Big project of wasted time?

[p3rlphr33k]

I have an extra server here just wasting away, so I figured I would throw in 6x80GB drives and ESXi and setup a mini virtual dedicated host..
The catch: I would give away the hosting spots to newbs to develop on, in exchange for a hard link to my main page.

The question: is this possibly a good idea considering I have 1 static IP?
how or does anyone use a shared host and submit using the same IP as others on the same host?

the idea seems great but the IP thing has me worried, and i'm not about to buy 6 new IP's to give away.. any thoughts?

[MadCat]

That's going to be a serious pain in the ass since each virtual server needs to have a "public" IP in order to have sites running on it. Otherwise you're stuck doing NAT and DNAT off internal IPs which you assign to the virtual server, which might (or might not) work.

As far as submits, doesn't matter much if they're on the same IP. Many shared hosts will have tons of domains on a single IP and that never caused issues with submits

I think, though, that if you really want to set up some newb-friendly hosting that you might as well just skip the VMware thing and set it up right on the server itself. lighttpd with the proper config can run PHP in a user-specific "jail", combined with Suhosin it shouldn't be the usual walking security hole, and given the proper FTP daemons you can limit each account to it's own directory.

If you want some more tips on setting it up, let me know, I used to be the sysadmin for a large webhosting company

[Simon]

Just a personal bias here, but I think one of the most important things someone new to this can do is to get a small paid hosting account with a good hosting company which has been around awhile, allows adult content, and is well-received by the Link List and TGP owners to whom they may be submitting.

Absolutely no reflection on you or your idea, P3rlPhr33k, but a lot of new webmasters have been hurt by having the wrong hosting, either trying to use free hosting or by choosing a host which somehow let them down and wound up costing them the loss of all their hard-earned submissions when the LLs and TGPs dropped all of their listings.

If this was just for development of site and concept ideas but not for submitting, that might be useful for some things, but since you mentioned wanting a link back and asked about how they'd submit from the same IP, that may not be what you're thinking.

If someone can't afford or is unwilling to invest the few dollars a month on an inexpensive paid virtual hosting account they really have very little chance of making more than beer money in this business today.

Just my 2 cents.

[LeRoy]

If you have a strong backbone it might be ok. If you are doing mainstream sites with low traffic you're good. Even as a newbie my Dell Sc440 with upgrades was very slow. I eventually closed it and kept everything at Colo. Since then I have had no problems.

[MadCat]

You can run adult off an old P3 with a gig of ram and still get good performance, it's all in the tuning That's why if you get a dedicated server, you also want it managed by capable sysadmins that actually know more than just "ugh reboot server, ugh install patch"

On a side note, if you don't use any fancy .htaccess files and have root access to your box, consider installing lighttpd instead of Apache. It's more memory efficient, and optimised to serve static content, but also works -very- well with PHP (by way of FastCGI).

[p3rlphr33k]

I am not concerned about about hardware or software fatigue. I am running intel S500SVL 4GB xeon 3150 779 6x80gb sas micro drives, intel srcs16 in a 240gb raid 5 + raid 1, VMWare ESX i3, with fedora 9. I am currently running 1 similar setup with a server 2003 R3 1 Tb storage RAID 5. I am very current with my hardware and have been in the infrastructure business for a few years now.

My basic question: will submissions under 1 IP, per host be pardoned, or will they be considered a "double" submission?

ESXi3
|
isp1--------------------------------------
| | | |
| site1 site2 site3
|
isp2--------------------------------------
| | |
site1 site2 site3

[p3rlphr33k]

server 2003 R2 , sorry

[MadCat]

Ugh.

Reinstall it with Linux or OpenSolaris and just run it as a shared hosting machine. A single IP on the physical host won't allow for incoming connections to be sent to the proper host unless you run some seriously fucked up setup where anything going to the IP is passed off to a reverse proxy running on the physical host which will then use the local host file/configs to fetch it off the httpd running on the virtual server.

I'd not run it the way you described

[p3rlphr33k]

windows server 2003 is for dns, dhcp, and print server

I run linux for my webs

[Fonz]

Also, a whole bunch of backlinks from the same IP doesn't give you much SE advantage anymore these days.