Need suggestions for hosting control panel - EHCP, Cpanel, etc?

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tankman1989

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I have a server that I am going to put at a co-location site and it has more than enough capacity than what I need. It has 64GB of ram and 4 dual core 3.5Ghz CPU's (a little lacking on cpu power, but it's what I have).

I'd like to see if I can give away free hosting accounts and or sell VPS accounts on this machine. I would like a free hypervisor so I guess I'm stuck looking at Hyper-V or a Xen alternative. I'm not sure what ESXi x.x would cost but am trying to evaluate 5.0.

I am planning on offering CentOS and Debian (maybe Ubuntu 10.04 as well) as OS options for the free hosting and possibly some Windows choices for paid VPS services. I'm really confused when it comes to the hosting control panels and have used EHCP a little and have looked at Cpanel but am shying away because of price.

Can anyone give me thier input or recommendations for a venture like this? Cost is a major factor here and I would like to keep this to a minimum but am willing to spend a little to make administration easier.

As always I really appreciate any input here - thanks in advance!
 
cpanel is what people will expect and is pretty easy to use
sounds like you would want the VPS license which isn't that expensive

what is the point of giving away free hosting? that server cost a lot and your monthly hosting prices costs a lot... how do you plan to make money on free hosting?

you could try xenserver if you want xen
 
ripken204 said:
cpanel is what people will expect and is pretty easy to use
sounds like you would want the VPS license which isn't that expensive

what is the point of giving away free hosting? that server cost a lot and your monthly hosting prices costs a lot... how do you plan to make money on free hosting?

you could try xenserver if you want xen
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Well I am going to have free hosting for members of the local Chamber of Commerce. Since I have a fixed hosting fee for the server I am hoping to gain some good will from local businesses and I'm also charging for site development if they want that to be done. I'm not giving away huge packages but large enough to be usable for a normal business site.

I'm hoping that when they see that I am offering a stable, reliable service that they will migrate over to the managed services down the line. I will have a statement in the ToS agreement that when resources need to be freed up the free hosting is the first to loose resources and or be cancelled with 90 days notice. At that point they can go to another free hosting service that we recommend or sign up for a small hosting plan provided by our business.

I also will need them to list my business and hosting services on a links/partners page and possibly a small "banner" ad for support services - it would more be an icon than a banner.
 
cPanel is great if you're setting up reseller accounts, however I think for single domain accounts Plesk offers a much nicer looking interface.

Check out KVM on Ubuntu if you want a free virtualization solution. It's well integrated into Ubuntu and development is funded by redhat on the actual core modules.

EDIT: You can check out webmin too, it's not as nice as cPanel or Plesk but it's free.
 
I will be hosting many domains, I alone have about 30 which I will be switching over from 1and1 (I like 1and1's web hosting setup, IDK what they use). I will offer free subdomains to local businesses but won't offer free domain names for businesses - they need to buy one and point it to my server. So if that is the case, I know EHCP will do the job but I don't know how much documentation and community support there is compared to something like Cpanel of Plesk.
 
I'm going to be blunt. You are out of your league (Based from observations from your multiple threads). You need to setup a home lab, learn and play with what you are asking about and make a decision based off your experience. Once you have the experience, planning and funding then you can start a project like this.

If you jump right into this with live customers they are going to get really pissed and leave when you have issues which are bound to happen.
 
klank said:
I'm going to be blunt. You are out of your league (Based from observations from your multiple threads). You need to setup a home lab, learn and play with what you are asking about and make a decision based off your experience. Once you have the experience, planning and funding then you can start a project like this.

If you jump right into this with live customers they are going to get really pissed and leave when you have issues which are bound to happen.
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Thank you for being blunt and honest. If only all things could be approached lke this, things in the world might be easier :) .

That is what I'm doing right now and have been doing fine with Apache w/Vhosts but the only hard thing is migrating to the Hyper-v w/ a hosting panel. I've been hosting sites on Linux for 5 years without problem on an unmanaged server. I just have never combined hosting with a stand along hyper-v yet I've been doing it on many different platforms on VM's and regualr machines. The biggest step here seems to be establishing which hyper-v fits my needs, then which OS's I will run on it and finally the hosting/control panel I need. Learning the hypervisor is very easy as its pretty similar to VM's run on my servers in VirtualBox or Vmware, just cutting out the base OS.

The way I see it is I need to find out if EHCP, Plesk or Cpanel will do what I need and then become very comfortable with it.

After that, what else is there?
 
I personally use Esxi 5 which supports just about every OS out there. Hyper-V and Xen work OK too. They should run just about any OS that you would want.

As for control panel; Cpanel was my favorite, plesk was just Meh and I do not have any experience with EHCP.

Running a hosting panel on your VM is no difference than running it on a physical box. Now I am somewhat reading between the lines with your reply and believe that you kinda want a web based control panel that will control your VMs. Is that what I am picking up on?
 
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