Hello,
We have 3 Dedicated servers and 4 VPS. We like to start a free web hosting company.

We planned to give webspace for static sites. I mean.. NO PHP, NO ASP support anyway.

we have WHM installed in all servers.

I have no guess how to organize our new members. Is WHM enough?

How can we create accounts automatically after a user registration in our site?

I mean how to link user registration with WHM account creation section?

And please tell me your advice for our new free hosting company.

Regards,
Karthi Keyan.

After you have about 30,000 users, WHM becomes very stable for managing all of them. I would suggest asking your question at http://www.freewht.com , as they'll be better able to help you out.

HI,

I am also considering testing free hosting as an addition to my current hosting operation. I would be interested in sharing experiences with you if you are interested.

Dave

sure.... you are welcome

Don't worry at this point about how you'll approach this technically, what scripts to use, etc. - focus on the basics.

What is your business model? How will you get your clients? *Who* are you targetting? What are you doing differently to make this succeed compared to those who tried free hosting and failed? Why not purchase an existing free hosting service? Will you be able to support a business like this for 5-10 years and have the revenue to pay for everything? How long will the business remain in operation? What are you going to do if this doesn't work out? Do you have an exit plan? Why are you doing this compared to other options such as paid hosting?

There are a *lot* of questions to answer before you get to figuring out how to make account creations - that's the easy part, hard part is making everything work. Look at the big picture, not one or two specific things.

Edit: Just for the record, I didn't mean to come off in a bad way with those questions - this is business, treat it like that.

I think for your purposes WHM is enough, since it's free and you are not accepting any payments. But you shouldn't do automatic account activation because then your servers might get overloaded due an overwhelming number of people who want to signup for free accounts.

As far as I am concerned, I do not waste time on any manual process that there is an automation for. I currently have a paid hosting service and when I started out I was manually creating accounts for my paid customers and that took a lot of time. Some days I would spend one hour per day manually creating accounts. Needless to say I use an automated process now. Without using an automation script would mean spending too much time on manual processes as apposed to growing your business.

I myself am considering using ipanel from ihostdev, which I will be starting next week.

After you have about 30,000 users, WHM becomes very stable for managing all of them.

Seriously now, have you ever ran a cPanel server with 30,000 users? I'm sorry, but I don't think cPanel was coded with the ability to scale to that many users, let alone even a tenth of that amount. Not that you'd want 30,000 users on a single box in the first place. :)

The most optimal approach would be to make your own script. You don't need to use cPanel, as 95% of the features offered in cPanel aren't even going to be relevant when you are not allowing PHP, CGI, etc. Don't even bother to use Apache. Go ahead and use a better web server such as Lighttpd or LiteSpeed. Write a simple script to automate the creation/deletion/modification, etc. of vhosts and work from there [e.g. move on to FTP]. Technically speaking this isn't too hard to do.