+- Sinisterly (https://sinister.ly)
+-- Forum: Design (https://sinister.ly/Forum-Design)
+--- Forum: Web Design (https://sinister.ly/Forum-Web-Design)
+--- Thread: Becoming a Web Host Soon... (/Thread-Becoming-a-Web-Host-Soon)
Becoming a Web Host Soon... - slbmeh - 07-01-2011
My consulting firm is going to be setting up a data center within the next 8-12 months... and we are currently negotiating a colocation reseller contract. Not sure how I want to set up what packages I want to sell just yet.
I'm looking for some feedback as to what you guys think is absolutely necessary in a good web host as well as what would be a nice added feature. Please label your suggestions accordingly so I can break these down in to basic and different premium packages.
RE: Becoming a Web Host Soon... - slbmeh - 07-01-2011
I've been doing some hosting privately for my clients. Had one outage in the 5 years I have been up and it only affected a nameserver for an hour. ISP's fault, assigned one of my static IPs to a new customer by mistake. Two ISPs coming in... I run a master and slave cluster with Raid-6 (Thinking about going raid-10 for increased throughput since I have an entire cluster for redundancy) and heartbeat monitor. Software configuration is Gentoo Linux with automated build/update scripts that are pushed out via nfs from the host. Default configuration is VPS. Negotiating a contract with ISP for colocation service. Depending on how that goes it might be cheaper for me to outsource all of my dedicated hosts.
I have an excessive amount of processing power due to the fact that computers are my father's passion and his corporation was my initial investor and he wanted to "play"...
I have a merchant account with my bank to take credit card. I am also set up to take payment by cell phone. I support PayPal, but I'm thinking about dropping it (almost a thing of the past), I've been tossing around the idea of accepting facebook credits, and maybe a PPA/PPC barter agreement for advertising...
Security updates are generally pushed within 8 hours of the notice (if I have to write the patch myself) or within an hour of the patch release... I eat lunch with a few guys from CERT and Google Pittsburgh and they give me a heads up if something comes their way that can concern me...
I think my support staff is fairly decent... They speak english... 24 hour phone and email... you may not always get a competent tech... but you will at least get in touch with a competent secretary who will contact a tech immediately... very small operation... 2 sysadmins and myself...
Anything else?