Hosting Control Panel
Posted by tom March 25th, 2006
Besides my normal day work I am starting up a little webhosting service (a hobby!). There are many different webhosting solutions, ie software products which allow you to maintain that business: ISPConfig, VHCS2, CPanel, WebCP, Plesk, etc. What struck me the most with these was how they impact your system configuration. They seem to have impact almost everywhere. Ofcourse you ask: Why are you telling this here?
Well, I believe Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) is THE perfect plaftorm for creating such a product. On the one side you have the web-frontend which allows you to maintain your domains, users, email addresses, forwardings, databases and DNS entries. On the other hand you’ll need a daemon running as a privileged user to maintain the system side of things: cron processes, creating users, folders and restarting services (webserver, ftp server, etc). A daemon can be written in Ruby with very little effort, the daemon would run a basic XMLRPC/SOAP webservice (only listening to localhost, firewalled off from the cruel outside world), which can be called from the web front end. The web front-end can run in lighttpd, not using apache, running on a separate port (like the default Rails configuration does). This way we’re not dependent on anything which needs to run the business (like apache). I’ll post some more details later, I’m certainly planning to start and finish this. It will be open-sourced when it’s of any use.
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