Hosting again

[Lyle - CosmicPerl.com]

Joel Bernstein wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 04:11:50PM +0000, Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
>   
>> 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'll get it working on some test machines at home, then get it working 
in the datacentre with my sites and some small clients, then look at the 
bigger clients.

I've been running dedicated Linux box's for over 5 years. Dealt with all 
kind of hack attacks, mailing issues, software issues, hardware issues, 
you name it. Taught my self Linux remotely, never used it first hand 
until I built my Supermicro dual opteron colo server. Compiled and setup 
xen, my colo is now running xen host and 3 virtual private servers. 
Setup BIND, sendmail, Apache, Tomcat, ruby, tcl, lua, python, Perl (of 
course) and a lot more. Secured my scripts and sendmail (after learning 
the hard way). Created monitoring scripts so that my US and UK servers 
monitor each other and fix each others common problems when they occur. 
Made scripts to deal with the mail queue, setup IPTABLES, WebMail, 
Webmin, Mono... Documented everything for future reference (learnt how 
important this is from my first server experience).

I have proved to myself time and time again that I can understand and do 
anything on a computer, I just need to push myself to do it. I HATE 
being dependant on other people and other people tend to be a total let 
down. The idea of paying someone to setup something that I don't know 
how to replicate, where they might not do it properly, might bog off 
when I have problems, might not have documented it properly so that I 
can get someone else in... AGHHHH, sod em all! I'll learn it and do it 
myself!

I've installed my software on so many different hosts across the world I 
have little respect for so called hosting administrators. I've helped so 
many guys who are supposed to be qualified to do simple tasks like 
adding perl modules.

Even a big host like Fasthosts. They seem to have 1 tech guys who 
actually knows his stuff, all the others just feed you a load of crap 
which is total bull, what they actually mean is "I don't have a clue 
what I'm doing!".
> 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. 
>   
Don't worry about me. Worry about my hair line :(
> 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
>
>