Hosting again

[Joel Bernstein]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 04:11:50PM +0000, Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
> Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> >Then at minimum you want to co-locate three devices. You will need to
> >hire someone to configure the third device.
> >
> >  
> I'll certainly be doing everything myself.

As a learning project? Weren't you talking about a production
environment for hosting applications for paying clients? If you haven't
done it before, consider employing somebody to do a professional
design/setup job. I wouldn't think your clients will be enthusiastic
about hosting provided by somebody who knows nothing about it.

I don't want to put you off, far from it, but you should perhaps be
careful of over-selling yourself. If you haven't done something at least
3 times (it takes that many goes to know which mistakes not to make) you
should IMHO be very wary of offering services which rely on it. It might
go well, but at best it's a bluff and at worst it's conceivably
negligent. 

This is just good business sense in focussing on what you're good at.
If your skills lie more in development than systems
admin, networking, backups, security and all the other skills you need
to be successful running a hosting platform, it might be wise to
concentrate on what you do well and find a partner/employee/whatever who
can provide the skills you don't yet possess. Scalable internet
architecture isn't something where some book/mailing list knowledge will
substitute for real world experience.

/joel