How do you host multiple public facing websites on a VPS?

Question

I have moved this question to serverfault where it might be more appropriate.

See http://serverfault.com/questions/128329/how-do-you-host-multiple-public-facing-websites-on-a-vps

We host about 30 websites using typical shared hosting plans using ASP.NET and SQL 2000/2005/2008. I am now wondering about hosting all of these websites using our own virtual private server such as http://www.crystaltech.com/vps.aspx

This is clearly cheaper but comes with a lot of questions I need answers to:

• Is the risk of having to keep this VPS server up and running worth it? Until now, the host provider has managed the server and we have not had to worry about crashes, downtime, software patches etc. We are not server administrators, we are programmers, so this is not really our expertise. On the other hand, it may not be hard to learn.

• When we make a website live, we log in to a domain management control panel and change the primary and secondary name servers to point to our shared web host:

  Eg ns1.sharedwebhost.com and ns2.sharedwebhost.com

  These name servers are going to have to change when we have a VPS. I don’t understand anything about how to set this up. Is there some useful info anyone could direct me to? Or is there software we need to install to make the primary and secondary name servers work on our VPS?

• The control panel we have for shared hosting comes with DNS management like this:

What software would I need to install to create this for each site we host at a VPS?

• The control panel we have for shared hosting also comes with a POP email interface that allows email addresses to be added easily:

Is this something that can be easily set up at a VPS so clients can manage their own email addresses?

Is there software we need to install to make this work?

Answer 1

1) It depends on your applications, visitor patterns, required resources, etc. In general I'd say if you don't have the expertise - prefer scalable hosting solutions or managed dedicated servers (which can be quite expensive, but cheaper if you require very high availability).

Personally I host few dozen websites on my VPS and generally it is very easy to manage manually (after all it is Windows Server, you have GUI and PowerShell). That is until you hit a problem or someone hacks you.

2) You can always use free or paid DNS services or install OpenDNS on your VPS server (not recommended). Your VPS hoster might be providing DNS servers, ask them.

3) You can buy Plesk or cPanel and manage your websites the same way.

4) Same.

Everything you ask can be set up initially by your VPS provider. They will install control panels that will allow you to easily manage your websites, while having full server access as well.

Answer 2

You can have the best of both worlds. I use EuroVPN at www.eurovpn.com - they offer Semi-Managed plans on their VPS's (they have a sister company, EcoVPS for people who don't want this support). When I say semi-managed, the proactive monitoring is done by you, but you can always raise a ticket if you get stuck or there's a problem, and an engineer (1st/2nd & 3rd line) connects in using RDP to do the work for you.

Also, they give Plesk for "free".