It’s common knowledge around WHT – web hosting providers should host their company websites on a server different from their clients. Hence, in the case of a server going down, your clients can still contact you, and you won’t disappear along with them.

So where should a web hosting provider host their website? With the equipment they themselves have, chances are, each server will have a number of clients on them. So should we reserve an entire dedicated server for the company website itself? Wouldn’t this be a waste, seeing as the server will at most deal with billing, creating packages, possible forums and sending / receiving emails? It would also be impractical to rent out some space from another hosting provider, i.e. using another company’s shared web hosting.

So the bottom line is, if you shouldn’t host your web hosting company’s website on the same server as your clients, where should you host it?

[SIZE=3]. . . So should we reserve an entire dedicated server for the company website itself?
Yes. That is optimal.
Wouldn’t this be a waste, seeing as the server will at most deal with billing, creating packages, possible forums and sending / receiving emails?
It could be considered a waste, although that depends on how much you value security and the data contained therein. You can't risk that data being on a shared server.
So the bottom line is, if you shouldn’t host your web hosting company’s website on the same server as your clients, where should you host it?
On a good dedicated server (off network) or maybe a VPS. Dedicated server would be more secure, imo.

We have the bulk of our website and related "stuff" on our own various servers. Billing and other mission critical things are always on our own dedicated servers with no other clients.

However, we host a few of our static webpages - ones that basically just have our contact info and hosting package info - on a shared hosting account with a trusted provider. Nothing wrong with that and it gives another bit of insurance, since that provider doesn't use any of the networks that we do.

--Tina

They key is to get a small dedicated server. Since you are just hosting the one site, even with mysql usage, etc.. You are not going to use resources. So look for the Celerons, etc to host your company site on.

Thanks for the replies. Would you recommend against running anything else on the server? i.e. and IRCD?

We use a dedicated server for all of our company websites, and would use a backup server in another DC containing backup systems, but try and use your dedicated server to your full advantage, so installing IRCD is fine (appart from possible security issues etc).

Our main website, helpdesk, and billing services are colocated off-site, albeit in the building next door, but off-site nevertheless in a trusted datacenter.


Wouldn’t this be a waste, seeing as the server will at most deal with billing, creating packages, possible forums and sending / receiving emails?

Gentle word of advice: The value and security of your customer data should be of the highest degree.

Thanks for the replies. Would you recommend against running anything else on the server? i.e. and IRCD?
I wouldn't run IRCD on that same server. Keep is as clean as possible. :)

It really depends on what type of server you're allocating too. If you have only static pages, you can get away with a really cheap celeron without sacrificing performance. It'd be a waste to have a terrabyte of disk space and 16 gigs of ram.

Raid should also be a consideration, even for a small server. Just because you have a small server, that doesn't mean you should risk a hard drive failure and subsequent downtime resulting.

Thanks for the replies. Would you recommend against running anything else on the server? i.e. and IRCD?

I wouldn't host an IRCd alongside even the shared hosting clients. Personally I could forsee that turning out a lot worse than hosting the main site there.

At a certain point having your own dedicated server will be a definite advantage to your company's infrastructure. You can use it for remote SSH sessions, monitoring software for other servers can be run here, etc. The goal of a server like this is to be locked down, reliable, and something you can depend on.

Depending on exactly how you set it up, you could maybe even install some applications for yourself and use something like VNC to use them. These wouldn't be daily applications but something for your bare essentials incase your own computer goes on, maybe email and web browser applications?

Obviously you don't want too much going on with this server and so maybe that last idea is a bit much, but the basic idea is that there are plenty of things you can do and so once the NEED exists, it may be something good to consider and implement.

This is really beneficial to have your own server, heck we have about 4 servers that power our site, including db cluster and public and private server for our billing software. It may be overkill for you to get a server, but do it. Even ev1 has $69 celerons so just start out on that, we started on a VPS to run our own servers and not have our own colo, it is only the right thing todo.