Starting my own hosting company
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URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=22171
Printed Date: 29 March 2026 at 3:37pm
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Topic: Starting my own hosting company
Posted By: iSec
Subject: Starting my own hosting company
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 6:34am
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Since I'm currently paying $134/month for my dedicated server, I decided to get a commercial account from my Interent Service Provider and start my own hosting company for my sites. I also decided to start (hopefully) making some money by hosting people's sites, too.
I already have 5 PC's ready. Two of them have 64-bit processors with 1 GB memory for each, the rest are intel Pentium 3.0 Ghz with 512MB. I'm also planning to buy a new 'server' PC with either a Duo or an Xeon processor which's where I want to host sites. I have also registered a domain name for my company and will soon incorporate it, trademark it, and plan to get my TID or Tax Identification Number to comply with my state's regulations, etc...
I really trust this forum members' experiences and hope to benefit from it on this. Here what I need help with:
Any help/tips/tricks are highly appreciated. |
Replies:
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 9:13am
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First of all 1Gb of memory is no where near enough for a web server, most of our servers running Windows 2003 are using in excess of 1.5Gb of memory. I personally tested all the control panels you mentioned and must say that http://affiliate.webhostautomation.com/idevaffiliate.php?id=206_8_1_20 - Helm is the best by far , if you have a look at our hosting at www.webwiz.net there is a demo of the Helm Control Panel. It's also on sale if you are quick with 50% off. For backs we use Backup for Workgroups which is a bare metal backup software at a really reasonable price. We then use this software to backup our servers each night to an off-site dedicated server located at a different data centre. A hardware firewall is the best solution for protecting your network, but I also use Microsofts ISA 2004 for our local office network which I find is just as good. ------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |
Posted By: Mikey
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 9:29am
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I'd go with -boRg- on the Helm front end. I've used many CP's and found that Helm was by far the best. As for good customer relationship? It's the same as any relationship in my book, just always be there for them  ------------- Handyman man? |
Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 3:06pm
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I'd forget about the commercial internet account and host in a data center. Sooner or later the big blow comes. But then again, I live in an area that is subject to the odd hurricane or ice storm. Most commercial DC racks are based upon particular server form-factors (e.g. 1u, 1.5u). They don't handle the standard desktop boxes. Security is a philosophy... not a software. You need to figure out what you need to protect and how. It's not just a network thing. Mail and DB servers need a different philosophy that web servers. e.g. will you allow unrestricted dbo access? will you allow traversing paths on web servers? What php options and why... because your customers will challenge your choices. Back-ups are similar in that you need to have and communicate to your customers a philosophy. Do you back up/restore by machine, by account, by domain on web servers. Is it by account or by db for DB servers? Do you back up Mail servers at all? Spam is up 60% over the last two months... mostly due to new methods of utilizing zombie pc's to send it. It's expected to get worse. Put some thought into anti-spam/virus. Many places are adopting a multi-level approach to dealing with it. One approach is to reject any mail received from an ip the first time then accept it and put the ip on a whitelist if the mail is resent within x amount of time. Will you restrict email lists? You probably won't want to for sites you create, but you don't know the people who sign up for hosting. Creating sites and running a data center are each full time jobs. Data Center support will need to take priority over everything else in your life and it won't be time you can plan on. If your heart lies with creating sites, stay away from the data center stuff and go with a reseller account. P.S. Don't offer immediate site set-up/access. Verify the customer and cc info first. EDIT: Re: Control Panel... go with the one you can get the most easily understood tutorials for. People either can't read or don't know what to look for in a FAQ. A little Flash goes a long way towards saving your time. ------------- 
Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me. |
Posted By: iSec
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 6:31pm
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Borg,
I will purchase a Helm license following the link you provided, but I was curious as to what the difference is between the Helm Control Server License and Helm Remote Server Licence?
Now for backups, you mentioned Workgroups Backup. I looked it up in google and came up with different results, some are free and others aren't. Can you post the right URL here please?
I will surely use a hardware firewall as I need to connect more than one machine anyways. I'll also look for that MS ISA 2004 software.
Mikey,
I think so too. I used plesk but I wasn't comfortable with its behavior when the server got restored or when I removed/re-installed it. It wouldn't function properly until I reinstalled after the HD was formatted and Windows got re-installed.
dpyers,
TYVM for all your great advises; I forgot many of them and you just reminded me. But after all, it is much better/cheaper for me to go with that plan than staying with a dedicated server, even if it is just to host my own sites. I will be paying the same exact price, but will have TOTAL access to my server(s) and do whatever I want (legally). For example, with my current dedicated Server I had to re-install the Server twice, each time I paid a fee of $35. I'm sure I will need to re-install it again in the future as I do a lot of testing on it for my school projects. So why keep paying that hosting provider all those charges? It will also be a good learning experience for me to operate such small business. I'm a network student and currently working on a very challenging capstone project with 7 other students, that project will help me do the right thing for this small business I plan to start.
As per a disaster occurrence, I do live in a very snowy city called Buffalo, close to Niagara Falls in New York state. This city is known for its bad snow storms. We just had a storm this past October (very unusual to have a storm that early time here) in which 90% of the city lost power, 300,000 people lost power for at least a week. Luckily at my house, I never lost power. I just re-wired my house a few months back to handle greater electrical power needs, too. The bad thing was that the ISP itself had an outage so having power without internet access still didn't mean much. This thing is not usual though. I remember back in 2001 we had a very bad storm and didn't get a similar one until this past October.
"Security is a philosophy not a software", this quote should be published on every technology website! I will do my best to reduce security risks, install essential hardware firewall and study other professional hosting companies' rules and apply it to my own. I have hosted with many good companies and know a lot as to what type of access is provided for their clients.
P.S. Borg I like http://www.webhostautomation.com/geek/ - this video on Helms website, so hilarious!
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 6:46pm
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The link you need is http://www.backup-for-workgroups.com/ - http://www.backup-for-workgroups.com/ The difference between Helm Control and Helm Remote, is that your first server needs to have Helm Control on it, then if you have other servers you can installed Helm Remote which the main Helm Control can control. ------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |
Posted By: iSec
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 7:27pm
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Borg, thank you mate. |
Posted By: Mikey
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 10:11pm
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Hahaha that videos perfect, shame they dont advertise on TV
------------- Handyman man? |
Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 11 December 2006 at 10:14pm
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Didn't mean to sound preachy. Wasn't sure of you background and level
of expertise but you seem to have your head on straight regarding the
things that might go wrong and have enough experience to remember
Douglas Adams' advice... Don't Panic". Good luck with the new venture. -------------
Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me. |
Posted By: the boss
Date Posted: 16 December 2006 at 2:11pm
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personally 2GB of RAM classifies as a desktop machine for me..because that is pretty much what the optimum computing horse power is these days...Server talk starts with 3GB and upwards.. Then are the SCSI disks and stuff...response time is very important for servers.. ------------- http://www.web2messenger.com/theboss"> 
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Posted By: iSec
Date Posted: 19 December 2006 at 10:01pm
I personally think that 2 Gb is good enough for each single server. However, the processor class/speed is what's important. Having an intel Xeon/AMD Opteron with 2 GB of memory would do just fine.
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the boss wrote:Posted By: michael
Date Posted: 20 December 2006 at 2:45pm
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Actually depending on what you are running I found RAM to be way more important. I still have one old Compaq P3 800MHz, but it has not 3GB of Ram which is its max, it run very fast for IIS, ISA and SharePoint +SQL Express 2x. Sure it's not the ideal but as far as IIS goes I found Ram to be very important considering persistant caching and dataset are all stored in memory. ------------- http://baumannphoto.com" rel="nofollow - Blog | http://mpgtracker.com" rel="nofollow - MPG Tracker |
Posted By: iSec
Date Posted: 21 December 2006 at 3:52pm
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I see. Well RAM is cheap these days and hopefully it will continue to be that way or cheaper. |
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 21 December 2006 at 4:38pm
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I find the same, it's very rare on most of the web servers that processing power goes above 20%, most of the time it's almost registering, but the amount of memory used is in the gigs. The only server that requires more processing power is the mail server and that's because it's running virus scanning on emails as they pass through the Mail Transfer Agent, even then it does top more than around 60% for a few seconds at a time when a big influx of emails come in at one go. ------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |
Posted By: iSec
Date Posted: 22 December 2006 at 8:06am
| I've always thought that the processor is more important than memory but I guess I'm mistaken... I will go with your advises guys... and add more memory to my machines. |