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Be your own ISP

Posted on 24 Sep 2002 at 12:53

This is because you aren't controlling a web server yourself; you're simply adding accounts to someone else's server. Your reseller account gives you the facility to add users to your provider's system up to a finite amount of space or a specific number of accounts.
If you want to take the next step towards the ultimate control and branding situation, you need to look for one of the few resellers such as G-Net Online or Interland that offer a full private virtual server for you to play with. Of course, you could fork out for a 'real' server, but I'll discuss that adventure next month.

Fully branded
A full virtual server plan will rarely be any more expensive than a standard reseller account. However, they do involve more expertise on the part of the provider and a lot more involvement from you to set up and maintain properly. This particularly affects the area of security. You will, in fact, be looking after your own server - actually a virtual subserver of the provider's real server - and deciding who can go where and what they can do.
As a virtual server owner, you'll still get a control panel to organise things, but you'll have far more control over the operating system to set up user accounts with mail and FTP access rights, passwords and quotas. Name servers can be created to point to whatever host name or resource on your server you like, and web servers can be set up with the host domains you see fit.
Probably the best thing about your virtual server, however, is that it's indistinguishable from the real thing as far as the rest of the Internet is concerned. This essentially means your provider can allot this server a unique IP address and you're able to achieve ultimate branding by associating your company domain name with this IP address as a name server entry.
This name server entry will then show up when anyone does a 'whois' search. The result is that at last your server really points to 'you' and your customers are sitting on 'your' server - and you haven't spent a penny on expensive hardware to become a true ISP.
With so much available virtually, you may wonder why anyone would want to go further. Well, the usual reasons are speed and space. If you want your customers to benefit from the fastest access, you'll need to take them off a server that they may be sharing with many more domains, dozens of reseller accounts and maybe even a few virtual private servers.
With your own dedicated server, for example, you can upgrade RAM and processor as demand increases, plus add more disk drives for extra space. It's also possible to limit the number of clients per server to maintain speed, and you can even install virtual server software and become a reseller host yourself.
So for the lowdown on dedicated servers, co-location rack systems, attaching your server direct to your own Internet backbone connection and how to offer a broadband or flat-rate dial-up service, read part two of 'Be your own ISP' next month.