[Wolves] Web Hosting Control Panels and Virtual Servers

[Matthew Walster]

On 19 Mar 2007, at 11:43, Adam Sweet wrote:
>
> I'm looking at Web Hosting Control Panels such as
> Plesk, cPanel and ISPConfig. I'd like to tie one of
> these panels into a Xen hosting platform, or perhaps
> Virtuozzo (made by the same people as Plesk).

For web hosting, use cPanel if your clients are going to be Average  
Joe instead of Geeks. It's hideous, and webmin/ispconfig can do as  
good a job, but the customers just get used to cPanel.

For Xen, don't bother with a control panel from the big three - just  
use the tools xen-tools and xen-shell found at http://xen-tools.org/ 
index.html - far superior to anything else you'll see out there.

Interestingly, I've been trying to sell Xen units for about a year  
now, and only had one client - who ended up buying a dedicated  
server. I even GAVE them away for a while, and can't even sell them  
at cost. Interestingly, the server could more than handle it - HP  
DL580 G2 with four SCSI drives and four 1.9GHz processors, but the  
RAM is the kicker - to make it profitable, you need to practically  
give it away. Unless you're just using irssi, you want at least 128MB  
of RAM in the server, and that's costly.

Trust me, Xen is great, it's just really hard to market, when you can  
get dedicated server for under £40/month these days.

Matthew Walster