Best Way to Start a Website Hosting Service?

Kwirl writes "Lets say that I wanted to start a small business endeavor, namely reselling my server space and offering pre-built websites. What resources would I need to start something like this on my own? What hosting service would best suit those needs? What would be the best way to manage a subdomain-level service that provided a basic forum, registration, a web site and some controlled administrative access for my friends so they couldn't easily terrorize each other? I'm curious to know if I could start something like this on my own, and without much more than just my own server space, time, and creativity. I'm not looking to make a living out of this, its mostly just a way for me to more efficiently manage having several friends each wanting me to built or run a web site for them, and perhaps make some small residual income if a market exists. The Slashdot community represents such a broad swath of experience and expertise that I'd like to know how you would approach a project of this nature."

Comments

Re:How to succeed in 10 easy steps

[Binkleyz]

You forgot:

5) ????
6) Profit

Someone was bound to do it, figured I'd just get it out of the way...

Here you go

[kylehase]

I'd start with 18 2x quad-core 2.3 GHz webservers each with 8 gigs of RAM, and 4 quad-core 2.3 GHz databases with 16 gigs of RAM.

Re:Plesk

[12357bd]

Making a server run smoothly and securely on the big bad internet is an arduous task.

Not so hard, ADSL + NAT(on router) + Linux + Apache + mod-security + static content

Now, managing users... that's hard!

Re:How to succeed in 10 easy steps

[phroenips]

Symantec: Where good software goes to die.

Low-expectation motherfuckers and slashdot

[trolltalk.com]

A lot of these "Ask Slashdot" questions are from people who would be better off being told to just fucking google it.

It's not "elitist" to say that they should do bit of basic research first; or are slashdot users mostly such low-expectation under-achieving slobs who crave any sort of interaction, even from someone who doesn't care enough about what they want to do to take the time to actually *learn* enough to ask smart questions? If they don't give enough of a shit to do some research first, I don't see why anyone should give enough of a shit to help them.

Really, this ranks right up there with people asking us to do their fucking HOMEWORK for them! "For my class project I want to do blah blah blah ... please tell me how to do it ..."

Even the slashvertisements are better.