Advice: Best practices for multiple small website hosting.
 

Hello Everyone,

I have a server running that is hosting less than 10 websites for friends and myself. I'm doing this mostly for the challenge and to learn as much as I can.

I want to know some best practices in how to achieve my goals.

Goals:

Host several very small bandwidth websites (maybe 10 at most) from my home server.

Allow ftp access to a primary website for the website owners to access their sites.
ie: ftp.webhost.com

Allow ftp access to guests of the website owners.
ie: ftp.personalsite1.com
ie: ftp.personalsite2.com
etc...

Hosting mail server for each website owner with multiple users allowed for each domain name.
mail.webhost.com
mail.personalsite1.com
mail.personalsite2.com
etc...

So far I have apache and vsftp (working on postfix for now) working using actual local usernames for each website.
ie:
username: personalsite1
website: www.personalsite1.com
ftp: not matching up to my ideal plan. Anyone could connect to ftp server through any domain that pointed to the server.
ie: ftp.personalsite1.com = ftp.personalsite2.com = ftp.webhost.com

All those domains point to the exact same machine and since I'm using local accounts any users could connect to their personal ftp from any of the domains pointed to that machine.



My big question: Is there a better "smarter" way to arrange this? Does anyone have any recommendations or adivce for me?

Thanks for taking your time,
checkmate3001

Hi Checkmate3001,

I'd advice you to install and configure something like ISPConfig. That's an OpenSource control panel for webhosting services and works perfect.

ISPconfig

And on this website you can find various howtos explaining the complete installation and configuration.
HowToForge

Kind regards,

Eric

Thank you. ISPConfid
 

Thank you for your advice. I read up on ispconfig. It looks very promising. However, I noticed that it recommends to start with a fresh system, newly installed, with a default system.

I don't really want to start all over. I instead want to continue to work with what I have and find better ways to use what I have.

After looking more into ispconfig I decided to install pure-ftp in place of vsftp. I really like vsftp for its security, but it really doesn't have a rich feature set nor is it very adaptable.

So far I am liking pure-ftp because it does offer support for virtual users and it has a very large number of options to fine-tune it how you want. The only down-side is that it was a very strange way to confiure it with a number of small files in different directories with text inside to define different options, as opposed to one or a few conf file(s).

So far so good.

Thank you,
checkmate3001