Hello all,
I haven't been out here in a very long time. I ran a hosting company from 1998 to 2002 (those of you who have been on WHT for a while will remember me), but I sold my hosting company a couple years ago.
Since 2001 I've been running a dial-up ISP. Been pretty happy doing it (only doing it part time now, and working for a living with the rest of my time) but I've been thinking for a while of getting back into doing some web hosting on the side (after all, I have the servers and everything for the ISP, and only a fraction of the resources are being used, why not throw some web sites on there and make some extra money).
The problem is that for the dial-up I outsource our tech support. The call center we use is willing to also support our hosting users, but in order for this to work I need a control panel for the support people to use to work with the servers.
Back when I ran my original hosting company, we didn't use a control panel (in 1998 they just didn't exist, and we built all our own systems then and never saw the need to move to a CP setup later on). So I have absolutely no idea when it comes to CP software what's good and what isn't.
The CTO of the call center we use says they have experience supporting Plesk, Ensim, and H-Sphere. From what I can see, Plesk and Ensim seem to be too costly to implement for what I'm looking for (web hosting isn't likely to become my primary business - it's just a way to utilize some of the equipment we already have to have for the dial-up end of things), plus I once rented a server with Ensim and it was all sorts of problems. H-Sphere looks like it could do the job, and the price is certainly reasonable.
But I'm looking for feedback from hosts who are experienced using it. What do you think about it? Is it easy to work with? Any issues from a technical end? Is it going to (as Ensim did) completely hijack our servers so that it's impossible for us to do other things on it (we're looking to add the hosting onto existing servers - servers that are doing radius, e-mail, dns, and other dial-up-related stuff) and can't afford to have the new technology blow up the stuff we're already using).
On a somewhat related note, if I wanted to explore a bit with it, and maybe set up a few accounts just to see how it will go without jeopardizing our existing servers, can anyone recommend some resellers or dedicated server providers who offer H-Sphere that are good people and good companies that I could work with if we decide not to do it on our existing machines?
Any suggestions would be helpful. I've been out of the business for a long time (in Internet time, that is) and a lot has changed. I've been trying to catch up here as best I can, but there's just so much overwhelming information that it's taking some time to weed through everything here on WHT. So I figured I'd post this now so I can get some good feedback.
By the way, I'm really not looking for feedback of the type of "hey, yeah, H-Sphere is good, dude" or something like that (I see a lot of those posts on here these days, and I don't need it). If you don't have anything constructive or truly informed to provide, don't waste your or my time by posting. Not to be rude or anything, that is absolutely not my intention - I just have seen a lot of posts in other threads as I work my way through that really didn't contribute to them and it's somewhat annoying, and I'd like to avoid that here.
Thanks in advance for any feedback anyone can offer.
- Jason
Linear Mode
