Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Your site vs your clients site?

[James-Fagan]

Ok, i've come to the conclusion that I should host my site elsewhere from my servers than to my clients sites.

So how many of you host your website on the same servers that you host your clients websites on?

If not, and you host it elsewhere, are you on a reseller plan, VPS, dedicated or co-location?

I will most probably be going to do this with my site on an advanced reseller with a company like premiumreseller.com but I just like to know what you do!

Thanks - James

[keliix06]

We have a couple dozen sites we run, that we own, from one server. All of our clients are on different servers.

[imago-allan]

Greetings!

In my experience it is always wise to have your site hosted on a different server in order to provide an opportunity for clients to contact you in case their sites are down. You can host a forum and post announcements on your site for your clients' guidance.

You can also have an alternative contact info (or email) that your client can use to contact you.

[kris1351]

You should never run your site on your customer server, this is a BIG no no. One insecure script exploited from a customer could cost you all of your customer data. Not to mention that you should really have a minimum of 2 servers running DNS for you and your customers.

[Dacsoft]

We always run our business site on a different server that is in a different Data Center.

There are no customer sites on the server. This allows us to run with increased security.

[mrzippy]

If you use a company like www.httpme.com, it includes a free account on their "offsite" server, which is located in a different data center.

It's a good way to keep your own website separate from your customers.. and costs you nothing extra.

[handsonwebhosting]

In the beginning it's one thing, but as you expand you will want to put your services on seperate machines so customers can still get a hold of you.

If nothing else, you will want your support desk and billing system on seperate servers. On our site we actually have 5 seperate dedicated machines for our site and services. We do not mix these with customers at all.

[michaely]

I know this is going a little off-topic. But do you recommend going with a seperate company using a VPS or something (if you cannot afford another dedicated server)?

If so, any recommendations? As I would only need a small VPS (under 2gb space/ 20gb x-fer). If you are a VPS provider, just PM me with some details or a link to your site. Thanks.

[handsonwebhosting]

I would recommend it - yes. Keeping your files in a seperate data center would also be an advatage just in case something was to happen with the pipeline into your main DC.

I unfortuantly do not have any information on VPS - never played with it, but I know there's a category here somewhere with people advertising rates etc.

[Dacsoft]

Originally Posted by michaely

I know this is going a little off-topic. But do you recommend going with a seperate company using a VPS or something (if you cannot afford another dedicated server)?

If so, any recommendations? As I would only need a small VPS (under 2gb space/ 20gb x-fer). If you are a VPS provider, just PM me with some details or a link to your site. Thanks.

You could use a VPS if you wanted. To just make sure your support system was always available, you could use a VPS or even a regular hosting account with a reliable provider. I would recommend your support site be in a different data center than your servers.

[James-Fagan]

Originally Posted by michaely

I know this is going a little off-topic. But do you recommend going with a seperate company using a VPS or something (if you cannot afford another dedicated server)?

If so, any recommendations? As I would only need a small VPS (under 2gb space/ 20gb x-fer). If you are a VPS provider, just PM me with some details or a link to your site. Thanks.

Maybe a little too much space and bandwidth but futurehosting.biz offer some good VPS servers!

[SDC-Eric]

We run our site w/ different carriers and in a different datacenter, as a contingency plan for an outage. Call it paranoid, but it is really helpful to be able to send out emails without monkey-ing around with our own systems or worse, DNS.

Depending on what you need for your site, you could get something simple, ie Shared/VPS. Just make sure that whatever you end up doing you choose a reliable provider, even if you end up paying a little more. Otherwise, what is the point?

Good Luck

[IH-Rameen]

Our main website: <<< removed >>> is hosted on the same server as our customers. We don't see the need to have that offsite..

However, our support desk and billing data is offsite on another server for redundancy reasons...

[Mini]

We host our main website and support/billing system on a different server to our client servers.

Mini

[sgarbus]

We host our website on its own dedicated server. Unfortunately, that's located in the same datacenter as most of our servers are (Steadfast), so the recent outage was quite harsh. No biggie though, they're still a great company.