Hi all!

I work for a non-profit educational organization that provides central IT services to K12 schools. We already rent space in a tier 1 datacentre and obviously have excellent internet links.

I'm interested in providing a web hosting service to our member schools. As automated as possible since we can't don't have many technical staff. A front-end like plesk looks great(pity is doesn't support LDAP for auth). What about the OS and DB backend?

Could someone point me towards some best practices or howtos for setting up such a service? Self-service DNS is also a VERY important.

Either Plesk or cPanel/WHM should be able to do this for you. For the back-end administration if you're going with Virtualization then I would recommend HyperVM or Virtuozzo from Parallels as well.

This is relatively simple....

CentOS 5.3 for the OS
cPanel/WHM for the Control Panel.
WHMCS or ClientExec for automatic provisioning of the account.

Name-server wise, as long as everyone who signs up is ok with using the same name servers, such as ns1.your-non-profit-host.com and ns2.your-non-profit-host.com, then you would never have anything to do DNS wise :)

Any billing software should be able to help you automate this. Programs like modernbill have plugins to work with almost all of the different types of OS and control panels available.

They also do the dns assignments too. If you cluster your servers together you would only have one set of nameservers for all of your servers.

For ease of use, you may want to stick with just one control panel though so you'd easily be able to move sites from one server to another.

cPanel + WHMCS

A hierarchical format, with delegated administration is also a very important feature. As we would delegate to districts, which would then delegate to individual schools. can cpanel and WHMCS work this way?

Does someone have links to best practises or real world deployment examples?

Well, if you are from a university, it seems obvious for me that you should go open source.

Thomas

What about authentication? i heard cPanel does not support any form of external auth source(ie LDAP). Is there some way around this?

Well, if you are from a university, it seems obvious for me that you should go open source.

Thomas
Not so in this case. Open source is means security issues (not always though). You'll have some bright chap in the Uni capable of turning your server into a dum box.

What about authentication? i heard cPanel does not support any form of external auth source(ie LDAP). Is there some way around this?
When you say authentication, what are you trying to accomplish here? Are you trying to integrate cPanel into some other panel you are going to develop?

cPanel has an extensive API, look at it: http://twiki.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/AutomationIntegration/

Not so in this case. Open source is means security issues (not always though). You'll have some bright chap in the Uni capable of turning your server into a dum box.

How come you are saying that? So windows is more secure than Linux? IE more secure than Firefox? Oracle better than Postgress? And what about ... HyperVM? :)

This makes absolutely NO sense at all. It's not because something is open source that it's less or more secure. It's just that when it's open, you can at least audit the code, and do something even when the author is gone. But it doesn't make any difference otherwise.

Thomas

ganesh-rao: I just don't want another identity data silo in our infrastructure. I want to be able to assign hosting rights based on, say LDAP group membership.

I don't want to have to maintain an additional identity source.