Setting Up VPS / Dedicated Servers for a Small Business

Question

Okay I'm trying to setup a couple VPS, and a few dedicated servers for some clients. And would like to know the best way to go about it, the servers will be running Ubuntu server.

First question: Can I get more than one external IP from my IPS so each VPS / dedicated servers can all host on port 80, on the same internet line? I could get more than one internet line for each client, but that would cost the clients big $$. I am already hosting a couple dedicated servers for some clients and none of them are even coming close to using there 100/100 Mbps internet line, if I could share that line between a couple clients that would cut the cost for them, by about $60 per month! They're only using about 5 TB per month, and you could easily put 25TB of bandwidth through that line per month.

Second question: What is the best way to set up a VPS? I have never really played around with that, and I have some clients that don't need / want 12 cores @ 3.46GHz and 32GB of ram. I will be putting about 2 to 4 clients per server.

This is not my main priority right now, but in the future I would like to setup a shared hosting server. If you know of a free automated script that I could run to do this, it would be much appreciated.

If there's any other information you think I should know please let me know! And I would appreciate advance and detailed answers, thanks and advance! :-)

Answer 1

First off, please understand a VPS and Dedicatd server are very different things - and it matters to your question.

A Dedicated Server is a physical machine which you lease (or install in a data center). A VPS is a virtual server which sits on someone elses physical machine. You would typically have multiple VPS's on a dedicated server, but you would NOT TYPICALLY DIVIDE A VPS INTO FURTHER VPS's.

[ This question only makes sense for a dedicated server] You may be able to get more then 1 external IP address from your provider if they offer this service (its certainly technically feasible - and indeed something I have). On the flip side, you probably don't need this and can use a single IP address to act as an HTTP router (load balancer), which can take the requests and forward on to machines behind NAT as appropriate. This can boost security as well.

Your second question also only makes sense if you set up a Dedicated server. If you use a decent hypervisor (KVM will do what you want), you can allocate resources per virtual machine. Note that if you are using KVM, you may want to run CentOS or Redhat on the server while running Ubuntu on the VM's as KVM, being a Redhat product works "better enough" on Redhat/Centos then Ubuntu to make this worthwhile - although it can be run on Ubuntu.

KVM will allow you to oversubscribe resources - be careful of oversubscribing memory or disk resources as this can cause big problems (you don't want the host using swap disk as memory for the VM's) if the load is unpredictable or not closely monitored.

Don't use a free hosting script for setting up hosting servers until you know what you are doing. Even then, most people would like CPANEL, so if that is your client base, use that.

Detailed answers required more detailed question - and not combining multiple questions into 1. If my answers don't suffice, please ask more specific questions - if its more then just a clarification, use a new question.