Re: [cobalt-developers] Geocities / Homestead type of website

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"W. Too" <w_too@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I represent webdesign & hosting company. We are currently building a
> Geocities / Homestead type of website for one of our clients. The
intention
> is to give users a free website consisting of (approx) 10 static html
pages.
> May I ask a few questions, please?
>
> 1. Cobalt recommends 200 websites per server. Having in mind that our
> websites will be fairly small, how many could we comfortably host on a
> Cobalt RaQ 4i, 256RAM, 20GB HD?

It all depends on the load on the server.  Cobalt's marketing claim that the
RaQs can host up to 200 sites is really just a marketing claim.  As far as I
know. they have never seen any of the assumptions that it's based on, if in
fact there ever where any.  I've seen RaQ3s with 128MB of RAM running
smoothly with over 400 low-traffic sites and I've seen RaQ4s with 512MB of
RAM choking on a handful of very high-traffic sites (by high-traffic I mean
they were serving a half million page views per day and 10+ GB per day of
traffic).  The GUI itself will only allow you to setup about 250 sites, at
least without modifications, but for what you're trying to do it sounds like
you wouldn't need to rely on the GUI anyway.

> 2. while signing up, a user provides some data; could things like a
username
> and password be used to *automatically* create a virtual website on a
Cobalt
> RaQ 4 or XTR? So immediately after signing up, the user would be able to
use
> his website. We would not have to go to the Server Manager and add the
> virtual site manually.

Yes.  You'll just need to build a script that generates the user/site
accounts in the appropriate files.  Unless you're going to give the users
POP/IMAP email access, shell access or FTP access you really don't need to
create system users though.  You can give webmail access and access to a web
interface to manage the site (upload, edit, etc.) without creating system
users.  You'll just probably want to create your own user management system
which is database-driven.  At least that's how I do it when building a
system like that.

> 3. Suppose we host 500 websites per server; what happens if you have more
> than 500 users. They would have to be hosted on another server. Can anyone
> provide any advice here?

Can you elaborate?  I don't understand what you're asking.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/