ISPConfig 3

[shovenose]

I know It's in use on BCN, given that port 8080 says so

I'm going to make a custom skin for it because it's UUUUGGGLLLYYY but functinality wise it seems alright so far... we need to do a lot more testing before we roll it out...

But yeah, I'm finally using it!!!!
The install, while takign a while, worked without a hitch. And I got good practice in teh CLI
I followed this guide:
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-se...ot-ispconfig-3

[Topcat]

why bother reskinning it?! its not the meat of a website.....I'd spend the effort on something far more useful.

[Uranium-235]

yeah. something else too.

if you're good at graphics and have a good program, check out my cap database thread, and find my posted png (later in the thread) that I needed semi-transparent part of the alpha layer on. and please post the full size, unlike rat, even though I asked him if he could please do it again.

[Uranium-235]

mwhahahhaa



edit: is that norton I see shove?! I thought you knew better!

[Mad_Professor]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

mwhahahhaa



edit: is that norton I see shove?! I thought you knew better!

Yeah why are you running norton?

BTW what the hell is ISPCONFIG3? What it's purpose?

[Uranium-235]

since you're too lazy to google it...its a system for web hosting that runs on linux distros

[shovenose]

@Mad Professor:
It's a free thing that performs similar functions to cPanel...
So you can like manage your hosting/website/email easily...

@People who dislike Norton:
I get the "Comcast Business Suite" flavor of it for free given that my friend is a Comcast Business Class customer... it does it's job just fine thank you very much I am still using Avast! Free, for the rest of my systems, and my Mac Pro has Avast! for Mac too!

FWIW, that screenshot was on my desktop computer. Notice something odd about the fact that's a desktop computer? Hint: look near the Norton icon

[smason]

Originally Posted by shovenose

@People who dislike Norton:
I get the "Comcast Business Suite" flavor of it for free given that my friend is a Comcast Business Class customer

You paid too much.

[Uranium-235]

yeah, nvidia and wifi, so what? thats not odd, even for a desktop. oddest thing I guess is you have putty running, not many people know what that is

[shovenose]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

yeah, nvidia and wifi, so what? thats not odd, even for a desktop. oddest thing I guess is you have putty running, not many people know what that is

I was referring to the wifi. That's pretty odd, on a desktop...

PuTTY, Firefox, Remote Desktop Connection, FileZilla, and Notepad++ are probably my most-used programs...

[shovenose]

Originally Posted by Topcat

why bother reskinning it?! its not the meat of a website.....I'd spend the effort on something far more useful.

cPanel isn't exactly beautiful, but it doesn't look this ugly.
Our Hosting Clients will be like WTF is this ugly shit? I want to be able to make our simple, sleek, unique, custom, and good-looking control panel a selling point!

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by shovenose

cPanel isn't exactly beautiful, but it doesn't look this ugly.
Our Hosting Clients will be like WTF is this ugly shit? I want to be able to make our simple, sleek, unique, custom, and good-looking control panel a selling point!

Good luck. You will soon learn what a fickle and bitchy system that is, especially when you start hashing up its code...

[mariushm]

So if your clients are so picky, why don't you just use cPanel then?

They'll compare your plans with other companies' plans anyway, or they'd want to transfer from another hosting company to yours, and they find cPanel tutorials everywhere easily...

You'll also reduce the time you spend on answering support questions from people who don't get how this panel works, because you'll have free cPanel documentation and lots of stuff available already.

You'll hate me again for saying it but is 425$ a year (or 35$ a month) per server so much that it will be cheaper for you to spend time on making a " simple, sleek, unique, custom, and good-looking control panel"?

You can shove about 1-5k shared hosting accounts on a single server easily ... that's a few cents per account going to the cPanel license

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by mariushm

So if your clients are so picky, why don't you just use cPanel then?

cPanel isn't free, ISPconfig is. That would be my guess. I've used it for years....but it can be a pain in the ass to use. cPanel is much nicer.....but for what I do, ispconfig works great.

Originally Posted by mariushm

They'll compare your plans with other companies' plans anyway, or they'd want to transfer from another hosting company to yours, and they find cPanel tutorials everywhere easily...

You'll also reduce the time you spend on answering support questions from people who don't get how this panel works, because you'll have free cPanel documentation and lots of stuff available already.

You'll hate me again for saying it but is 425$ a year (or 35$ a month) per server so much that it will be cheaper for you to spend time on making a " simple, sleek, unique, custom, and good-looking control panel"?

You can shove about 1-5k shared hosting accounts on a single server easily ... that's a few cents per account going to the cPanel license

100% concur.

[shovenose]

How many accounts can I fit on a Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM?
Answer me that.

Then, factor in power costs, maintenance if a disk fails, connection bandwidth price, etc...
Add cPanel, for $400/year (we found it cheaper for that price, not the $425 price)...

And that's an expensive server, for the fact we're not making any money yet

Then again, we've already got 5+ clients that are waiting for us to set everything up, but that's not going to pay for all that!

We'd be using ZPanel http://zpanelcp.com/ but we can't get the mail system working...

We're going to find a solution for this that's not cPanel and not crap, at some point...

[mariushm]

You're trying to save money where you shouldn't.

With shared hosting, you make money pushing as many clients onto a server, but you're obviously not going to handle a lot of them on a single core 2 duo with 4 GB of ram IF the server's going to do everything.

The solution is to use such a system ONLY as php + http server + php accelerator (xcache + varnish or whatever) and maybe for storing the users' files on a raid 5 (minimum) - you don't want to have a hard drive dying and take everything those users have. You pay the cPanel license PER SERVER (or static IP) so you want to stick as many accounts on that static ip but mysql and the mail server are open source so why use precious resources on the server for them?

php is not very multithreaded so your cpu will be loaded only if you have multiple pages requested at the same time, in which case apache or whatever you use and the php accelerator and the file caching of the OS will need those 4 Gigs of memory. 2 Cores that run at high frequency are better for php than 4 cores and less frequency.

You move the databases to a dedicated server with a CPU 4-8 core CPU because mysql or whatever you use WILL use several cores properly, it's multithreaded. You can share this SQL server with 4-5 front ends, maybe even more.
And if you get one customer who has a very heavy mysql site, you can just send him a message and move his databases to another mysql server that servers customers with less database load.

Ideally, you also set up a mail server which will be used by 5-20 front ends... thousands of customers. The hosting accounts don't send emails every minute, so a single mail server will handle thousands of user accounts. This also makes it easier for you to set up spam filters and limit the number of emails each user can send hourly, you can use a separate IP class just for email servers because you'll have headaches with companies blacklisting your email servers for spam (even when your customers don't spam, plenty of regular people forget they subscribed to some newsletter and mark it as spam which adds up in time and you wake up with lists having your ip as spamming)

Companies like Dreamhost do this and they go even further by using NAS machines - they just stick 40-100 drives in a RAID 10 and connect several front end boxes to the NAS with 1-2 gbps links. They have users using 100-300 GB on shared hosting, others use 100 MB... it's stupid to assume they use individual Core 2 Duo servers with 500 GB disk space like it seems you're planning to do.

You just can't compete in the shared hosting market without resorting to such tricks.

You seriously need a business plan and you need to invest some money in it if you're serious, if you try to cut corners on the smallest things I personally don't see a bright future.

Have a look around you at pretty much most startups - no matter how bright and smart they are, 99% of them get some seed money, some investors to push dollars and get the infrastructure and service running smoothly so that when people find the service they'll stay and use it.

And by the way, think really hard what would make your company better than the tens of thousands of shared hosting companies out there? Why would I go for you instead of GoDaddy, Dreamhost, Site5, media temple, bla bla? What will make you special? It's obviously not going to be the hardware or the software as far as I can see so far...

ps. the 425$ is the value advertised on cPanel's site. If you start to work with a datacenter, they're probably going to get the licenses at 30-40% discount from cPanel , and if you rent 10+ servers from them or colocate your stuff there, they'll be happy to give you heavily discounted licenses.

[shovenose]

Mariush, thanks for the advice. But we got zpanel working and skinned to look pretty good.