What is needed to serve 500+ websites??????

[eje2001]

Ok my brother and I are thinking about hosting 500 or so websites(low-medium hit) each with about 50-100mb of space. What is need to accomplish this task?

From what I have gathered so far is I would need:

Static IP

Dedicated T1 line

Server or Servers

Software

If I go with a dual PIII 1000Mhz w/100gbHD server. How many websites could I host off of it?

Also the software, if I used say Microsoft Windows 2000 Server 25 Users($1000) this will only allow me to host 25 client websites??????

So that would mean I would be looking @ $20,000.00 right off the bat for software alone??????


Any and all kinds of help is appreciated.

[Xayd]

Who said you had to host with Windows?

Last time I checked Apache and Linux/BSD's are still free.

I'm sure someone will be more knowledgable than me on how much bandwidth the average low-hit site sucks up, but a T1 is only 1500kbps download/upload, divided by 8 is around 185k/sec. Figure the average index page on a website would be around...say...100k, you could have two of those sites loaded simultaneously with good speed.

In short, a T1 isn't enough for that many sites.

Xayd

[Statica]

XayD is right, it would seem that a single T1 would be inadequate.

In addition NT/2K is not a viable option .. both in terms of cost as well as performance. In my experience gonna be a tougher job to meet up to your uptime promises with a win machine.

You should be looking more into the hardware. A single PIII just isnt going to cut it either, for that number of sites, you need to be looking for at least a few. You need separate machines to handle mail, FTP/Telnet to say the least, and what about backups and redundancies? u cant really have 500 websites sitting on one egg. For better efficiency further, you are looking for at least an IP range.

There are wayy too many pitfalls and requirements than just being able to say this is wht you need for 500 websites. It isnt as simple a doing Size of website x 500, bandwidth of one site x 500 ...

Even the OS is not based on what you can afford, but based on what you want to offer. If you offer FrontPage compatibility, what database are u offering? How are u going to provide access? What security are you using?

Originally posted by eje2001 Ok my brother and I are thinking about hosting 500 or so websites(low-medium hit) each with about 50-100mb of space. What is need to accomplish this task? From what I have gathered so far is I would need: Static IP Dedicated T1 line Server or Servers Software If I go with a dual PIII 1000Mhz w/100gbHD server. How many websites could I host off of it? Also the software, if I used say Microsoft Windows 2000 Server 25 Users($1000) this will only allow me to host 25 client websites?????? So that would mean I would be looking @ $20,000.00 right off the bat for software alone?????? Any and all kinds of help is appreciated.

[mairving]

You would have to be nuts to spend all that money on Windows 2000. You will have enough expense with the hardware setup. I would use something like E-smith Linux and Apache. These will cost you nothing. If you want, you can purchase support also.

Is this 500 sites all at once or will you start out with a handful and add more later? There are lot of other things to consider like:

• How will you offer support?
  
• What kind of hosting? (Frontpage, Coldfusion, MYSQL, PHP, ASP, etc.)
  
• What scripts will you offer?
  
• What security will you offer?
  
• Will you have a website designer?
  
• Where will you put your serverfarm?
  
• Who will you buy domains from?
  

I know hosts do it different but I think that with small sites, you can get 25 or more on one server using Apache, Linux.

An option worth looking into, often times less expensive than a T1 line, is a business cable connection. In reality, you might need a T3 line and a bunch of routers.

I am telling you that what you are thinking about doing is a massive undertaking. If your plans are to say start out with 20 or so accounts and work your way up, it may be workable.

Another thing to consider is that with all of the capital expenditures that you will have, you probably won't see a profit for at least a couple of years. But I think that you may be approaching things wrong. What you really need to do is to sign up with a host and become a reseller. This way you can still realize a profit and let the host worry about all this stuff. My host, Hosting Matters, offers hosting plans starting at $6.95. For a reseller, these prices are around $3.00. You could sell it for $6 and not even have to worry about it.

[eje2001]

Wow thanks for all the replies, a boat load of information. Mairving we were thinking about the reseller option at first but thought why don't we just do the entire operation ourselves. Well I think we are going to go with our original idea and just resell. Thanks everyone you really openend up my eyes.