[CVALE] Web server

[Jason Roysdon]

Dan,

I did this for a number of years for friends and family.  I still do it, 
but I want out of it.  The biggest hassle is that I do it for free, and 
don't really have the time to do maintenance on it.

That said, I am going to move to a pay model, but I need to buy a new 
box first.  My plan is to give everyone X days (probably 2 months) to 
poney up the yearly cost ($12/year), at which time I'll move them over.

One thing I have to do before I'll move folks over is have some sort of 
billing/customer management option in place.  I want it so that users 
can add their own new domains and automatically configure their DNS, 
vhost, and maildaemon options.  Plus I want them to have access to 
handle their own aliases for their domain, without have to take a wildcard.

One thing I'm planning to look at to do this is the following (I'm not 
sure how well it'll do everything):
http://www.gplhost.com/software-dtc.html

I'm also planning to switch from Fedora Core (which has a short 6 month 
release cycle and short support cycle of just a few releases, and even 
Fedora Legacy only supports it few a few more releases then).  I'm on 
FC3 which will no longer be supported by Fedora Legacy after FC7Test1 is 
put out.  I still love RedHat, so I'm going to switch to CentOS, which 
is basically RedHat Enterprise Linux w/o the RH trademarks and logos. 
RHEL has a 7 year support commitment, which means so long as CentOS 
doesn't go away (no signs and they are the biggest re-roller group of 
RHEL), then I'm good to go for a long time.

Things you'd want to look at are will you support everything your users 
want?  Frontpage Extensions (bleh), and all the other stuff they may 
want, and how are you going to maintain that and keep it patched and up 
to do so you don't become a zombie host?  phpBB2, MovableType, 
WordPress, etc. are good examples of security problems that you must 
patch manually.  It's not hard, but it takes time, and you've got to do 
each one individually...  That's a big pain when you have 30 phpBB2s and 
Hundreds of MT / WP installs.  How will you force users to upgrade if 
they don't want (I handle all that for family, as they just want an easy 
web interface)?

What about disk quotas?  What about spam and AUP?  Will you give shell 
access?

You want something with strict firewall policies, and most likely 
SELinux (which causes all sorts of overhead with webhosting, since 
apache has to be given permission to do everything you expect it to do 
already, like talk to your mail daemon).

-- 
Jason Roysdon
http://jason.roysdon.net/

dan at imabiz.com wrote:
> Hi, gang.  Once again asking for pearls of your wisdom....
> 
> Have a client situation developing that just might be ideal for hosting my
> own server.  He's got a T1 line, needs to change hosts anyway, and the site
> doesn't do anything super critical right now (no sales).  Certainly we can
> always go back to another host if it doesn't work out.
> 
> So, I was hoping you could offer some observations/tips/links on what one
> should worry about these days in running a host.  [Among other things:  what
> kind of time should I expect for administration/maintenance?]
> 
> -- Dan Langhoff
> 
> 
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