounts for web hosting? (for instance
somedomain.com with 100 Terabytes HDD space and 10 Pentabytes bandwidth
per month!)

If you have other ideas, they're welcome.
Thank you,

--
Kerberos.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Begin  <opsjztmbthqi7syn@pretinho>
On 2005-01-02, Kerberos <me@privacy.net> wrote:
> I'm doing a research to create a web hosting company. I found this
> newsgroup and maybe you could give me tips and useful links.
> I need almost everything to found my company. I am reading books on Unix
> Administration, the FreeBSD Handbook, and Networking.

Oh dear. Do yourself a favour and hire a real unix gal or guy. You only
need one, and maybe not even full time. But if you don't have the skills
already you're going to hit a learning curve and your customers'll
get to enjoy that, too. Of course you can watch and learn, but as you
mention later on you'll want to focus on running the company and on
keeping the customers happy, and not on struggling to learn a system you
don't know well, yet.


> I don't want the company to be yet another so-so hosting company. I want
> to concentrate on customer support rather than on solving technical
> problems. The least technical workforce I'll need the better. The idea is
> basically "just" monitoring that everything works fine, updating once in a
> while hardware and software easily and automatically on all servers.

You're rationalizing the technical problems away. If you do not want
to be a so-so shop, you will have to fact the facts and have someone
_good_ set it up and monitor it for you. A new shop _will_ have teething
problems, and you _will_ need expertise to set it up properly and make
sure everything a) works and b) can be made to work again when something
goes wrong. And you already have your arms full with all the other
little details that make up running a company.


[snip: dreams]
> If you have other ideas, they're welcome.

As I said, do yourself and your customers a favour and hire someone with
10+ years of experience with how to keep machines running, to consult you
and get you a working setup. It will not be cheap up front, but it will
give you a stable foundation you can build a good name on.

Then again, it seems everybody has to have had his sky fall down on him
at least once.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Thanks. But is it possible to have all I asked previously?
I don't pretend to do the technical stuff (not enough skills, and no time
at all), but I'm learning to at least have an idea of what the person I'm
going to hire is doing.
What I want is to automize the most so that everything is easy and not
time-consuming.

--

Kerberos.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 18:52:49 -0200, Kerberos <me@privacy.net> wrote:
> I'm doing a research to create a web hosting company. I found this
> newsgroup and maybe you could give me tips and useful links.
> I need almost everything to found my company. I am reading books on Unix
> Administration, the FreeBSD Handbook, and Networking.

You don't know anything about the technology, but you want to be a web
hosting company.  Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

> I don't want the company to be yet another so-so hosting company. I want
> to concentrate on customer support rather than on solving technical
> problems.

How are these two things different, exactly, in the context of the
type of service you're proposing?

> The least technical workforce I'll need the better. The idea is
> basically "just" monitoring that everything works fine, updating once in a
> while hardware and software easily and automatically on all servers.

Uh huh.

(Snip more of the same)

> If you have other ideas, they're welcome.
> Thank you,

I think you have no idea what you're proposing getting into.  If you want
to see how some real pros do it, go to rackspace.com and see what kind of
support they provide.  Until you can do anything vaguely resembling
that, with that level of service, network redundancy, solid hardware
(for me, no downtime in 7 server-years so far), and their extremely
good _technical_ customer service, you have no hope of competing.  Their
prices and level of service will give you a good idea what you'd need
to get to before anyone would even consider your service.

If you don't have several (3 or more) network feeds, from different
providers, forget it.  UPS?  Physical security?  Why should I trust whoever
you are?  That sort of things.

I think you've got some homework to do first.
Dave Hinz

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 09:10:57 -0200, Kerberos <me@privacy.net> wrote:
> Thanks. But is it possible to have all I asked previously?

Not with your apparent level of technical experience based on your
questions.

> I don't pretend to do the technical stuff (not enough skills, and no time
> at all), but I'm learning to at least have an idea of what the person I'm
> going to hire is doing.
> What I want is to automize the most so that everything is easy and not
> time-consuming.

Automation is time-consuming, but it's only so once.  Like someone else
said here, you'll need at least one wizard-level person for several
to many months to get you going, and you need to have a decent infrastructur
e,
support, and pricing, or you'll have no business.

If it was me, I'd get that stuff set up on my own box first, learn how to
use it, and go from there.  Build up a base infrastructure, some sample
boxes, break them & learn.  Then, realize you need a wizard, but you'll
know what questions to ask in the interview.

The setup you're describing would be perfect for someone wanting to
do remote consulting on a per-hour basis; I'm not sure you'd have
much luck hiring someone away from another job for this setup.

Dave Hinz

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Em 3 Jan 2005 14:57:34 GMT, Dave Hinz <DaveHinz@spamcop.net> escreveu:


> I think you have no idea what you're proposing getting into.  If you want
> to see how some real pros do it, go to rackspace.com

I think their prices are ridiculously high, some competitors of them
provide excellent service and are 10x less expensive in the US. Many
companies just don't have the budget ready to spend more than $500/month
for a server.
I live in a 3rd-world country and here prices are a lot cheaper. Regarding
Rackspace, people pay a technology that is no reason for such a price,
even for middle-size companies. We rent servers as middle men to small and
middle-size companies, our prices are a fraction the price of Rackspace,
and we hardly ever have any technical problem. IT budgets are tight most
of the time, and without competitive prices we would loose the market.


--

Kerberos.

http://www.opera.com
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.auriance.com
http://www.osresources.com
http://exodus.jabberstudio.org

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:38:38 -0200, Kerberos <me@privacy.net> wrote:
> Em 3 Jan 2005 14:57:34 GMT, Dave Hinz <DaveHinz@spamcop.net> escreveu:
>
> 
>
> I think their prices are ridiculously high,

I don't.  Their servers, and service, is spectacularly good.

> some competitors of them
> provide excellent service and are 10x less expensive in the US. Many
> companies just don't have the budget ready to spend more than $500/month
> for a server.

I'm not paying anywhere near that.  And if you're paying 50 bucks a
month, you're getting a shared server in a chroot environment, not
a dedicated piece of hardware.  But you must know that.

> I live in a 3rd-world country and here prices are a lot cheaper. Regarding
> Rackspace, people pay a technology that is no reason for such a price,
> even for middle-size companies.

If you say so.

> We rent servers as middle men to small and
> middle-size companies, our prices are a fraction the price of Rackspace,
> and we hardly ever have any technical problem. IT budgets are tight most
> of the time, and without competitive prices we would loose the market.

I thought you said you were looking at getting into the business, now you
make it look like you're already in it and just trying to get the word
out or something?

What's the real situation here, anonymous person?

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Em 3 Jan 2005 20:58:20 GMT, Dave Hinz <DaveHinz@spamcop.net> escreveu:

> I thought you said you were looking at getting into the business, now you
> make it look like you're already in it and just trying to get the word
> out or something?
>
> What's the real situation here, anonymous person?
>

No, we're just dedicated servers resellers, but we want to get into the
market to make more money.

--

Kerberos.

http://www.opera.com
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.auriance.com
http://www.osresources.com
http://exodus.jabberstudio.org

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 20:24:24 -0200, Kerberos <me@privacy.net> wrote:
> Em 3 Jan 2005 20:58:20 GMT, Dave Hinz <DaveHinz@spamcop.net> escreveu:
> 
>
> No, we're just dedicated servers resellers, but we want to get into the
> market to make more money.

You need to hire someone who knows these things.  If you try to learn
them yourself, your customers will know more about it than you will, and
you'll fail.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]