[shaunmckinnon]

Let me introduce myself. I'm Shaun McKinnon. I work for a security company in Orillia, Ontario, Canada.

The owner and myself are thinking of establishing a small web hosting company. What kind of hardware would I need to get started? We want to use Linux Fedora as the OS. We'd like it to also create an offsite mirror of the server.

Thanks in advance,
Shaun McKinnon

[jasonlambert]

You've made the mistake that everyone else before you has made... Your asking the questions in the wrong order. Before you decide what server hardware or linux distro you need, you should determine what kind of hosting you will offer... Is it shared? who are your target audience?

Eg, if your going to target high end websites with 5Gb Oracle and Postgres databases your hardware requirements are TOTALLY different to a company hosting a few ecomm stores with 20Mb MySQL databases. If your offering Oracle, your only real options would be SuSE or Redhat Enterprise as these are the only distributions officially supported. If your going to offer languages such as Coldfusion, then your proberly restricted to Redhat or SuSE again as I suspect these are the only distros you will get official support for coldfusion on.

Jason

[big_k105]

welcome to the forums

[shaunmckinnon]

Sorry, that was silly of me...I want to offer a simple mysql php enabled minor ecom sites. I want to offer around 600mg file space.

[jasonlambert]

Hardware for that, to offer good uptime...

If the sites are going to be fairly low traffic then you are likely looking at 2+ harddrives in RAID-1 configuration, 1GB RAM (512 would suffice), and at least a 1Ghz processor.

Disk size is up to you, you can do what thousands of web hosting providers do and "oversell" your disk space, so for example:

Without overselling.. 600Mb per customer, for 100 customers means you MUST have 60Gb of disk space in total.

Overselling... Now imagine you know that on average your customers are going to use 300Mb of diskspace. That means you offer 600Mb, but you only need to purchase a 30Gb disk. This saves you money buy not having to buy large disks to support what your offering because you know your customers wont be using that space anyway.

If you want to create an offsite mirror, you can use software like rsync or write a custom script to do it.

Jason

[stathisx]

welcome to the forum from me too!

[shaunmckinnon]

Are you allowed to use Fedora for commercial web hosting?

[jasonlambert]

yes, you can use it for whatever you want