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

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"W. Too" wrote:

> 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.
> 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?

As I recall, the Cobalt interface has a setting, I believe, 250, which
limits the number of main sites set up under the gui interface.  You can
change this; check list archives for this list and perhaps for
cobalt-users, perhaps for "maximum sites" or similar.

How do you intend to set up the sites?  Do you intend to set them up as:

  user.yoursite.com

or as

  www.yoursite.com/user

or as

  www.yoursite.com/~user

The easiest way to do this would be to use the last of my examples; that
way you could use the gui interface to set up your site, and a script to
control the Cobalt Command Line Tools to create the users.  And that way
each user would also get an email box in the form "user@xxxxxxxxxxxx".

The first way you could use the Cobalt gui (and possibly the Cobalt
Command Line Tools) to set up each site after changing the default
number of sites allowed on the server, but each site would then have the
overhead installed for an entire site, including a minimum of one main
and one user website PER site.  And usermail would come to
"user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx".

If you choose to do it the "middle" way you'll have to write your own
code to handle your users, who will of course be "virtual" users, not in
the Cobalt system at all; they wouldn't get email on the server unless
you set that up specifically and separately.

> 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.

You can use your own CGI to run Cobalt Command Line Tools to set up
users under my third scenario above, or more carefully, under my first
scenario.  The second scenario could NOT use Cobalt "users"; you'd have
to do everything yourself, with virtual users.

It's extremely dangerous to allow unlimited free website setups unless
you've got systems in place to handle thousands of signups; if enough
people find out about this site you'll overload a RaQ in less than a
day.  Believe me Geocities isn't doing this with one server.

> 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?

RaQs handle more than 500 users, depending on other factors; see some of
the other replies.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Linux and Cobalt/Sun/RaQ Consulting
nobaloney.net
P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA  92517
voice: (909) 778-9980  *  fax: (702) 548-9484