PRECAUTIONS starting own webhosting company.

Hi guys, I really need the opinions from the experienced web hosting owner.

For starting here my server specs:

P4 3.06Ghz Dedicated Server
1500 GBs of Monthly Traffic
2 Huge 120 GB IDE Hard Drives
512 MB of RAM
RedHat Linux OS
cPanel/WHM
and much more .....

I will use the lpanel script so that buyers are able to have their host after payment (Instant acount creation).

My questions are:

If users are given shell access how can I monitor their usage such as preventing them running eggsdrop , high demanding cpu process. Can I find an admin to employed for him to do that ?
Advertising ? How should I advertise my company. Looking for cheap
advertising programs where I find it ?

Please tell me other facts that I should take into consideration.
Hope youll all help me .

I will reply you with my gained experience in past.

First, congratulations for your web hosting company.

for the server specs, everything is pretty good and standard. but I think that you need 1GB to 4GB RAM if you are going to use the server for hosting.

Shell access always is a high risk. You can prevent it generally and enable it only under special needs (customer has to request manually). or I believe there's a page in your WHM panel where you can kill eggdrop, irc, etc. processes and deny them.

Always see what's getting the load high, and kill this process.

Yes, it's very wise to hire a server admin to take care of the server If you're a novice with dealing with servers. but my point of view, everything is as easy as click and setup using your hosting automation control panel.

Advertising -- That depends on how much you're going to spend. a very cheap way, put an attractive link in your signature on this forum. pay for your ads on Google Adwords or other popular sites. If you are starting small, I'd say.. word of a mouth, populate it locally, talk with friends.. and advertise on forum here.

Good luck.

I don't advise you to give out shell access so easily... you just need to be more careful with ur server security if you wan to run a proper web hosting business.

There no problem for server security and uptime .
Thanks for the opinion ?

Any ideas from others ?

Hi wahwaho,
What I would take into consideration is the fact of the potential for abuse in having an automated account creating script running.
The abuse can come in the form of fraud based orders, so perhaps it would be a good idea to verify that your orders that come in are legit orders, and I know that some payment processing companies can or do provide an AVS service (Address Verification Service)

To monitor processes currently running on your server you will need to type the following from your command prompt in your server:
ps -aux a option displays processes owned by other users and attached to a terminal; u option displays user names and start time of process; x option displays processes without a controlling terminal which basically means processes that are executed lets say at startup whereas a process that has a controlling terminal could be a script or application that is started by a user.
Now lets say you want to get a bit more information on a particular process then you would type from your command prompt on your server the following:
ps u -C someprocess

Now what if there is a process that is eating up your resources making your system really slow? Well you would have to kill the process by typing from your command prompt:
kill pid

pid is Process ID. Well hopefully this should keep you busy for a very short while, and there are others to use such as top, pstree,and nice.

Loads of tools available, so by all means explore it .

Best of luck with your business :)


-Bones

Ok thank nice advise . So I must in touch to check the creation of acounts so as to avoid fraude. I think lpanel itself is better for that as payment won't be made on the site itself. On paypal or 2checkout .

I'd stay away from giving out shell access and the instant account activation. Approve each order manually and do a lookup of the IP address - make sure it matches the location of the user specified. Rather call the customer and verify the order.

It seems like you are not that experienced with system administration. Be very careful in that case. WHM is not giving you everything you need to administer a server properly. I recommend hiring a system admin hourly.

Also make sure your server is secure before you start. All patches need to be applied and you should have a firewall in place. Do not allow direct root login and disable Telnet. There is much more to do. So, secure the box first ....

Great one thanks .. yes better disable shell access.

For admin where could I found someone for that. Yes I think I really need one. I hope that hiring an admin wont cost much .

I would disable shall access until you become more familar with your setup. If you do not set up the shell access (make sure its also using SSH) people can get access to things like root without much trouble (if they are linux savy).

Hey wahwaho,
Most of the pertinents have been covered but I wanted to also suggest a fraud verification system like http://varilogix.com to help deter fraud orders if using an automatic install script.

Hey man that will really help thanks. And got a very good price :)

No problem!
Thought you might like that:)
It's helped quite a bit on our end cutting back on the bogus signups.
Best of luck on your new business;)

I personally would give shell access to those who request it manually and on a case by case basis; if they do not ask for it then they will not get it. As far as Lpanel goes it is a decent product just be aware their support staff lacks time and some major changes are coming to future releases of Lpanel.

I second the need for fraud prevention. The latest trick we were hit with came from Vietnamese credit card thieves who jump from host to host and install proxy scripts. I called to confirm the order and it definitely did not check out. (The poor guy had no idea what web hosting was.)

And on another note: our system has shell access disabled by default. Users have to request it through their control panel.

Well Lpanel is developing their system that does just that call the client to confirm the order placed which Lpanel said it would be out shortly.