Hosting Platform

[Guest Mick Walker]

Hi,

 

I have been charged with creating a front end system for a web hosting

solution. The company I work for is a large ISP based in

Northern/Southern Ireland. We will be working with the Microsoft RDP

team on this, as we have entered into partnership with them, and thus so

will be used as a case study.

 

Basically we are aiming for a robust deployment scenario, where upon

sign up the clients website/space is created and deployed as

automatically as possible, through the management interface I am

designing (Similar to the way PIPEX do it).

 

Here is the spec (That I have so far and its far from finished):

 

• Web Hosting

 

By default we'd like new sites to have a quota of 250Mb disk space and a

set amount of bandwidth usage (e.g. 2Gb) for static HTML with no logging

enabled. With that as a base, we'd then offer a series of add-ons -

some free, some with costs.

 

We'd need to add/edit/remove the following:

 

- disk space

- monthly bandwidth usage

- FrontPage extensions

- custom MIME types

- host headers

- logging

- custom error pages

- default documents

- virtual directories

- index server catalogues

- site security (NTLM, IP restriction, etc)

- ASP

- ASP.Net v1.1

- ASP.Net v2.0

- PHP

- Perl CGI (possibly)

- additional FTP accounts

- password protection

- directory permissions: read/write/browse

- webstats (free - using Log Parser)

- premium webstats (currently WebTrends)

- scheduled tasks (possibly)

- piggyback SSL (each host will have a generic cert installed)

- standalone SSL certs (each requiring a separate host IP address)

- database backups

- source content backups

 

 

Management of the options above is also an item we will be adding in later.

 

I have been doing some research, and it seems that Configuration Manager

and Operations Manager are the way in which I can automate these tasks

as much as possible.

 

Does anyone have any good references/books that cover these items? I

particular I would like to look at some source code examples. I am going

to use C# but any language would be OK to use as a reference.

 

I didn't mention it before, but we are going to deploy using Windows

Server 2008 RC1 upon release, but any resources relating to 2003 would

probably be fine as well.

 

Kind Regards

 

--

Contact Me: perl -e 'printf "%silto%c%sker%ccodegurus%corg%c", "ma", 58,

"mwal", 64, 46, 10;'

A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's

ill manners.

[Guest Anthony]

Re: Hosting Platform

 

Mick,

That's an interesting specification. I am just curious as to why you would

not use an ISP provisioning system like Plesk for this?

Anthony,

http://www.airdesk.co.uk

 

 

"Mick Walker" <mick.walker@privacy.net> wrote in message

news:5kqqpaF52j07U1@mid.individual.net...

> Hi,

>

> I have been charged with creating a front end system for a web hosting

> solution. The company I work for is a large ISP based in Northern/Southern

> Ireland. We will be working with the Microsoft RDP team on this, as we

> have entered into partnership with them, and thus so will be used as a

> case study.

>

> Basically we are aiming for a robust deployment scenario, where upon sign

> up the clients website/space is created and deployed as automatically as

> possible, through the management interface I am designing (Similar to the

> way PIPEX do it).

>

> Here is the spec (That I have so far and its far from finished):

>

> • Web Hosting

>

> By default we'd like new sites to have a quota of 250Mb disk space and a

> set amount of bandwidth usage (e.g. 2Gb) for static HTML with no logging

> enabled. With that as a base, we'd then offer a series of add-ons - some

> free, some with costs.

>

> We'd need to add/edit/remove the following:

>

> - disk space

> - monthly bandwidth usage

> - FrontPage extensions

> - custom MIME types

> - host headers

> - logging

> - custom error pages

> - default documents

> - virtual directories

> - index server catalogues

> - site security (NTLM, IP restriction, etc)

> - ASP

> - ASP.Net v1.1

> - ASP.Net v2.0

> - PHP

> - Perl CGI (possibly)

> - additional FTP accounts

> - password protection

> - directory permissions: read/write/browse

> - webstats (free - using Log Parser)

> - premium webstats (currently WebTrends)

> - scheduled tasks (possibly)

> - piggyback SSL (each host will have a generic cert installed)

> - standalone SSL certs (each requiring a separate host IP address)

> - database backups

> - source content backups

>

>

> Management of the options above is also an item we will be adding in

> later.

>

> I have been doing some research, and it seems that Configuration Manager

> and Operations Manager are the way in which I can automate these tasks as

> much as possible.

>

> Does anyone have any good references/books that cover these items? I

> particular I would like to look at some source code examples. I am going

> to use C# but any language would be OK to use as a reference.

>

> I didn't mention it before, but we are going to deploy using Windows

> Server 2008 RC1 upon release, but any resources relating to 2003 would

> probably be fine as well.

>

> Kind Regards

>

> --

> Contact Me: perl -e 'printf "%silto%c%sker%ccodegurus%corg%c", "ma", 58,

> "mwal", 64, 46, 10;'

> A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill

> manners.

[Guest Mick Walker]

Re: Hosting Platform

 

 

Plesk has many features which we would not use. Also we need to be able

to plug this system into our current billing, and production system

which would not be an option with using Plesk.

 

Also by developing in house, we are getting a significant return from

Microsoft in return for being a case study (probably the main reason).

 

Mick

 

Anthony wrote:

> Mick,

> That's an interesting specification. I am just curious as to why you would

> not use an ISP provisioning system like Plesk for this?

> Anthony,

> http://www.airdesk.co.uk

>