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Ask HN: Which provider would you use to start a small web hosting company?

1 points by iDemonix ↗ HN
My day job involves looking after a Cloud Linux web hosting setup, based on WHM and cPanel, for a few thousand small customers in a niche sector.

I freelance and create (mostly WordPress powered) websites for small to medium businesses, as well as eCommerce sites and so on. I end up referring them all to various 3rd party hosts and domain providers, when most the time they ask if I'll host it and provide services like backups, setting up email accounts and so on.

As I have knowledge of web hosting, and it my work are ok with it, I figured it'd be a fun side project (I've been looking for one) to scratch an itch I've had to learn more about 'the cloud'. All my work web hosting is on our tin, and I've used Azure enough to dislike it.

What would you use to back it? I was thinking of either DigitalOcean as I know it well, or learning AWS, which I want to do but seems daunting. It'd be great to be able to auto scale, or simply create an EC2 instance per customer or something which would be great for security.

As well as the titular question, if anyone has any blogs or similar related, I'd be interested in reading.

4 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] thread
Alir3z4
I suggest you get a reseller account from one of the web hosting provider and setup your clients on it.

Managing cPanel, WHM, CloudLinux, CXS, CSF, Munin, backup, security, etc is not easy.

ps: I'm running a web hosting business myself ;)

iDemonix
I've done that for a couple of clients, but I wanted something I could entirely automate and my current host have randomly broken permissions and stuff during maintenance. I manage most of that stuff already anyway, I was wondering if anyone was backed by AWS mainly. Do you have a blog or something? I'd be interested to see how a small setup gets on - are you a one man show?

Edit: Never seen Munin before. At work my main responsibility is monitoring, so I setup and scale out our Icinga, Graphite, Grafana and Graylog platforms - you should check out the Icinga/Graphite/Grafana stack, you can do some awesome stuff!

Alir3z4
For most of Azure, AWS stuff I use Ansible for automation and deploying my tools.

If I have something like wordpress, joomla or any other classic web application that can be easily run on cPanel, I don't bother with installing automation for them on AWS or any bare servers or even docker. Even though lately using docker, containers or stuff like that have become very popular.

Still tons of the stuff like database backup, monitoring, ssh access for each customer, htaccess configuration, php multi-version, etc are not easily done by those technology stacks, cPanel & CloudLinux cover them all.

If you want to play it cool, you can even run each web application on heroku.

If you're still considering to go out of cPanel stack, I suggest you something like Dokku, deis, Flynn, Docker Swarm, etc...

I don't have a blog by myself about this, but there are tons of resource about them how to go with each of them.

I mosltly play with Python, Go, Java, NodeJS and some others for web application, so CloudLinux or cPanel are not a fit for me. Therefore I get them done with PaaS as much as I can and tons of help from my Ansible playbooks to run customized machines on bare metal or AWS servers.

I started running the web hosting business as a one man show for a 3-5 months to get things running and now we have 2 people on it to manage cPanel/CloudLinux and OpenVZ servers.

Thanks for mentioning the monitoring stacks, I'v used some of them before but not extensively. I mentioned "munin" because its available as a plugin for cPanel and sometimes configuring it can cause confusion.

[dead] BlueLeafHosting
I think starting off with a reseller account would be a great way to manage, since it provides you with the basic tools to start a web host. Checkout blueleafhosting.com/cpanel-hosting for some stellar reseller hosting options with 24/7 support.