Hey everyone,

When we first got into business I decided to go with a quality reseller to cut costs. I know this reduces legitimacy to some degree, as everyone and their brother is a reseller of some company or another. But I spent several months testing services before I found, what I thought was, the best service.

Anyhow, in an effort to grow and to have more control over the technical aspects of hosting and to offer more freedom to my own clients I am curious about VPS settings.

Basically, I want to keep the reseller account. I'm very happy with the service as are my clients. I will host only shared hosting accounts with this.

The VPS will be used for redundancy, so in the unfortunate event the server experiences any downtime (Reseller server) the VPS would display our website, or at the very least a "We're working on our site, we'll be back online in a moment. Here is some important links.." page.

The VPS will also be used for one of the following things: Either where I can put my own resellers on or where I could put just a few 'semidedicated' (for lack of a better term) clients who require more resources and freedom than typical shared hosting can offer them.

Now, here are my questions...

1.) Can anyone point me in the right direction as far as setting up the VPS to display the main website in the event the server were to go out? How could I achieve total redundancy? Would I need to purchase separate WHMCS licenses for the two separate IP's?

2.) What sort of specs would you recommend for a VPS that is being shared by (5 or under) people with high resource sites? When I say 'high resource', I simply mean anything that would typically be frowned upon in a shared hosting environment, like a semi-popular forum, large e-commerce site, small social network, etc. I think I am in the position to just tell the company I am getting the VPS from what I need, and they can deliver it. (They don't list VPS on their site, just helping a good customer out )

3.) Can the VPS do both?


I'm just wanting to expand a little bit, and while I currently have full root access on the reseller server I am on and the ability to 'master' resell, I'd honestly rather keep my alloted space reserved for shared hosting accounts and use the VPS for other things. My technical knowledge is a few steps behind my business knowledge, but I'm looking forward to having more control.

Your a smart guy, We think a like.

By we think alike I mean, I would take the Master Reseller and only use it for Shared Hosting, While having a VPS for Reseller accounts and even some small shared hosting.

In a mattor of fact I don't think its a problem if a company is ran off a reseller, Hey they are making money aren't they and there clients are happy? Now I bet if you where to tell your clients you where on a Reseller or that they where on a Reseller they would maybe not leave you and say hey thanks for telling us but we're not moving you treat us well and the service is great wouldn't they?

As for the main site on both VPS and Reseller, Here is what I would do, First I would shoot out to GoDaddy or NameCheap and purchase a .info domain lets say, Surmounted.info and put that domain as information for your customers, So when they think they are having down time they could always go there and see if the service is up, I would purchase a nice small shared hosting plan from a provider like HostGator or something and just have that account for information services for the site.

And for the main site just incase the Reseller Goes down, Now what you could do is take the billing system off the Reseller, Because its on a shared server not good to have it there, Others can hack into your account and get all that information and I would move it over to the VPS after that Ill have the template and main site of Surmounted.net on the VPS and have another domain on the Reseller just to have the reseller up, I say this because you def. know that your VPS will be up and has more chances of being up other than the Reseller..

Its just something I would do, Hope you understand what Im trying to eplain to you. Good luck and I hope you find out what you want to do to make your company more secured and better.

1) I have to admit that it is quite hard to find good tutorials on how to setup a VPS. When I bought my first VPS it took me a couple of months to get used to SSH and full WHM version. However, the biggest help for me was a web hosting book. It explains everything about starting your own web hosting business (including server setup, WHMCS, marketing etc). It's well worth the money in my opinion as you will learn so much. Here is the link:

http://www.webhostingbusinessbook.com/

2) This is a very hard question to answer as there are so many factors to take into consideration. Before you start hosting customers on a VPS I recommend playing around with it for a couple of months at least. For this I recommend 1GB RAM, 20+ GB Disk Space and 100+ GB bandwidth. The good thing about VPS hosting is that you can upgrade your specs very easily with most hosts. I personally have a VPS with igxhost.com and have been very happy with their service.

3) I can't help you on this one as I am more of a marketing guy rather than a techie

Regards,
Jack

Thanks for your response, I actually DO have that book, but forgot about the VPS part!

I'm about to test out a cloud VPS setup that is currently only in BETA mode, so I won't use it for production but rather testing.

Our provider doesn't list VPSes on their site, but they're working with me to provide me one soon too.

All in time, all in time. I have SSH access to our current server, perhaps I should start using SSH more?

Thats nice of Surmounted.NETs provider, I wish there was more providers like that that go out there way to provide a client with something they don't offer.


All in time, all in time. I have SSH access to our current server, perhaps I should start using SSH more?

You should use SSH more often, If you do so then when you have a server you'll be use to the commands and know what your doing.

I haven't actually done this myself, but IIRC, you will need failover DNS in order to make this happen.

The premise is, your main DNS will be pointed to wherever your main site is, then the failover DNS should be pointed to the VPS.

Now, I could be wrong here, and please, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if the primary DNS comes back as "website unreachable" then the Failover should pick up? Or is that just if the DNS server itself is unreachable?