Having main company website on same 'server' as customers.

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Posted by Callum-JH, 11-26-2011, 06:45 AM
Is there anything against having your main company website on the same server as your customers? Are you better installing it on its own vm? Also is there anything agiainst having cpanel on your main company server. Thanks
Posted by mcdl, 11-26-2011, 06:52 AM
It's not the best idea since if the server goes down for whatever reason then they cannot access your site to open tickets etc.
Posted by hostultimo, 11-26-2011, 07:00 AM
You must also consider asking yourself what type of services you want to offer. ie Dedicated, Reseller, Shared etc. The best practice is to have your website in a totally different datacenter to where you host most of your clients. The reason for this is if one datacenter goes down, most likely the other datacenter would be up. It's very rare to have an outage in both datacenters at the same time. Try hosting in a totally different datacenter and city. If you can reach out of the country as well then do it but please insure that the datacenter that you choose is highly reliable.
Posted by Chris211k, 11-26-2011, 07:04 AM
It is not advisable to run your main website, on a shared environment with other customers. Your asking for problems doing this, most hackers the first thing they would look for when attacking a hosting company, is to check to see that your running your website on the same server as your shared clients, this would make your whole other clients vulnerable and open to attacks. Best advice that anyone could give you is that, it is better to host your website, on maybe a VM separate from your shared hosting clients, this way you are not open to such attacks, they do happen a lot of hosts think they can get away with bad practices like this, until one day it hits you on the head. You also have the risk, If your website goes offline customers cannot reach you. so it's best to house your site off-site from your main network that you are using. So that your site is still up & running during a major outage with your other core provider. Plenty of factors when doing this. you could even consider a shared hosting provider to offload your website.
Posted by bear, 11-26-2011, 09:05 AM
You recommend he keeps his main site away from his own shared customers, then go on to suggest it would be ok to do so with shared customers on some other provider? Seems a bad idea to me, but maybe you could explain how that would be better? Fully segregate would be my recommendation. Different DC, on at least a VPS in order to isolate this from *any* shared hosting accounts.
Posted by Chris211k, 11-26-2011, 09:25 AM
I'd say that if you go with a high reputable provider, they have better servers compared to throwing your site onto a virtual machine, Including better security and stability, enterprise software that would cost you a lot compared to buying a hosting plan. Saving money yet it's still efficient. Don't forget you have to pick the correct host. Everyone has a different opinion when it comes to this. Lets see some other opinions from members firstly
Posted by bear, 11-26-2011, 09:29 AM
I was actually looking for your reasoning there. I'm open to hearing why you think it would be ok in one situation but not the other, which has nothing to do with other member opinions.
Posted by Chris211k, 11-26-2011, 09:31 AM
You get enterprise features, such as cloudlinux,litespeed including raid-10 disks, including better security compared to running it on your own virtual machine. Cost you far more to maintain it compared to buying a shared hosting account. I am talking about on a small scale host, your best option in my opinion is doing this simply because, it would cost far to much. When you are hosting IE, WHMCS. you want the best server-side security possible as you are keeping private personal details of people.
Posted by bear, 11-26-2011, 09:45 AM
The point was, why would shared on someone else's server be acceptable where it isn't on your own. Can you explain that? Added cost for a VPS is a given, and irrelevant, but the security is indeed the issue.
Posted by Chris211k, 11-26-2011, 09:52 AM
If you run your site, on one of your shared hosting servers, Imagine if a client got provisioned on that server, they could break into it, putting your other clients at risk in general.Imagine if a hacker exploited another site on that same server, Then found out that the main company website is also running on the same server, You are ***** then literately. In general its best finding some administrator to secure a VPS for you and run it from that. how ever for small startup host's the idea I gave above is a better solution. You purchase shared hosting from some reputable provider your getting put on a server. where the security in general is increased. Generally someone asking this question is going to be a new start up company. That only has a small customer database.
Posted by Patrick, 11-26-2011, 10:44 AM
I would recommend hosting your website at a different data center, away from any of the data centers that you use for your clients. The main reason being, as someone else already stated, that in the event of an outage your clients will be able to reach you. There's nothing more aggrevating when your provider goes down and their website also goes down leaving you to wonder WTF is going on. Regarding the security risks of hosting your company website on a server with other clients, you're basically saying that you don't trust your setup and then why should your clients trust you? Zero day exploits aside, there is no reason for data to be compromised in a shared hosting environment whether you host 1 site or 10,000 sites. Keep your company website separated from your clients for offsite communication reasons, not security reasons.
Posted by WiredStorm, 11-26-2011, 10:55 AM
Each side is neither right or wrong, it just all depends on what you want. Either take the risk of your clients not being able to get a hold of you if the server goes down or explain why your not hosting at the same data center your promoting. Just make sure your uptime is monitoring the right IP ;p
Posted by WiredStorm, 11-26-2011, 10:57 AM
I for one feel for this that if you can't protect your server from being hacked you shouldn't be doing hosting.
Posted by bear, 11-26-2011, 11:10 AM
So, you guarantee your hosting to be hack proof? Ever?
Posted by WiredStorm, 11-26-2011, 11:14 AM
Nope I don't guarantee that.. Hacking happens but if you can't take the steps to stop it fast before any real damage happens then your SOL.
Posted by Patrick, 11-26-2011, 11:26 AM
I'm guessing you've never heard of Hacker Proof? http://www.comodo.com/hackerproof/ /s
Posted by Chris211k, 11-26-2011, 05:30 PM
I'm not saying that I cannot protect a server from being hacked. If you are asking simply, this question, this is why I advised the person to do this.
Posted by kpmedia, 11-27-2011, 12:36 AM
I think hosts needs to use their own infrastructure -- otherwise it looks like you don't have much faith in your own setup. But that should be a dedicated server or internal-use-only VPS, not pooled with customers. This is one criteria I look for when vetting hosts. Are they using their own servers? I've found that most hosts using another datacenter/etc are the ones that go down most often -- i.e., they don't want their site on the same crap they're selling. The most amateur ones use cheap shared hosting. The one exception would be if they've decided to splurge on a very costly server/VPS from a premium host. A private cloud setup, perhaps -- something that they don't offer.
Posted by brianoz, 11-27-2011, 12:47 AM
If you can secure your server properly, there's no reason not to run your own site on the same server as user sites. However, that's a big "if" and experience tends to demonstrate that most hosting company owners, particularly the new ones, don't know how to secure their own servers. This is probably the one key point at which you should hire someone who is focussed on this very specialized area. A hundred dollars or so goes a long way and will save you a lot more money down the track if you are serious about your business.
Posted by Purevoltage, 11-27-2011, 07:25 AM
Host it in the same location as your other servers on it's own box, then have another box in another datacenter Sync the two boxes or three and everything should be good.
Posted by Chris211k, 11-27-2011, 08:06 AM
We are talking about startup hosting companys here. I don't think the average startups. Have the money to invest in buying maybe 2-3 seperte boxes for the company website. You would not be asking this question, If you simply knew what you was doing anyway
Posted by bear, 11-27-2011, 09:33 AM
And if that DC goes down, so does your point of support. The point of segregating it is to increase the chances of being up when a server your customers are on isn't. A secondary benefit is reducing entry points for hacking. We don't offer VPS, and don't go in for $1/month providers. So your suggestion is to purchase and provision 2 (or more) dedicated boxes in 2 different DCs to host just your main website? You don't feel that's even slightly absurd? To those suggesting they keep valuable customer data on the same servers as their hosted accounts; good luck to you. Nothing is hacker proof, no matter how much you're bragging about your own security, and having potentially thousands of additional attack vectors to your data is a foolish risk. I prefer to reduce that risk. To each his own.
Posted by iexo, 11-27-2011, 10:39 AM
I agree with bear here, Yes a host should use it's own infrastructure but not if it's on the same box as clients, if they have their own cloud infrastructure then yes, if not then I would never recommend any host holding their site on the same box as any clients, this could cause huge complications. However I see no issue with hosts using other providers for corporate sites, it's a definate good move.
Posted by shvinod, 11-27-2011, 04:28 PM
I will prefer to keep the company site separate from customer's site... In case of any issue, customer need a mechanism to reach you..