Hosting setup with Easy Engine

v3
#1

Hi there, this is more of a business related question. I am hoping that someone in the community can give me some advice on this question.

When you host for clients you inevitably have to limit certain things like hard disk space etc. Since EE is not handling this by default, which is fine, can you propose what the best way is to handle this? Otherwise, we might end up with a situation where clients get ‘unlimited everything’.

In certain cases this is not ideal. Maybe you can also indicate how you set this up in your own hosting setup. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards Francois Wessels

#2

EE is REALLY not meant to shared hosting scenarios (at least, not yet).

I sell hosting based on EE (plus some enhancements), but every customer has their own VPS.

#3

I haven’t done this, but had it when I used ISPConfig 3…

I would use something like that as a start, or see how ISPConfig did it. Its going to be a lot of custom work though :-/

#4

@StormWalkerEc Thanks for the reply, apart from the obvious that ISP Config can add some overhead to your setup, is there any reason that you can’t use ISP Config in conjunction with EE?

Just looking at all the alternatives for now…

Kind regards franwess

#5

Thanks for the reply, strictly speaking we are not setting up a shared hosting environment, but much rather something more fully managed. I just need to get an idea of what is available out there.

The idea of each customer having their own VPS is a good one, but in some instances not feasible for smaller client. Since some clients are small it might be not be necessary to limit resources. Just wanted to know whether their may be some solution out there that can be implemented. ISP Config looks viable up to the point where EE handles shared hosting by default.

Kind regards franwess

#6

As EE just sets up the environment so us Admins dont have to slog through a manual process, and the source is available as a GIT, you can go through the scripts and modify them and change the target locations.

If you haven’t used ISPConfig before, it create a client group on the system per user you add, and a web user per site, locking things down to that level. I assume the quota system it has is bound to that client group. The directory structure would be /var/www/clients/client4/web17/web. I would start by adding in those two extra args to the EE script, client4, web17 for example, then change the location that it downloads wordpress to that location. As ISPConfig saves and creates the nginx config from the database, you could hook into that and add the config into the extras portion, the same way EE recommends it.

Lastly, you need to ensure that the NGINX you install has the same components that EE uses. So very doable, but your making a custom solution for your setup, and would need to track any changes EE does to its master version so as to stay in sync.

It would probably be easier to change EE to accept args to have a similar setup with client/web so you can hook the quota system into, a small DB that keeps and tracks these values, and CLI when you change them.

#7

Thank you very much for the comprehensive reply. Is this something you have done before, it seems that you have a decent amount of knowledge on this? cc @StormWalkerEc

Kind regards franwess

#8

Not really. What happened was that I wanted more control and automation for wordpress sites, and I manually went through what ISPConfig did in setting up the environment for NGINX websites. So tracing through all that I reached a light weight setup with just nginx, db, php etc. But I had to manually do all the rest every time to deploy a new site. And just before putting it into production, I found EE, man, what timing, but that education didn’t go to waste …

#9