Some of my friends and I had put up a web hosting business a couple of years ago, not mainly for profit but just for the fun of it. We still don’t have that much customers but the numbers are slowly increasing to the point that made me realize that I should somehow learn the trade. I just thought, that there’s still so much to learn on Linux when it comes to web hosting.
We just subscribed to reseller accounts since we started the business, but just recently I felt that I am already tired of not having total control of our servers. Every little problem we had back then should be reported to our provider’s support team, when in fact I could have easily fixed it myself. So I decided that’s it’s just about time that I get our own server and do the dirty works myself. I started things out with a VPS, since a dedicated server would be an overkill for us in terms of pricing. At least with a VPS we tend to achieve total control of our services, and the same time still minimizing the cost. Moreover, we still don’t have that much customers to really go for a dedi at this point. We’ll just cross the bridge when we get there. 
I had been using WHH/cPanel for such a long time, but this time around, it excites me to actually have control of it and tweak things myself. This may add some work on my end as the systems administrator of our group, but the additional learning and the excitement of being on the top of your game, overcomes the additional effort I needed to exert.
To give us an edge to the web hosting business, I decided to go for LiteSpeed instead of Apache since if you would view my recent posts, I had been very impressed with the speed and performance of this little piece of software. Then we are now supporting Ruby on Rails, as well as some additional perks such FFMPEG modules, and RvSiteBuilder. It’s not that easy to configure, and it’s a lot more difficult to maintain with cPanel since it doesn’t support LiteSpeed web servers, but somehow we pulled it through.
I had been constantly monitoring and tweaking our servers now, and so far so good. I hope our customers feel the same way. 
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