Whats peoples views on these? Should you keep the clients sites on a seperate server to your own? I can see good points for each just wondered what other people do.

+ for different severs:
Should the reseller account suffer an outage then your support etc are still up.
Gives an option for remote backups

+ for same:
Lower cost.
May give an impression of confidence in the server

opinions?

Your site should never be on a customer server. This is just begging to have someone hack one of your customers and end up getting your customers information. Additionally if your site is on the same server how will you continue support when customer servers are down?

It is very smart to host your site or support site at a different location because when you have an outage you can easily inform your customers about it. Also it looks very un-professional to have a customers site down and your site down at the same time.

Hey,

Thanks for the responses. That was the way I was thinking of heading as the additional cost is negligible anyway. Just gotta finalise a few things and then hopefully I can enter the world of reselling :)

Thanks again

Adam

Been thinking a bit more about this. With the reseller account I was going to get, you get a static IP included for your site so I was thinking about putting the main site on the same account as the resellers and also setting up a seperate support site with helpdesk,forums,knowledgebase etc.

Sound reasonable?

If this server goes down there will be no way for your clients to contact you.

I HIGHLY recommend just getting a seperate package on a different network, and putting it there.

hmmm ok, the only thing thats slightly confusing me now is that when I go to the sign up screen for the reseller package it's asking for a domain, I select the "i'll point my name servers" option and it asks for the domain name.

So if I give the domain name of the main site and just leave the dns pointing to the seperate main site and then create dns entries for ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com pointing at my static IP's on the reseller account,would that all work nicely?

confused myself a bit there hope you get what I'm on about :)

The lower cost of having your site at the same place as your clients is not worth the headaches if you want to provide 24/7 support because as several have said the loss of your site would not allow you to provide a live support system.

Just my .02 worth

thanks for the reply, thats the way I'm definitely going to go now. Any comments on the domain/name server situation would be really appreciated

we have three seperate tiers, tier one is our website, the second is our reseller servers, third is our customer servers, we do not mix clients, resellers, and our sites on one machine.

In the very beginning you will get away with being on the same reseller account as your clients. But you should change that as soon as the growth and revenue allow. Some reseller hosts offer off-server accounts for the support site of their reseller clients. At least then you already have an off-site location where clients can contact you.

you could always purchase an inexpensive site on another host that monitors your clients with say a cron job or javascript looking for a keyword that is on the site which will send you an email if the site doesn't have the keyword on it (i.e. down).

I like that idea - but you really need two sites so that if your first site goes down you have a second.

I think I may package that - seems like that best way to go.

Another good point is if you have a custom DNS make sure you do not let your domain expire.

Vincent G

That sounds like it might be a nice package, the monitoring sites would not have to be large, although if you put a trouble ticket on one of them you might need 100 megs to handle the correspondence and logging functions.

That part becomes a problem - what to do about you secondary website.

You can setup your DNS and Domain Hosts as such that if the first site fails it can go to the next.

Or you can just have a second site that your clients know to go to.

But to sync a website maynot be such a good idea - maybe better to just have a secondary fall back help desk with a simple clone site which is on a separate server.

Space is not a biggie these days with hard drives being so large and low cost.

Vin

If a site points to dns1.yourdomain.com and the second nameserver is dns2.secondomain.com on a seperate server that was a clone of the first site it would work, although if it were an oscommerce site you would need to have backups of the database quite frequently if you intend it to be an emergency backup site.

having one nameserver is not a good idea.

Best to have NS1, NS2, NS3 and NS4

It doesn't cost extra so why not do it right.

Vin

no, I didn;t mean just one nameserver, I meant that the first nameserver would be on one host, the second on another host and then third would be on the first host and fourth on the second host (assuming two seperate hosts). :-)

Sounds good.

This way you will have only one domain name also.
And should the first site fail the second becomes available.

Might be the best way.

Vin

well I got to bed for a few hours and get a load of good responses :) some very good ideas there that I will take on board and hopefully get working. One small thing remains unanswered though about the dns setup I proposed.

Reseller account given the domain name of the main site (hosted elsewhere)
Main domain has ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com pointing to the main site.
Then setup ns3.mydomain.com and ns4.mydomain.com to point to the IP addresses of the name servers for the reseller account.

would this work?

adamneal,

whenever you do multiple name servers I HIGHLY recommend they _all_ have the same records for everything aka one set usually ns1/ns2 is setup with the master zone and ns3/ns4 gets a slave zone thus the slave auto downloads all zone data from the master. This allows all records to be easily kept in sync and allows for everything to work nicely. You will want to simply make the helpdesk/billing as a subdomain e.g. billing.mydomain.com or members.mydomain.com etc. That is the best method of setting it up. Also if you want to do a clone site for the main site then you'd simply need to add in two A records for both www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com. with the period (signifies an absolute domain name). That is what is commonly referred to as a round robin or random pool, it's usually used for failover purposes or IRC related use. In any case it would work that the two IP's rotate being "high" meaning the ISP will pull up the one site first and if it fails the retry will go to the next one thus allowing for failover in case one box drops but the other remains available. It will increase load times if an outtage occurs but it should still remain available though.

-Justin

thanks for the reply but I think I'm getting more confused :S

If I take the clone site out of the equation I simply want my domain on one server and my clients on another with the name servers for the clients being something similar to ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com

sorry to keep going on, think I might need to do some extra reading on dns,..... anyone know some good sites?

You can do that also but if you can have both it's better.

As to settings - your host should be able to tell you what they are and you only need to set it at your domain registrar.

Your host should know two things regarding this.
One is setting up a custom DNS
Two is how to setup mail on the second account.

I would suggest looking for a small hosting company running at least 4 servers since the larger ones may not be able to control this type of setup.

This is something that I think should come standard with reseller accounts.

Vin

Thanks, I know it wouldn't even be an issue if I had my maindomain on the same place as my clients account the confusion just sets in when moving the main domain to a seperate server :P

I think the best way for me to figure it out would be to play around with it, I just don't wanna screw anything up :)

I didn't even think about MX records..........

You will need two accounts any way do do it.

One way is two different domains.
The other is the same domain on both servers with one set as a fall back website.

Mail is a issue if you use the fall back method - it needs to send the mail to a different mail server.

Vin