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

["Liam Delahunty" <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

W. Too wrote 15 February 2002 12:46

Dear Sirs,
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.

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?

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.

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?
_________

Maybe I've got he wrong end of the stick here, but wouldn't you just need
ONE site and hundreds of users? You wouldn't be setting up individual
domains for them for free, so have your main site:
http://www.freehostingdomain.tld

and the space for the users would be:
http://www.freehostingdomain.tld/~uniqueusername

Either way makes little difference, at a guess I'd say the second way MAY be
slightly less processor intensive, as you wouldn't need lots of DNS stuff
going on to serve the pages and you'd only be serving/forwarding email on
the one domain.

But as far as I understand the real limits aren't to do with the numbers of
users or virtual sites it's the traffic on your machine. With geocities type
sites, I guess most are lucky to have more than a couple of page views a
day, so you could probably fit hundreds of users / sites on.

I suppose in the end it's down to the business model, if you are looking to
sell on domain names, and 'real' hosting packages, then the former way may
be easier for you long term.

kr,
Liam