Let me start by congratulating the project developers for the"open source" banner. Linux Forever The story... for the past year I started giving free hosting to some friends and their small companies. Since I'm a linux LPI I have the servers (apache2, mysql, bind9, zimbra, etc. and the network) tweaked to perfection and that outputs astounding hosting speeds. Now I'm facing 3 issues: 1. Starting to be hard to manage the backend and all the servers. Well, not hard, just the modules or servers are not interconnected. Everything needs to be done manually, individually. 2. Friends complain about when they ask me for a change, takes time... because of point 1 and my "personal / professional" life. Their usual question is, why can I do it? 3. All this is starting to be expensive. So, I have been lurking around google, checking out hosting panels like ispCP Omega, cpanel, ispconfig, directadmin and a bunch more. CPanel seems to be n.1, unfortunately cpanel and all the other "payed" panels are out of the question. As I said in n.3, hosting for free is starting to affect my finances and therefore can not afford it. Being a linux guy, already knew about ispconfig. Decided to create a vdi to test 3.0.4.6. No issues during install and setup, followed one of the how-tos, just changed the squirelmail part of the how-to and installed roundcube (because of the GUI... more eye candy). Kinda like the prospects, but it's a huge learning curve, and honestly haven't checked all functions to see if everything works as publicized and expected. Have a few questions to the ispconfig masters about the best professional hardware deployment. Read a few posts regarding this and do like one of the setup's, separates functions per machine, better load spread and web requests: 1 panel machine 1 ns1 machine 1 ns2 machine 1 web machine 1 database machine 1 email machine Taking the above as example I was planning one of the following setup's Setup 1 1 main panel machine with mail and NS2 1 web + database machine (prefer web databases in the same machine, speed and security) 1 NS1 machine total 3 machines, splits different internet load per machine Web / mail / NS Setup 2 1 host machine with 3 different virtual guest machines vdi's running ubuntu server 64x - vdi machine for main control panel (2 cores / 4gb ram) - vdi machine for NS1 (2 cores / 2gb ram) - vdi machine for NS2 (1 cores / 2gb ram) 1 dedicated web + database machine 1 dedicated mail machine total 3 machines Setup 3 1 main control panel machine + mail 1 web + database 1 NS1 (have an old computer that cannot use for other functions but should work fine for dns) 2 cores 3 gb ram 1 NS2 (have an even older computer that cannot use for other functions but should work fine for dns2) 1 core 2 gb ram total 4 mchines (2 are old and dedicated to NS)
