Hi all,

I've been a customer for about 6 months now IIRC, I'm very happy with my 540.

I'm looking to be a 'small' reseller host for this software I've been writing. I have a number of clients lined up, and I'm expecting more. It's PHP/MySQL. So my question(s) are:

1. Could a 540 handle cpanel/whm and 50+ clients? I have no problem with moving up plans, but with some tweaking, maybe I can get by. Nothing too crazy, just php/mysql stuff. Maybe a forum on there, and wordpress. I don't forsee anything too high-traffic.

2. The other problem (might) be disk-space. I'm trying to do some research, but does anyone know what realistic disk-space requirements would be? Could I get by on a 5gb quote on a 25 gig VM allocation?

3. Nameserver - can I host my own 'nameserver' with Linode? Would would the DNS manager work with hosted domains?

4. I'm assuming MySQL would be a large bottleneck - I can move that to another server (a 360 for example), if needed?

Right now I am looking at photonVPS (just for this purpose). 8 core, more RAM, more disk-space, but not the awesome control panel of Linode, and actually the node they've put me on doesn't even have a direct control of the VM (some nodes do, some don't yet ,they said end of March. I have to email in for a reboot if I can't SSH in and it's completely gone =\)and the whole DNS manager. And I don't like spreading my providers around. But if everything above is OK, I'll just go with Linode and get a cPanel license (I hate cPanel, but clients love it).

Just a few questions... thanks!!

An un-crazy php/mysql stuff, sure. I have zero experience with cpanel, tho, can't help you here.


Erm, what? You mean like in per-user quota? Well, depends what you expect your clients are gonna do there...


You can install BIND, make it the zone master, and set up Linode DNS manager to work as a slave. Then whatever you change in your BIND config will get automatically pushed to all nsX.linode.com servers... (Don't remember if you can set it to pull everything you have on your BIND or you need to add per-zone entries in the Linode DNS panel. If so, it can be automated using the Linode API.)



Sure, and if you'll put it in the same datacenter (surely you will, because of latency) you can enable (and secure!) the private IP feature and don't have it count against your bandwidth. Oh, did I mention that if you're not gonna hang any web-facing stuff on the second server, the bandwidth pooling will practically add the 200GB you get with 360 to your 540?

I had cPanel/WHM running on a 540 recently just to see if it could handle it, and although I didn't have any live clients on the system, the 540 ran the base system fine.

Hosting your own nameservers - I did this in WHM. Otherwise when you create new accounts you'd have to manually set them up on the linode DNS page. I guess it could be automated through the lindoe API though