Hello all,

I'm in the planning stage of starting up a small hosting operation. I've been running dedicated servers for years for my own personal business stuff, but have never really taken on the role of "paid webhost".

Now here's a simple question I have, which I'm sure has been addressed 1,000x over, so I apologize in advance for that. How does one handle bandwidth management for individual customers?

What I mean is.. let's say you offer bandwidth to customers at $1.25/gig Do any of the current control panel software packages count bandwidth for the individual virtual domains that are setup on the machine?

Of course you can setup MRTG to count the overall bandwidth of the machine, but to count for individual virtual sites is the question here, and how it can be done.

Thanks in advance for any help on this issue.

Kevin G.

cpanel measure bandwidth on http, email, pop

Does it measure the bandwidth per virtual domain customer, or just an overall amount? Also -- do the customers have to be on their own unique IP address for it to count individual amounts?

There is nothing elaborate occuring with bandwidth monitors...

The software is reading the web (requests) and mail server (inbound & outbound) log files. Thats it - plain and simple...

Yes, I do realize the general idea behind it... but in a virtual hosting environment, I want to make sure I have the proper tools in place. Now a few have responded telling me to use Plesk, and some say CPanel. But having never used anything but Webmin, I'm a bit torn here.

Any suggestions for control panel knowing what I'm looking for here?

Originally posted by kgibbons
Yes, I do realize the general idea behind it... but in a virtual hosting environment, I want to make sure I have the proper tools in place. Now a few have responded telling me to use Plesk, and some say CPanel. But having never used anything but Webmin, I'm a bit torn here.

Any suggestions for control panel knowing what I'm looking for here?

Either one will do what you want kgibbons. Having used both, I would have to recommend Cpanel. Only because the customers seem to like it better. But Plesk has some very nice features that Cpanel does not have. So I guess it’s a toss up…:cartman:

Thanks for the response Jim. However, I really don't foresee myself giving customer-end access to the control panel features. Basically, we will handle the virtual domain setups and any other requested additions (extra email addresses, ftp logins, etc..)

Maybe I'm missing something being that I never did use a control panel like Plesk or CPanel?