Creating my own web hosting

[RTX 3090]

Hi, I am trying to create my own web hosting but I wanted a little information. I have an 8 core Dell T320 with 32GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, is it possible to create 1 cPanel installation with 50 accounts that can only access their own area. I don't want anyone to be able to access anyone else's files and also my server is not powerful enough to run 50VM's on ProxMox. Please let me know, thanks

[Eigenvektor]

Can't really help you with cPanel, but do you have a static IP and what is your bandwidth? Does your ISP allow hosting of web services?

[Master Disaster]

For personal use or do you intend to sell them?

 

Not wanting to sound offensive but it sounds like you don't understand ACLs & permissions properly which is something you must wrap your head around before ever trying to sell server space to the public.

 

It goes beyond that though, you'll likely want a DNS server running with reverse proxy, you'll need to set up SSH to accept multiple clients, you'll need virtual switches to handle the subnet routing, FTP for remote client access, VPN for server dial in etc etc.

 

Its really not something you should be trying unless you're 100% confident you can do it properly because the consequences of you getting it wrong is a court date.

[RTX 3090]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

For personal use or do you intend to sell them?

 

Not wanting to sound offensive but it sounds like you don't understand ACLs & permissions properly which is something you must wrap your head around before ever trying to sell server space to the public.

 

It goes beyond that though, you'll likely want a DNS server running with reverse proxy, you'll need to set up SSH to accept multiple clients, you'll need virtual switches to handle the subnet routing, FTP for remote client access, VPN for server dial in etc etc.

 

Its really not something you should be trying unless you're 100% confident you can do it properly because the consequences of you getting it wrong is a court date.

Planning to sell cheap hosting (around £3 a year)

Is there any tool which does everything for you, like a cPanel set-up. Will something like WHMAutpilot work

[WereCatf]

12 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

and also my server is not powerful enough to run 50VM's on ProxMox

I'm not familiar with cPanel, but it seems that it supports using LXC-containers. Containers are much faster and less resource-intensive than full VMs, so that's what I'd recommend.

13 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

I am trying to create my own web hosting but I wanted a little information. I have an 8 core Dell T320 with 32GB RAM and a 1TB HDD

An HDD for 50 websites? You might find latency quickly becoming a major issue. Also, you only mention one HDD, which means you don't have any RAID set up? Do you have a UPS? Do you yet have a plan for backups?

[Master Disaster]

Just now, RTX 3090 said:

Planning to sell cheap hosting (around £3 a year)

Is there any tool which does everything for you, like a cPanel set-up. Will something like WHMAutpilot work

CPanel is a PHP layer, its basically a web service that runs on your server, you still must set everything up yourself first and you're ultimately in control of permissions.

[RTX 3090]

2 hours ago, WereCatf said:

An HDD for 50 websites? You might find latency quickly becoming a major issue. Also, you only mention one HDD, which means you don't have any RAID set up? Do you have a UPS? Do you yet have a plan for backups?

I have 4 500GB HDD's in it and a 512GB SSD. The HDD's are in RAID

 

2 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Can't really help you with cPanel, but do you have a static IP and what is your bandwidth? Does your ISP allow hosting of web services?

I have business line which has static IP in it

 

2 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Do you yet have a plan for backups?

I have another PC with 4TB HDD in for backup every few days

 

2 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Do you have a UPS?

Power never goes out where I live, like the last time it went out was 4 years ago

 

2 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

CPanel is a PHP layer, its basically a web service that runs on your server, you still must set everything up yourself first and you're ultimately in control of permissions.

Is there anything that will automatically set the permissions for me (free or a cheap tool under $50)

 

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, RTX 3090 said:

Is there anything that will automatically set the permissions for me (free or a cheap tool under $50)

 

Nope, there's no way for software to know which users need what permissions for which files. It needs to be done manually by a human.

 

CPanel will (I think, never actually used it) semi automate this when you add users but you still need to assign the correct permissions to each user as you create them.

[Biomecanoid]

1 hour ago, RTX 3090 said:

Hi, I am trying to create my own web hosting but I wanted a little information. I have an 8 core Dell T320 with 32GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, is it possible to create 1 cPanel installation with 50 accounts that can only access their own area. I don't want anyone to be able to access anyone else's files and also my server is not powerful enough to run 50VM's on ProxMox. Please let me know, thanks

Does not sound like a good plan, If you want to test everything , learn and maybe do sites for friends and family go ahead and do so it will work fine.

 

You can not go selling hosting services without a plan and infrastructure with a couple of PCs stuck under your desk it is a recipe for disaster. 

 

On the other hand your customers won't know that, so it might work for a while until issues start to appear and you can't solve them because you want to relay on automated tools to setup everything for you. Its kind of sketchy. 

 

* You have just plain computers that anyone can have not proper servers

* You don't have a backup plan

* What will you do if your "server" breaks from being on 24/7 do you have failover to another server ?

* What will you do if  a circuit breaker goes down in your house, Do you have backup power ?

* Do you have a firewall ?

* What will you do if internet goes down, Do you have failover to another line ?

* Do you have a static IP ?

* Do you have DNS ?

* Do you have symmetric internet ? Websites need lots of upload that consumers lines don't have.

* Can you work with Linux command line ?

* Who will handle the support of 50 clients.

etc the list is long  

 

You can not relay on luck that he power will never be down, that the internet will always work, that the sun will always shine.

 

 

 

 

[Sir Asvald]

1 hour ago, RTX 3090 said:

Power never goes out where I live, like the last time it went out was 4 years ago

That is not a good reason. It is ALWAYS recommended that you have UPS in a live environment. 

 

2 hours ago, RTX 3090 said:

Hi, I am trying to create my own web hosting but I wanted a little information. I have an 8 core Dell T320 with 32GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, is it possible to create 1 cPanel installation with 50 accounts that can only access their own area. I don't want anyone to be able to access anyone else's files and also my server is not powerful enough to run 50VM's on ProxMox. Please let me know, thanks

There are hosting sites that offer reseller packages? I used to use that for my side business and I paid around £29.98 a month for cpanel and WHMCS. It's better than running your own servers..

[RTX 3090]

27 minutes ago, Sir Asvald said:

There are hosting sites that offer reseller packages? I used to use that for my side business and I paid around £29.98 a month for cpanel and WHMCS. It's better than running your own servers..

I was thinking of doing that but they only give like 2 cores and I have a server lying around at home so why not use it. 

 

I also have a 128GB RAM 32 core backup server I can use but I don't want to leave that on 24 7 as it sucks energy (it has 4 CPU's and 4 1200W PSU's so that will consume a lot of energy)

[RTX 3090]

59 minutes ago, Biomecanoid said:

* Who will handle the support of 50 clients.

 

59 minutes ago, Biomecanoid said:

* Do you have symmetric internet ? Websites need lots of upload that consumers lines don't have.

I'm not offering top of the line hosting, I'm going to charge £3 a year, not month. I would hope they are not expecting top of the line servers for that price and I will mention in the listing it's not a high bandwidth server (100mb down 150mb up) and uptime is around 98% 

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, RTX 3090 said:

I was thinking of doing that but they only give like 2 cores and I have a server lying around at home so why not use it. 

 

I also have a 128GB RAM 32 core backup server I can use but I don't want to leave that on 24 7 as it sucks energy (it has 4 CPU's and 4 1200W PSU's so that will consume a lot of energy)

Because you're dealing with other peoples personal information & data, Its a minefield. There's a reason why Luke refuses to touch peoples CC information on Floatplane and its not because he doesn't know how or that LMG isn't capable of it.

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

 

I'm not offering top of the line hosting, I'm going to charge £3 a year, not month. I would hope they are not expecting top of the line servers for that price and I will mention in the listing it's not a high bandwidth server (100mb down 150mb up) and uptime is around 98% 

You can't just dismiss things and cross your fingers that everything will "just be OK" when you're selling a service.

 

I'll be frank, you don't have the requisite knowledge, hardware, bandwidth & manpower to pull this one off.

 

Sorry if that sounds harsh, it's not intended to insult. Your idea is not going to work and if things go belly up you could find yourself in pretty serious trouble.

[RTX 3090]

5 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Because you're dealing with other peoples personal information & data, Its a minefield. There's a reason why Luke refuses to touch peoples CC information on Floatplane and its not because he doesn't know how or that LMG isn't capable of it.

Would it be better to hire a VPS then. Also will 2 cores be enough for a VPS for cPanel

[Master Disaster]

8 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

Would it be better to hire a VPS then. Also will 2 cores be enough for a VPS for cPanel

I'll just say this one final time, in my honest opinion its not something you should be doing at all. That's not even a you thing either, I would give the same advice to most people.

 

If its really something you're interested in the look at getting yourself signed up to a computer science course, study networking and gain the skills to manage a server properly. It takes YEARS of training to get to a level where you can manage a public facing server safely, I specifically keep 95% of my homelab isolated from the net entirely because I don't want any of my servers even talking to a DNS server outside of my subnet. I have one instance of Apache forwarded to the web and even that's running in a private subnet on my NAS, behind 2 firewalls and far away from the rest of my server stuff.

[Biomecanoid]

3 hours ago, RTX 3090 said:

Hi, I am trying to create my own web hosting but I wanted a little information. I have an 8 core Dell T320 with 32GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, is it possible to create 1 cPanel installation with 50 accounts that can only access their own area. I don't want anyone to be able to access anyone else's files and also my server is not powerful enough to run 50VM's on ProxMox. Please let me know, thanks

Just start doing it for friends, family for free and if you want show your progress here to people as well . If that works for like a year without any issue whatsoever. Then you could consider selling your services.

[LogicalDrm]

 -> Moved to Servers and NAS

[Master Disaster]

15 minutes ago, Biomecanoid said:

Just start doing it for friends, family for free and if you want show your progress here to people as well . If that works for like a year without any issue whatsoever. Then you could consider selling your services.

I'd be interested in progress updates as well, its great to see someone eager to learn new IT skills but its important to learn to walk before you try to run.

[Biomecanoid]

3 hours ago, RTX 3090 said:

Hi, I am trying to create my own web hosting but I wanted a little information. I have an 8 core Dell T320 with 32GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, is it possible to create 1 cPanel installation with 50 accounts that can only access their own area. I don't want anyone to be able to access anyone else's files and also my server is not powerful enough to run 50VM's on ProxMox. Please let me know, thanks

Another thing, Do you know how to make websites ? and I don't mean download templates from the internet and change the text and images and not even using software like Dreamweaver. Can you just open Notepad and start writing HTML ? 

 

We used to do that back in UNI, not that I remember everything right now, but I am sure it would all come back with a bit of work if I needed to do so.

 

You will need that if you want to make it a profession.

 

 

[RTX 3090]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

I'd be interested in progress updates as well, its great to see someone eager to learn new IT skills but its important to learn to walk before you try to run.

Is reseller hosting ok because they do all the hard stuff for you don't they like 20i

1 hour ago, Biomecanoid said:

Another thing, Do you know how to make websites ? and I don't mean download templates from the internet and change the text and images and not even using software like Dreamweaver. Can you just open Notepad and start writing HTML ? 

Yes, I professionally design websites, normally using WordPress but I can write in HTML too, although my designs won't be too good. I can do CSS and JS too, but I am not the best at it

[RTX 3090]

@Master DisasterIs reseller hosting just like a whitelabel and then they give you the accounts or is it the same as setting up my server (as in not possible (by me anyways))