Starting my own hosting company

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 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.


Edited by -boRg- - 11 December 2006 at 9:59am

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.


Edited by dpyers - 11 December 2006 at 3:21pm

The link you need is 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.

Hahaha that videos perfect, shame they dont advertise on TV