Hundreds of websites on one server? Best way to go.

[stevetheb]

I work in a school and I'd like to set up a small webspace for several hundred students, maybe 5 Mb each, with MySQL and PHP enabled. These would be for internal (Intranet) access only. They'd need to be able to upload using FTP. In effect I guess I'm trying to set myself up as a inschool ISP.
I quite enjoy the challenge of getting things like this working, but I'd be grateful if anyone could point me in the right direction to get this setup.

Many thanks

Steve

[sdousley]

do they all have a "home" type partition that gets mounted when they log on?

You could do a similar solution to what my uni had.

a Linux server, which stored all the files. and on that computer, run apache with the homedir stuff, such that going to:

http://localhost/~username

will, instead of going to the usual webroot, goto where you specify, which would probably be

/home/username/public_html

This means that the students dont need to ftp files to their webroot, simply copy to their users space on the webserver onto ~/public_html.

If their documents are not stored on the same computer as the webserver, then a simoilar solution with ftp to ~/public_html should work out ok.

Hope this explains reasonably.

[Mystic_Slayer]

Also another solutions is to create a portal:

You create a website:

http://websiteaddress/index.php

When they want to create their own website you get this:

http://websiteaddress/users/name/index.php where they can upload their webpage thru a upload facility.