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Think. Stop.

It's more annoying than you might think. I've done it, all my friends have done it, my cousin's done it and our dog will be doing it soon.

Don't don't don't. It's a VASTLY under subscribed and overly competitive market. Once you think you're the best, and you're successful, you become too reliant on a core group of customers who won't last for ever.

There are reseller accounts available with lots of ISPs, but few are on a commission basis (ie: you're the one who has to cover your client's costs and invoice them). Flat fees are usually available to dedicated servers licensors @ £50/m+ - but the market is changing and I'm not at all surprised if they're cheaper.

Plesk - possibly the worst thing I've ever used. Convoluted backend I couldn't hack on to extend pop-before-smtp the way I wanted.
CPanel - the original but very costly 6 years ago when I last used it. Has some impressive addons
EnsimDirectAdmin - Not one I've used personally, but I hear its ok.
VHCS - Freeware. Never used it personally. But there are many OS projects and forks out there if you look hard enough ]

Cubepanel and BlueQuartz worth a mention.

Most of these project offer "lite" versions which are free for restricted personal use. The only major difference between the free and paid versions is that the latter has multi-user and reseller capabilities.

I'd recommending taking up a decent Linux or BSD distro with a proven track record of security fixes. "apt-get update" is sufficient for the home user, but realistically, you want to track purely security updates. Consider an enterprise OS (CentOS?!)

Matt

http://www.go2linux.org/iptables-port-26-redirection-accept-email-on-another-port
and another
http://forum.ensim.com/archive/index.php?t-8228.html

Don't get me wrong, Webmin is great, it's at the top of my list fer shure, but that's not the be-all and end-all of systems management!! What about actual convenient tools like MRTG, Novell's eDirectory, RedCarpet, etc. etc.?

Huh? I'm not that familiar with eDirectory or RedCarpet, but MRTG isn't an all in one configuration interface like webmin. I though the only webmin alternatives were commercial products like:

Ensim
Plesk
Cpanel

Are there free software uber-configuration products other than Webmin? I tend to stick to the command line over ssh myself.

Oooh - I pity their webhosts then. The redirect to port 19638 and /webhost/rollout shows that the site is running the Ensim control panel software which only mails our bandwidth warnings - it doesn't automatically suspend high bandwidth sites or provide other methods of throttling. This means that that shared server (which is the common enviornment for Ensim to run in) is probably waaay overloaded at this moment and many many many customers are suffering.

I haven't seen anybody mention these guys (and they're GPL'd to boot!) so I thought I'd throw in my highly devalued 2 cents.

They seem to have a similar solution to this problem as Ensim does with their Webppliance virtual server suite. Basically making available to each virtual server their own copy of the standard filesystem underneath their /home directory via links and using chroot to keep everyone in their own little area. It seems to work pretty well.

Note: I use an Ensim Webppliance but other than that I really don't know what I am talking about.

Linux can natively be configured to enforce disk quotas and (with more difficulty) manage network bandwidth without any special virtual server software. Also the native unix process scheduling algorithm does reduce the priority of CPU bound tasks. The getrlimit(2) system call can be used to set various limits per process (not per virtual server unless the virtual server runs as one process I guess.) I know of no way to specifically limit disk bandwidth on Linux.

Freeware such as s_context and user mode linux provide no control over how much resources one virtual server gets over another besides disk usage. Other limited resources like CPU, disk and network bandwidth (RAM?) are shared just like they would be shared by separate processes under a single Linux system.

FreeVSD is not a virtual server, but a collection of scripts, binaries and multiple copies of hard-linked read-only filesystems for the common system environment. It is has the best chance for winning the total performance award but has no extra features for resource limits between systems.

True virtual machines. (E.g., vmware) provide very good isolation, but this leads to little sharing of excess unused resources between virtual servers I believe. They also have poorer performance in general because so much emulation is done.

The commercial, proprietary Private Server product from Ensim seems good from the marketing blurbs which say that they have "their own guaranteed share of the servers resources, including CPU, memory and bandwidth". I wonder what the performance penalty for this is and how much does it cost? Can anyone comment?

Linux can natively be configured to enforce disk quotas and (with more difficulty) manage network bandwidth without any special virtual server software. Also the native unix process scheduling algorithm does reduce the priority of CPU bound tasks. The getrlimit(2) system call can be used to set various limits per process (not per virtual server unless the virtual server runs as one process I guess.) I know of no way to specifically limit disk bandwidth on Linux.

Freeware such as s_context and user mode linux provide no control over how much resources one virtual server gets over another besides disk usage. Other limited resources like CPU, disk and network bandwidth (RAM?) are shared just like they would be shared by separate processes under a single Linux system.

FreeVSD is not a virtual server, but a collection of scripts, binaries and multiple copies of hard-linked read-only filesystems for the common system environment. It is has the best chance for winning the total performance award but has no extra features for resource limits between systems.

True virtual machines. (E.g., vmware) provide very good isolation, but this leads to little sharing of excess unused resources between virtual servers I believe. They also have poorer performance in general because so much emulation is done.

The commercial, proprietary Private Server product from Ensim seems good from the marketing blurbs which say that they have "their own guaranteed share of the servers resources, including CPU, memory and bandwidth". I wonder what the performance penalty for this is and how much does it cost? Can anyone comment?

i use an "appliance server" at mediatemple.net that uses the same sort of thing. just a small, isolated linux os on a shared box. works great! i'm fairly sure they use technology developed by ensim. read up on it here. nice to see this made available elsewhere though...

i use an "appliance server" at mediatemple.net that uses the same sort of thing. just a small, isolated linux os on a shared box. works great! i'm fairly sure they use technology developed by ensim. read up on it here. nice to see this made available elsewhere though...

I believe this package is very popular with webhosts. One user can totally hose the machine, the rest are not impacted. Trust me, I know.

If you really want a good control panel backed by a great company and low cost then you should check out Ensim WEBppliance LS .

It is the only Virtual Hosting control panel on the market designed strictly for the Novice Web Hoster.
Check it out.