I want to start a webhosting bussiness, oriented to latin american customer (spanish interfaces). I decided to start with a raq4 instead of a pc. Reasons: rackshak prices and lot of bandwidth. and after i get more than 60 customer i can get a pc server is this a good decision, strategy?

some questions:

1. will my customers have a control panel to admin their accounts? and can i customize it to spanish?? does this control panel allows: email managment, subdomain managment, ftp managment?

2. Can i offer differents packages (quottas, pop3, bandwidth) to my customers choose from? How to admin/manage the bandwidth usage per customer?

3. How the dns is handle?? can the dns servers be with my domain?? dont want my customers knows that im hosted by rackshack

4. any other tips info about thi bussiness in plan to start??
anything that i have to take in consideration?


Do you run a profitable bussiness on raq4 and rackshack? let me know please! im gonna invest all my savings of my whole life in promoting this bussiness and setting up this server. Thats why i want to be very sure before starting this..

First of all, I presume you want to use a couple of dedicated servers and sell virtual hosting packages? My reply is based on that ...

Originally posted by dominet
1. will my customers have a control panel to admin their accounts? and can i customize it to spanish?? does this control panel allows: email managment, subdomain managment, ftp managment?

The admin control panel is fairly comprehensive (i.e. the one you use to add virtual sites, dns entries, etc), but I'm afraid your customers won't be able to do much more than adding users (which implies POP3 accounts, e-mail forwarding and ftp) with their sub-set of the GUI.

2. Can i offer differents packages (quottas, pop3, bandwidth) to my customers choose from? How to admin/manage the bandwidth usage per customer?
Yes and no. Disk quotas are easy - the RaQ GUI allows you to set that up. Bandwidth is another story - you'll have to look for 3rd party products. And when it comes to POP3 - you can limit the total number of users per sites, hence the number of ftp and POP3 accounts.

3. How the dns is handle?? can the dns servers be with my domain?? dont want my customers knows that im hosted by rackshack
Ok, the Rackshack DNS works just fine - it might be best to start using that until your own DNS server is configured. There are some good posts at the Rackshack forum about this topic (and here, of course).

4. any other tips info about thi bussiness in plan to start?? anything that i have to take in consideration?
Just a couple of things to consider:

- backups
- signup scripts
- billing
- support
- don't ever allow anonymous ftp!
- webalizer
- keep the servers up to date (i.e. install the regular updates that Sun Cobalt makes available)
- study this forum, and subscribe to the Cobalt mailing lists (but only post there after you've done some research yourself)
- be prepared to work long hours ;-)

Finally, spend some time playing around with a number of your own domains on the server (or perhaps those of friends) before starting to go commercial. It only takes one or two grumpy clients to wreck your plans ....

Good luck!

Johan

Thanks for your info...more questions:

I have a linux machine at home, can i simulate a COBALT RAQ environment?? I want to program,test,try my project for free at home before paying a monthly fee of $99 plus a setup of 250

Can i use another control panel with raq instead the one that it comes with it?

Can i customize the control panel for spanish?

Heard that you cant have webmaster@ccustomer1.com and webmaster@customer2.com on a raq. How to handle this?? Most domains will have a sales@ webmaster@ pop3 account!!!

I want a successfull bussiness man with raq4 at rackshack post his email address here to contact him for some consult!

If i start the bussiness how to know if my customer is passing its bandwidth limit?

do you think its a bad idea to start a webhosting bussiness with cobalt? some people say that cobalt is for single website only and its not for commercial webhosting....any info about this?

search around the forum. there are alot of posts around that cover all of your questions regarding other control panels, POP users/aliases, and so forth. matter of fact, search here and at the rackshack forums.


search and ye shall find.



during those searches you'll also find many hosting companies that are working off of raqs. i think the raq's are perfect for small to mid-size websites who aren't really looking for heavy cgi/mysql/php usage. i'd say keep around 100 of those sites per raq(leaving you room on each raq for existing sites to grow) and you'd be alright.


but yeah. search through the raq list. when i got my raq4i, i just spent a few days going through every page of posts here learning as much as i could..