Hi,

I have been contemplating starting a web hosting business based upon H-Sphere. I am first planning to begin with an H-Sphere reseller account and then moving to a dedicated server depending upon client growth.

In researching H-Sphere I have been unsure whether it would be a good decision to begin with 1 server or start with a 3 server cluster when moving to dedicated. If I was to begin with 1 server is it difficult to transition to a 3 server cluster? I am hoping to keep costs reasonable and felt starting with 1 server will allow for a smaller investment, yet still have many of the benefits H-Sphere offers. I would hope to move to 3 servers eventually to experience H-Sphere's clustering abilities.

Thank you :)

H-Sphere makes it pretty easy to add a new server to the cluster. However, if you had to move services over from one machine to another, it would be somewhat difficult.

We've had customers use vmware or virtuozzo to start with a single dual xeon, partitioned into 3/5 machines. Seperating them to new physical servers then is a piece of cake.

Greetings:

Over the past several years, we've worked with many H-Sphere providers who started with one server, and then grew their cluster into multpile servers.

That's one of the many benefits of H-Sphere. Adding new Unix-based servers can be done in as little as 15-minutes; and Windows in approximately 30 minutes.

If you are able to use dedicated IP addresses for each logical services, and the data center you utilize allows those IP addresses to be migrated to other servers you add, then migrating logical services is all the easier. It can still be done without dedicated IP's for each one; it is just easier if each service has its own IP addresses.

I'm not sure about the comment about migrating logical services. Over the past several years we've been involved in at least a score of migrations (moving logical services), all of them went well. Positive Software did the migrations.

Thank you.