Hi guys,
thats my first post here so please don't eat me alive - I have just learned about linode (and VPS for that matter) and I'm wondering if I can use that solution.

I'm running a one-man webdesign company, doing some small projects on the side (meaning on top of my regular day job). Some of my customers asked me for hosting of their sites but I never liked the idea of becoming re-seller for another web hosting company.

I asked a few questions on your irc channel and it seems like running web hosting is what linode is almost made for . My only concern is if I'll be able to configure such setup and maintain it without spending too much time on it. Last time I had any exposure to linux was over 10 years ago and I remember very little, but looking at the forum I can see there is a lot of things to consider when setting up web and mail servers.

The reason why I believe I could actually pull this off is my customers usually have very simple websites, just a few static html pages, maybe some PHP/MySQL but nothing too complex... On top of that I will of course have to provide POP3/STMP as well as web based e-mail, maybe some simple stats/config and thats it.

No particular question here, I would like to hear what do you think about it, is there a lot of people doing this or maybe someone who started 'from scratch' could share his/her experiance??

Thanks in advance!

Why?

No one but a masochist runs their own email server these days.

To much work keeping it secure and reasonable spam free.

Outsource to people who know what they're doing. Google Apps works great for domains with under 50 users - and it's free.

I do what you want to do for a living, it's perfectly possible to do it, and there's umpteen ways of doing it.

Things you want to consider vs managed hosting (that's what you get when you resell most likely).

1) If the server goes down clients come screaming to you and you can't go screaming to anyone if you're on unmanaged (unless the network falls over or data centre gets hit by a meteorite).
2) Managing your own email servers are a pain (IMHO).

Anyway here's what I do.

I use google apps for email, you've got your imap/pop3 and spam filtering all sorted for you, and if you don't want a SLA it's free. (Also if the server goes down your email is still ticking).

I then run nginx proxying php/python/perl/whatever back to apache with mysql sitting there doing it's thing.

I only let a select few people that I know won't break things upload files to the server (and make sure only I have root).

That setup works for me, after the initial setup (takes a few hours if compiling everything) I can happily leave the server to do it's thing for months on end.

If you don't fancy doing everything from the command line there's quite a few control panels you can use, free ones include webmin, ispconfig (google for some more).

Paid ones are down to plesk and cpanel really (I used cpanel for a year or so I'm glad I ditched it, it wasn't the most stable of things).

I suggest you try setting up your own webserver with php/mysql but put your email else where (i.e. google).

Thank you both for replying.

I've been using GMail since back when it was invite only and I had no idea about Apps version. I'm moving mail account from my own domain there ASAP - thanks for the tip.

obs - the maintnance part is what I'm actually most afraid of. My days are 'full' already plus I travel quite a lot and I'm worried I won't be able to respond fast enough. How often do you 'expect' your servers to go down? I was hoping that for a simple setup it should be pretty stable but I might underestimate it here.

Another issue is dealing with domain registration for my customers, I live in Denmark and I have no idea how difficult it is both on the administrative site as well as setting it up technically.

As I understand you should have your own DNS server as well right?

I've been investigating this recently too and had accounts with several places - VPS.net, Hostgator reseller, wiredTree, knownhost and of course linode to see how they compared.

I used WHM/cPanel on the above places. WHM/cPanel is very easy to use, but at one point my server went down because a cPanel update borked the system and it took the wiredTree techs some time to deal with the problem (not their fault, just a cPanel update screwing things up).

Your control panel should be able to handle common things like email server, DNS etc.

Personally I would go managed rather than unmanaged for a client-hosted business.

If you're using a control panel like whm/cpanel with managed hosting I'd expect the server to go down at the most inappropriate times (like 2am) normally due to there being too much bloat in the control panel or someone on the tech support pushes a button they shouldn't (hence why I manage my own).

On a more serious note, you can't "expect" your server to go down, downtime happens, normally at the worst time (when's a good time?), the more software you have the more chance something will go wrong, control panels contain a ton of software so the likelihood of something breaking is a lot higher.

For unmanaged there's no reason it can't be up for months or years without any problems, I've a box that's been up for 173 days and the last reboot was for a kernel update. (I've heard of people having up times of 3 years or more)

Domain registration is easy, register it at your favourite registrar, pop in the name servers n1.linode.com to ns5.linode.com then you can manage the dns entries via linode's control panel.

Like you I've tried vps.net, wired tree, known host, slicehost, rackspace, servint, liquid web, and probably more that I've just forgotten. My favourite out of all of them is linode because it's value for money and has a great feature set, and best of all there aren't many employees (not too many fingers in the pie!).

You could try hosting your own site on a 360 node for a month or so and see how you go, if you like it then you can move clients onto it.