Im feeling more comfortable with the process each day on here. I am a trial by fire kinda guy. Ill nuke the server and reinstall it all to make sure i know all the ins and outs…now i want to start exploring how my customers might be able to sign up for a Virtual Server.
Does any one have any good suggestions or tutorials?
Like i want them to be able to sign up with their own email address for initial login details and such. As the admin in VM, i can see all that and set their email. Do i just do that internally? Invoicing i know will be on whatever platform i want to do.
Good to know that you are enjoying yourself with Virtualmin, @pologoalie8908.
If the customers who sign up will have their own domain / subdomain on a virtual server, then you should consider FOSSbilling. It will let a customer sign up, choose a domain or free subdomain that you offer, select a package (storage, email addresses etc.), pay for it and upon successful payment Virtualmin automatically creates a virtual server for that customer.
However, if you want to offer a Hotmail type service then Virtualmin has API’s and you could write code which will let a user create and access a mailbox on a virtual server server that you own.
When you say scale beyond a certain point, you mean as far as how many server/domains it can support? Is that limited to the server’s hardware itself or is it a software limitation?
How long is a piece of string? Given sufficient resources and low enough traffic, the number is in the thousands. Jamie did some performance work a few years ago for a customer that was putting thousands of domains on each server, basically parked domains with basic content and redirects and such. Virtualmin does fine in that scenario, and Virtualmin is probably not the limiting factor there, in most cases.
But, it’s also possible for a single site to overwhelm a single server, but Virtualmin is also definitely not the limiting factor in that case.
Virtualmin does not do performance intensive work, in the general case, so if you have performance problems they are almost always unrelated to Virtualmin. Virtualmin is just a GUI that manages a bunch of text config files (plus some ancillary scheduled jobs and such). The web server, mail server, etc. are where performance-critical work happens, and we use the same industry-standard options as most everybody else (Apache or nginx, and Postfix, and BIND, and Mariadb/PostgreSQL).
I suspect Calport is imagining a scenario where you want to launch a couple dozen physical machines and sell thousands or tens of thousands of hosting accounts. In which case, Virtualmin by itself is not going to be a lot of help. You’d need to write some code (or use an existing tool, if such a thing exists), to handle distributing domains across your server farm.
Thanks Joe. I assumed this was the case. Just wanted some more clarification. I think I saw you use that same metaphor before on a post asking how many sites can certain specs handle.