Help!! Setting up Reseller webhosting in CentOS 6

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

Hey guys,

I have been tasked with setting up a CentOS VPS web hosting reseller server. I have no idea how to do this and can not find anything pertaining how to do this online. The only thing I find is buying reselling stuff. Not how to setup a VPS using CentOS or how to setup VPS webhosting reselling using CentOS.

Can anyone either point me to a tutorial or explain how to do this? IK have heard you can do it with Webmin but have no clue how.

Thanks

 

[remixedcat]

Do you have access to Cpanel/WHM???

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

Unfortunately I do not. Those are expensive. I'd prefer a good free option. I still need instructions how to do this though. They have a domain. They want to resell web hosting using that domain for the user control panel and selling side. I'm familiar with LAMP stacks.

 

[remixedcat]

How is your HDD setup?

Also once you install a control panel you need to reformat the drive and reinstall. It's hard to delete a control panel once installed.

When you first get the server you would need to install the bare metal hypervisor and then after that and the VMS are created and the OSes will need to be installed on each, after that, you will need to install the control panel (if desired) on each VM.

Control panels:
webmin is a decent free control panel.

Hypervisors:
Now if you want a good hypervisor with dedicated resources per VPS I recommend XEN-PV becuase it seperates the VPS accounts into dedicated VMs.
Stuff like parellels virtuozzo and open VZ are more like jails and they share CPU and do bursting and stuff. They have thier own RAM and disk space but processor is typically shared. They are not full VMs. All OSes must be the same, as they share a kernel, Xen is full VM so you can have different OSes.
virtozzo is commercial and open VZ and Xen are free.

Once that is decided you would install the control panel software onto each VPS and then go from there.


Xen Guides:
http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Category:Manual

Webmin guides:
http://www.webmin.com/download.html
http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin


As far as account management software I do not know of a free one off the top of my head. I know WHMCS and that is kinda pricey though.

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

Well, I'm working with a physical machine. They want Linux as the default base OS. I recommended CentOS since Ubuntu server was missing a good chunk of the essential tools. Such as mtop and nmap. Yes I am aware you can install them with apt-get. Problem is server 13.10 doesn't have them in the repos. The HDDs (6 of them) are in a dell server chassis with a dual Xeon setup.I think I'm working with 6 600gb 10k drives.

 

[Aquinus]

Well, I'm working with a physical machine. They want Linux as the default base OS. I recommended CentOS since Ubuntu server was missing a good chunk of the essential tools. Such as mtop and nmap. Yes I am aware you can install them with apt-get. Problem is server 13.10 doesn't have them in the repos. The HDDs (6 of them) are in a dell server chassis with a dual Xeon setup.I think I'm working with 6 600gb 10k drives.

When running a server for production, I always recommend using Ubuntu's current LTS as opposed to the latest version.

I would install with an internet connection or add the apt sources for the internet. I don't know about the availability of htop since it's been a very long time since I've had to do any work with MySQL, but nmap should be installed into Ubuntu Server by default regardless apt sources.

If you can remote into the machine, I would recommend giving MySQL Workbench (formerly GUI Tools,) a try instead.

Also, if you're not dead set on a hypervisor, I recommend taking a peek at KVM.

 

[remixedcat]

I know its a physical machine.

In order to provision it out into vpses you will need the hypervisor.

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

Can we use virtual box or the tasksel vm?

 

[remixedcat]

Those aren't really meant for hosting. Xen and openvz are better optimized.

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

Is openvz free?

 

[remixedcat]

yes. however its more of a container rather then full hyperivisor like Xen is.

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

But aren't ve's more efficient and better performance?

 

[remixedcat]

Like I said above...

Openvz is a container rather than a full virtual machine like xen

They are both good...however xen will give you better performance due to it fully isolating the VMS and it also allows the clients to choose their own operating system rather than them needing to be on the same one the entire server is.

This also makes it so its more secure and each acts more as a dedicated server does.

 

[Aquinus]

I highly recommend looking at KVM as a hypervisor. Not to say Xen is a bad option, but I've used KVM for production deployments and have been pretty happy with it.

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

thanks for the assist guys! It has been sorted.

 

[Easy Rhino]

VPS web hosting reseller server

are you reselling web hosting or are you reselling VPS?

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

hosting I believe. TBH it has been a while since I looked into it. I was doing this for a friend who wanted to set this up himself but had no clue.