Hi,

I'm planning to offer Unlimited Domains Hosting on Windows servers. We get lots and lots of demand for windows based reseller plans on Unlimited Domains.

My customers have very low bandwidth requirement and most of the sites are small ASP based sites with data transfer of less than 200 - 300 Mb per Month.

I haven't seen many hosts offering Unlimited Windows Hosting. Just wanted to know your opinion whther how well it can go and how many domains with relatively very small or low resource usage like data transfer of less than 200 MB per month it can handle ?

Whats your idea ?

virtual or IP based ?

In my experience no.... I used to run a gaming network and utilised a Windows 2000 server for smaller sites hosting.

I'd set a limit on domains for each reseller account - improves the quality of the service your offering - a prime example would be Fasthosts - a service I believe would benefit by imposing a limit on the domains each account can have.

I'd think your proper clients (who know 'unlimited' is a bad idea) will thank you for it.

Bump.

I find a good rule of thumb for Windows servers it no more then 400 to 500 domains per server. I find that IIS gets unstable over 500.

lol...iis

lol...iis?

I would say it was a dig at IIS....

Just to check dreamrae.com - have you used IIS in a production environment before???

Originally posted by dreamrae.com
lol...iis
:rolleyes:

Well I'd be running all domains on name based hosting. Server I'm planning is win2k with Hosting Controller with 1 GB Ram over a p3 1 Ghz Machine with 7200 RPM HDD.

I Plan to move to a Dual Processor, SCSI HDD based system in the due coruse of time when I have enough domains to support a high config server..

If 400 is the no. which my current configuration can support then I think my plan is worked out to give me profitability. I believe none of my clients would eat major resources though I count in these issues as well.

Is any body running over 400 domains over a win machines ..If yes What configuration ?

I've worked with a company in the past several months that had just over 700 domains on a single server. They had four servers running this way, and IIS becomes very unstable after about 4 days of use and required a reboot. All the sites are very simple HTML and ASP pages, with some using SQLserver for database accessed info, but that was housed on a seperate server. These are pretty hefty machinces too. Dual 1Ghz P3s with a GB of RAM each, and full 10K SCSI drives.

It's gotten to the point some customers have been become very mad since the reboot times are almost random on that fourth day. The only reason I point to the number of domains is because it's just IIS that is becoming unstable. Like clockwork sites will stop serving out and the only way to get them back is to reboot the server.

The client is currently looking into purchasing two more servers and moving customers from the other four to the two news one to spread out the load.

250 to 300 low use sites max. Anymore and you will lose customers. You should price your plans around that, that may not leave you in a situation to be competitive enough to undercut everyone but your customers will be much happier and therefore loyal.

Thansk all here for your help and advice.
I would paln the things based on above stats. Now one more thing...Does it makes any sense to go for a p4 machine rather than a p3 machine. Do you think it improves the processing and hence content delievery in any way ?

I'm planning to go for command Matrix as the control panel..any thought on this ?

At this point I'd only go for a P4 if you can get a great deal on it. Otherwise, a P3 should be more then enough.

I'd be the first to admit that Windows does require rebooting more often than a Linux server.... although many server admins don't do what they would normally do on a Linux box... find the source of the problem that's causing you to reboot the server and solve it! If your rebooting a Windows server to solve the problem every time then your not really doing your job properly as a server admin.

Command Matrix looks very good - so far I prefer it to all other Win2k control panels.

On the P3/P4 debate... I've only read that the P4 isn't that much of a performance leap when it comes to server performance.

Is their any co offering Unlimited domains hosting on Windows server except matrixreseller & weberz..Both of them offer hosting over H-Sphere I' want to see some co. offering same on other CP's

I am no web hosting expert, but I just don't see how putting 600+, 1,000+ or even 5,000 domains on the same server should create problems with IIS, Apache or any other web server software. If you have a 1 Ghz machine with 1 Gig of ram, there is no reason it should be creating problems.

Unless one of the three things is happending:

1.) Too much Cold Fusion, ASP, JSP or PHP is running on server as well.

2.) The average amount of traffic each web site gets is too high.

3.) Something strange went wrong and the web server is not configured properly.

As JonB was getting at, if there is a need to reboot every 4 days, then there is something that is causing that problem. In the case of this topic it seems that once resellers allow unlimited domains, the performance goes down after a couple hundred domains, and is no longer worth it. It would be my guess because of #1, #2 or #3 above.

5000 domains on a Win2k server, you gota be kidding.
If it was possible you could make about $700,000 per server.

Unfortunately on Windows servers badly written ASP code can harm IIS more than badly written php code can harm Apache.

Check out Command Matrix (http://www.etrinix.com/cm/) as well - it looks very good from the screenshots... hopefully it's stable as well.

5000 Domains !!! Tell you If I can host even 800 No.s I'll be highly profitable.. ;)

I was just saying with no dynamic content and if none of the domains are getting traffic, then there should be no problem. You guys are saying the problem is the number of domains hosted on these servers, when I think your problem lies elsewhere... Most likely CPU or Bandwidth.

Yes, CPU and Bandwidth are the direct problems, and indirectly it probably has something to do with the number of domains on that computer. But it is not because there are "too many domains".

point taken. If you have 800 idle html sites and no application running then yes its feasible.