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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

Myselfy and a friend have a few little IT projects, and decided to rent a dedcicate server. To recover our costs we sub-let some of the space to friends and family who want websites, webmail etc under their own domain name. Through the use of plesk we can do all the admin dead quick. We consider ourselves a private ISP, i.e you can only have an account if we know you or have been recommended to us. In this way we're not bogged down with random support requests. So far we've recovered all our costs.... who knows we may even make a profit next year.

How comfortable are you in knowing that your web hosting service uses Plesk, a closed source application?

at least it wasn't a picture of this guy.

The SCO page never had a red hat. It was always blackened out. Here is an example of the real image with the red hat in it.

This is probably way off-topic, but anyway. Check the photo on the SCO website again (http://www.sco.com/products/authentication/) and then go to http://www.plesk.com/Product/index.php I think this guy is in a lot of trouble, given the fact that plesk only runs on linux and fbsd :)

Has this evil grinning face been spotted anywhere else? I'm guessing it and the above pictures are from a stock photo cd for marketroids.

the guy shows up at these url's from the article plus sites found by readers and mentioned in posts above... so far:

- Ipswitch
- Plesk
- SCO
- Arsys
- Ecora

have any more to share?

... stabbed out of the DarlBot's unhealthy bloodshot eyes, scorching a black line across the very pixels of the JPG until the RedHat was just a blackened, charred area.

For webhosting, this is ideal. Check out Plesk Server Administrator.