Hosting Platform [Repost]

[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

 

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