Amazon EC2 as a Reseller Web Hosting Platform – Part 1 – Overview
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has proven itself to be a fast, stable, inexpensive way to create and manage servers on the Internet. With the availability of both Linux and Windows platforms, the options available to developers and hosts are virtually unlimited.
This series of articles will look at the viability of using EC2 as a platform for reselling web hosting services. Listed below are the base items used in the development of the series. Your choice of platforms and options may vary. While I may explore other options, don’t take the examples I give here as the only way to approach things.
Requirements:
These items are required for creating an environment that matches the example given in the series.
- Amazon Web Services account. Free to obtain, and attaches to your existing Amazon account if you choose. See this link to register.
- A fully or demo licensed copy of CPanel/WHM control panel software.
- A fully or demo licensed copy of WHMCS (WHM Complete Solution)
- An available primary domain name (Optional: one or more secondary domain names for testing client configurations).
- Potential clientele
- A willingness to learn and experiment potentially outside your comfort zone.
Our Test Environment:
The environment we’ll be using for these articles will consist of 1 Amazon EC2 Large (x64) instance (Roughly equivalent to a 3GHz Quad Core Xeon processor, with 7.5GB of RAM), Multiple Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes of varying sizes, Multiple Amazon Elastic IP addresses to be used for both server and client configuration.
The next article will deal with the initial base setup of the EC2 image and archiving it for use in the next steps.