Cpanel program and creating domains/databases on the fly

[Guest]

*just realized this is a presales question...

Hi,

I am a reseller in the free reseller program. I want to stay in that program because I like resellers panel billing and supporting my web design customers. But I want to offer certain industries websites as "Software as a service". If you are not familiar with the term it basically means building one website/software that can run multiple websites then charging customers a monthly fee for use of the website. In order to do this I need to host the website in one customer account and be able to add domains on the fly to that account. This needs to be done because all domains need to access one installation of the website. I might be able to do it with each customer having their own account which would be even better but that depends on how much access I have to the server.

So my questions are:
1. Can I create sub domains in a single customer account on the fly.
2. Can I create databases from the system command using php.
2. Or even better can create a new customer account for each customer and have an htaccess file redirect file requests to my reseller account space.
-That would allow me to have each customer have an account for hosting files and databases related to their installation only as well as provide email for them.
3. Can I create emails on the fly in either methods.

I don't need to know how to do this as I can look into that myself. I just need to know if there are any reasons why I cant do so under the cpanel program. I imagine I would have to either do these things using the system command in php or use whatever interface whm has.

[Milen]

camelion, I have forwarded your questions to our cPanel support team and will post their reply as soon as I receive it. However, I am not sure that I understand what exactly do you intend to do. Can you, please, clarify? Examples would be helpful, especially for point three. Thank you for your interest in our cPanel program. I will get back to you as soon as I have more information.

P.S. Please, avoid double posting, if you made a post to the wrong forum section, make a note about it and I or another moderator will move the thread to the correct forum section.

[Milen]

Here is the info I got from the cPanel support team:

1. No, you cannot create subdomains through a script, you need to create them though the cPanel itself.
2. You cannot create databases through a script either. Databases can only be created through the cPanel.
4. In general, new email accounts can be created through SSH, because a mail account basically represents a few folders in the client account, but it is still preferable to create the email accounts through the cPanel.

The cPanel team would still appreciate a clarification of point three though.

[Guest]

Question 3

Sure.

The third question just asks if I can create hosting accounts on a server and be able to have those hosting accounts actually serve files from another account preferably my main account. Say my account is in home/reseller/pub_html and the customers account is in home/customer/pub_html. I would want to create an htaccess file that redirects all file requests for that domain to home/reseller/pub_html/index.php. My multi-website web application would then handle it by displaying content for that domain.

I don't think the cpanel program is what I need. I think I need something like your vps packages. Would I be able to do these things with a vps package and does the vps cpanel unlimited domain addon include whm.

[Milen]

The third question just asks if I can create hosting accounts on a server and be able to have those hosting accounts actually serve files from another account preferably my main account. Say my account is in home/reseller/pub_html and the customers account is in home/customer/pub_html. I would want to create an htaccess file that redirects all file requests for that domain to home/reseller/pub_html/index.php. My multi-website web application would then handle it by displaying content for that domain.

I suppose that this would be possible, but I guess that it would be of little use, if the other options that you need are not available in the cPanel reseller plans.

I don't think the cpanel program is what I need. I think I need something like your vps packages. Would I be able to do these things with a vps package and does the vps cpanel unlimited domain addon include whm.

Yes, the cPanel that is provided as an addon to the VPS plans includes WHM.

[Guest]

VPN Plans

So can I do these things with the VPN plans considering I will have root access.

[Milen]

So can I do these things with the VPN plans considering I will have root access.

Theoretically it is possible with a VPS cPanel plan with root access. However, to achieve this you need to feed commands directly to the Apache web server that is used to run the cPanel web hosting control panel (which is different than the Apache that serves the websites on the server). Since this is a non-standard solution, however, we cannot provide support for it and cannot guarantee successful results. Basically, if you choose to go with the implementation of such a solution you would be on your own.

[Bizafrica]

maintainance Upgrade

I wish to make a suggestion that where practically possible maint procedures that will attract downtime of more than an hour to be scheduled for off peak peak hours (night time or weekends)

Some of the domains we host have mission critical profiles meaning they cannot afford to be down for more than 2 hrs when transactions at peak (eg. weekdays) which presents to us the reseller a challenge to explain to them its for their own good that we are upgrading.

Simle case in mind is the maintainance for supcenter10.co.uk which is a very wellcome relief but 4 hrs downtime during peak business hours really streches patiance for the customer and is a sweet-bitter bill for the reseller if the trend progress.

pleased to hear your comments
Morris

[J.L.H.C.]

I wish to make a suggestion that where practically possible maint procedures that will attract downtime of more than an hour to be scheduled for off peak peak hours (night time or weekends)

Some of the domains we host have mission critical profiles meaning they cannot afford to be down for more than 2 hrs when transactions at peak (eg. weekdays) which presents to us the reseller a challenge to explain to them its for their own good that we are upgrading.

Simle case in mind is the maintainance for supcenter10.co.uk which is a very wellcome relief but 4 hrs downtime during peak business hours really streches patiance for the customer and is a sweet-bitter bill for the reseller if the trend progress.

pleased to hear your comments
Morris

Firstly, you are in the wrong thread, you should open up your own thread in regard to this. Maybe the moderator can split this?

As for downtime in nighttime, it is not practical as there are clients from all over the world & you can't expect me to go to bed when it is 1am in the US, right?

[Milen]

I wish to make a suggestion that where practically possible maint procedures that will attract downtime of more than an hour to be scheduled for off peak peak hours (night time or weekends)

Whenever possible maintenance is scheduled for hours when traffic generated by the server is low. However, you should also have in mind that many data centers do not have a system engineer available on site 24/7 and that employing a system engineer for tasks outside of business hours (at night or during the weekend) is very expensive especially for an issue that is not an emergency.

Some of the domains we host have mission critical profiles meaning they cannot afford to be down for more than 2 hrs when transactions at peak (eg. weekdays) which presents to us the reseller a challenge to explain to them its for their own good that we are upgrading.

I am sorry, but in my understanding missions critical applications are not run of a shared hosting environment. They are run of massively clustered redundant systems and even such systems cannot always guarantee an uptime equal to 100%. For example, Google runs their services based on such a massively clustered redundant system, but I have encountered times, albeit very rare, when some of the services that they offer like Gmail were inaccessible or down.

Simle case in mind is the maintainance for supcenter10.co.uk which is a very wellcome relief but 4 hrs downtime during peak business hours really streches patiance for the customer and is a sweet-bitter bill for the reseller if the trend progress.

With regard to supcenter10.co.uk, I would like to clarify that it was not down for four hours. Four hours was the time frame dedicated to performing the upgrade. The actual downtime of the server was less than two hours and this was clearly indicated in the news item about the upgrade.