I work for a domain registrar. We have a lot of domains registered with us, and a lot of customers.

We currently offer our customers free hosting with banners and the option to remove the banners. We have about 300k domains hosted with us on our in house written webserver. We are in the top 10 in the netcraft survey with our server.

The problem is that our free hosting servers, do one thing, they host static pages. So you can't really consider this to be a fully functional paid hosting option.

We are in the process of buying a nice size data center so we are starting to work out the details of offering our customers real hosting, and also our resellers a hosting option.

We want to do this once and just keep adding on to the product. We don't want to buy cpanel and then 3 months from now we have a customer who wants .net services that can only be supplied with a Win2k box and then we are looking for someway to manage Win2k boxes seperately from everything else.

So I have basically shot down cpanel and plesk since they don't offer a Windows solution. This leaves ensim, H-sphere and I guess Zeus.

Which is better or are there options that I am missing? Also servers are not an issue, if I need 20 that's fine with me. If we need to use a disk array instead of drives in the servers themselves, that's fine also.

Thanks for your time.

Donny

Why are you going with win2k instead of linux?

We are definitely going with linux or freebsd for 95% of our boxes, you just always have that nutball that wants Windows. We have a customer who is hosting about 30k of his own domains right now, on 48 Windows boxes.

I know that's stupid, and everybody in the world knows that's stupid. But if somebody came to you and said I need 48 Windows boxes to host my domains, would you complain?

So it's just an option that we need to have. In my opinion Windows is good for three things, icq (linux version sux), IE6, and Outlook. There is no reason to run a production webserver on a Windows box. But that's my opinion.

Donny

You could check out Helm

www.webhostautomation.com