I’ve finally started with my own web hosting. I got a reseller account on a Cpanel/WHM box that I’ve installed and still maintain. The box runs the most recent CentOS, version 5.1.
And I got several clients to start with and I want more

The reason I started with the web hosting was a part from frustration with the big hosting companies, like Lunar Pages. I’ve used their services and thought really good things about them but then problems started and they were really not doing their support job right. I have already wrote about them and I will make a separate post about the latest incident.

Right now, I can not offer hundreds of gigabytes of web space like they can but I can offer a professional support and hosting tailored to customer needs. I realized through experience this is the most important thing.

You can just throw away all those gigabytes (which IMO you’re not even going to use, most people have small websites) but when problems appear (and they will, no matter how good a hosting is) you want to know fairly what’s going on and how do you get that fixed. I fit there much more than those shaky support people at big hosting companies.

But to tell you all the truth, I’ve been really impressed with Cpanel support. Really.

They do a wonderful job fixing the issues and they’re that good that I forgive them for their bugs.

Err, maybe not all the bugs but they got credit with me. Keep up the good work guys.

And you can contact me anytime to get a fair offer on your web hosting needs.

Or maybe you want to make a web hosting company? I’m open to do that for you too

Happy new year!

I took a few days off from writing since I started my own hosting (more on that later) and I’ve been busy.

Cpanel 11 on CentOS 5 (and 5.1) has DNS issues. Actually from what I’ve read the problems exist also on CentOS 4.something and Fedora. I was reading the posts from here.

The problem is that Cpanel is only concerned about the external view. Now, I’m talking Spanish, let me explain.

The new bind (named) server now has by default 3 views, localhost_resolver, internal and external.

View is actually a separate config. It means I want to have this config for the local box (localhost_resolver), this setup for my network (internal) and this for all other boxes (external).

Now, when you define a domain in Cpanel they add it only to internal and external views, but not to localhost_resolver

And if you’ve put the ip of the local box in your /etc/resolv.conf (as I have did) then you do not get anything about your local domains, DNS ain’t working!

It’s a big problem.

The last time I found a “solution” on the net that advised to remove the first two and leave only the external view. I did that and it worked great.

But then, I guess some auto update process kicked in and it overwrote my changes to named.conf

Whaaaat!

Then I figured it out… They actually do not want you to have localhost ip or the ip’s of your server box in the /etc/resolv.conf

They want you to put there the ip of your ISP. So I did just that and guess what? Everything works!

So I guess you should do the same and fix this issue

I make sure this website, YFC is working among other websites (addon domains) on the lunarpages.com hosting. And they’ve been good for us, there were rarely problems with database accessibility and such.

But yesterday, the site was offline. I was greeted with a message telling me my account has been suspended… WTF?!
We have several more months of paid hosting so I didn’t see any reason for this situation.
After a few messages with the slow responsive technical support I understood that the problem was with our own IP address that we have requested.
The thing is, we were on shared hosting meaning we shared our IP address with other clients on that box. That led to problems delivering email since other people frequently sent spam or similar emails resulting in our shared ip beeing blacklisted. We though we had enough of that and opted for a own IP address, a clean one (hopefully).
Now, the support people told us the credit card expired and we couldn’t buy that IP. And because of that they suspended our hosting… WTF?!
They cannot suspend our hosting! WE PAID FOR IT!
They can tell us ok, you payment failed and you have to try again or give up. But don’t suspend our hosting *mad*

As it turned out, the credit card had the same numbers, only the expiry date was changed.
Once I sent that info to them, they told me everything went fine and in an hour of so my hosting will be online…

But it didn’t!

I complained, waited a few hours for them to reply to understand that they have given me a bad IP… grrrrrr

Then they switched me back to shared hosting (I almost laughed at that point) and an hour later told me I finally got my own IP…

Weeee… thanks a lot

But now a second problem appeared, one that they should have thought about since they’re doing those things on a day to day basis.
My TTL for a domain was set for several hours. That meant that most of the people waiting for the website(s) to come online will be able to use them not now but in several hours. They should have set the domain(s) TTL to something like a few minutes when the problems started. But they didn’t!

Anyway, I’m just now getting first visitors, the ones that do not check YFC so regulary (making a fresh DNS request), life will be good…

I don’t know what to think about their hosting

With the technical side, up to now, i have been satisfied

But their support is bad… Bringing my domains down is something that should never have occured, I have them all paid. I just asked for an additional feature and wasn’t expecting to have that feature take my domains down for 1+ (almost two) days.

I asked about some kind of refund/compensation for this issue… They have yet to reply…