Back in Janurary i pruchased a Raq 4i, Raq 4r, Qube3 Pro and Sun Cobalt control station.

( i have no clue what the point of the control station is)

I have sunk a good ammount of money into this and am quite tired of the monthly cost of this project. Could soneone direct me where i may be able to try to do this hosting biz to atlease break even?

Okay,

The RaQ4i and the RaQ4r ....
Excellent stable, low and easy administration,...
What's your problem with them?

The Qube3Pro...
Why have you bought it?
As a gateway (share 1 IP) for your internet connection at home?
As a fileserver?
DHCP ,...?
little SOHO webserver?

The control station...
I would only purchase it when I had around 200RaQ's I would have to manage... doing easy monitoring and upgrades...

Now,
the control station...
WHY have you bought it ?????????
Take it away from your rack...
the Qube?
Why have you bought it????

but...
the RaQ's...
Those perfect webservers...
What's wrong with them?

:eek: the Qube3 Pro and Sun Cobalt control station are useless to you...

Co-lo the Raq's somewhere and sell some webspace

i was advised bythe wrong people. have had alot of problems since i started this venture. The same people that advised me about the network setup created my webpage that dose not work. i cant really colocate due to the contract with the telephone company. i have an oc3 line that i signed a year contract for. the qube acts as a "gateway" for computers on the internal network. and the control station is just collecting dust. i was wondering if i could turn it into a web server it is a raq 4r with another gui loaded or something like that

Uh, I doubt you signed a year contract with the 'phone company' for an OC3... a t1 perhaps?

Cobalt servers are very good servers, and great for web hosting. From your description, along with technical problems, it sounds like the profit returns have not been what you expected?
You can make money in web hosting, but it usually takes some time to develop a customer base.
Perhaps if you share some more of your problems people can provide some advice.

OC3 from a telephone company?

hmmmmmm I can buy couple nice cars per month for the amount of a leased OC3 per month.

As how the others put in who replied, check if it is a T1.

I would say an average Raq can bring in around gross $2000 per month, but hey, it really depends.


For the control station, the chances of making it into a webserver is very low. Like the velociraptor, (which pretty much became obsolete from Cobalt Axxent, became spare parts in the end.
ie. fans, hard drive, cpu, heck even the power supply became a spare part. The ROM on the control station is probably different.
But then again, why not try........ hey who knows, Cobalts makes tons or surprising hardware.

i was advised bythe wrong people. have had alot of problems since i started this venture. The same people that advised me about the network setup created my webpage that dose not work.

Don't mean to be rude but it seems like a strange Venture to me anyway.
You started a business without even basic knowledge about the technical part of it, and spend a lot of money in equipment that you don't know how to use?

Besides that can't you hold the company that advised you so poorly responsible for this and claim the damage?

Just out of curiousity, what is your ventures core business? webhosting?

are you hosting your own website from home?


and are you sure you didn't get majorly ripped off by the company whom has advised you?

I can't understand you spend THAT AMOUNT of money without even knowing where stuff's used for?!?

Originally posted by dutchie


Don't mean to be rude but it seems like a strange Venture to me anyway.
You started a business without even basic knowledge about the technical part of it, and spend a lot of money in equipment that you don't know how to use?

Besides that can't you hold the company that advised you so poorly responsible for this and claim the damage?

Just out of curiousity, what is your ventures core business? webhosting?


No i do not know the first thing about webhosting. It was a mistake to try to venture into the field, and the core business was to provide webhosting.

Originally posted by skylab
are you hosting your own website from home?


and are you sure you didn't get majorly ripped off by the company whom has advised you?


I am not hoating from home i have an office in the industrial park of my town. as far as being majorly ripped off, i guess i have, the number to the company had been disconnected and the office is nolonger in use.

Originally posted by FiberOptic
I can't understand you spend THAT AMOUNT of money without even knowing where stuff's used for?!?

we all make mistakes in life. hopefully this is something i will learn from

Can someone reccomend a place to rebuild my website? it is mostly thee but not everything is working

perhaps you should take a look in the special offers forum and purchase a website template (there are many advertised for sale there).

or, if you want to keep the current design, post a service request asking for a web designer to offer you a quote on what he/she can do for you.

and while you're at it, you might want to read many many many of the posts in the "running a webhosting..." forum as well as the posts in the cobalt RAQ forum.

it's not a loss at all, you can pick up RAQ admin fairly easy and go from there.

An extra advantage of Cobalt:

Even my 82-years old grandmother can start basic webhosting on this machines.

All can be configured by the web admin interface,
Updates are easy to install, even using the GUI,
just for running MySQL databases,... you'll need a LITTLE knowledge of Linux...
And with the help of this forum, and www.pkgmaster.com ... yes ... my grandmother would be able to run MySQL databases...

:)

To avoid any further damage and problems, i would advice to colocate the raq4 somewhere, dump all the other hardware and try to get rid of the OC3 in any possible way.

Start small like we all did and experience the learningcurve.
Its really not that hard but it does take some efford and experience (that can't be bought.)

If you need any advice on the website email me the UrL and i'll have a look if its all really that bad.

Goodluck !

The only thing you need to have is "motivation".

If you wanna start hosting just for the money, you won't stay in business..

if you are well motivated, I'm sure you'll manage in a couple of years 5 servers :)

I do thank everyone for the help and advice that i have been given. I have posted an ad in the local paper for an admin, for the past month no call came in. Today i was contacted by a local college student and he informed me he was not the most experienced person to work on a raq but have done some work on the admin interface before and knows a little linux. The kid told me he would admin for free if i would sign progress reports for his professor.

The point is what dose everyone think? should i try to give him a chance? what else could i loose.

Let me know what u think. :confused:

yeah, that sounds great. intern/college credit is always a good way to get started, and if you're lucky, you'll be getting an honest/hard working student.

of course try and keep an eye on what he's doing, but, if you interview him and he seems trustworthy to you, then sounds good. nothing out of your pocket, except maybe treat him to dinner sometimes or something.

and if he needs any help, point him to the WHT

give him a shot, it's hard to break a raq under normal use and if something major happens we're here to help :)

I am sorry to hear you were so badly advised. It's not too hard to start off with almost a $0 budget.

I think many people start off by reselling, then when they have enough clients end up renting a dedicated server.

IMHO, there's no need to actually own any hardware for quite some time. I know that doesn't help you really, but might help someone else going through the same problem.

thanks,

im going to let him start tomorrow. I appriciate all the help again :)

Thank GOD that you found this place. This place is a good place to start. I started with nothing and from advice I have a full cabinet in a colo, decided on a extreme networks switch, got a bunch of servers and now I am working on adding BGP.

I got a raq3i 2 years ago and was surprised to see how easy it was to use.

Originally posted by msl
i have an oc3 line that i signed a year contract for.

You're joking? :eek:

Just be careful with that student...
Students want to try things out...
and try outs may lead to screw-ups...

I know students who do that too,
and without knowing of the owner...
they set up a whole counterstrake halflife game server or so...

Not to mention that ALL students act that way!!!!

and in the meantime setup website and shell accounts for all his friends,ofcourse he keeps the root pw when he leaves.
And you'll never even notice it, worse, you come to depend on him :rolleyes:

What on earth made you start a company this way anyway ?

God HimSelf :)

bobcares.com They will admin the servers for you and you can trust them. Go to www.elance.com pick a bidder to setup a website for you.

If you've really got an OC3 you can either get out of it or resell bandwidth on it.

At the right prices you can do a lot of business, even in today's market.

It sounds like you need some serious help, though, in understanding what you've got and where you can go from there.

What are the specs on your bandwidth?

What's your IP# so we can look at a traceroute?

What's the URL of your website?

If you've got the right bandwidth at the right price you CAN use it.

Neither your nor we know if you do or not based on the posts you've made so far.

Jeff

i'm seriously hoping they DON'T have an OC3. just because, from the sounds of it, i doubt they'll be getting it at the right price.

however, with an OC3, there are many many possibilities!

I don't think it's a OC3 he only mentioned the cobalt equipment. No mention of the routing equipment which would cost a ton.

oh yeah, i seriously doubt it as well. probably a t1 or a 384k frame relay or something like that.

i'm *hoping* he wasn't convinced he was getting an OC3. if so, then i'd seriously consider trying to press charges against the company that "advised" him.