----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg Kuhnert" <greg.kuhnert (at mark) theanchoragesylvania.com>
To: "Richard Siddall" <cobalt (at mark) elirion.net>
Cc: <coba-e (at mark) bluequartz.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2008 5:27 AM
Subject: [coba-e:13322] Re: BQ Design Suggestion
> Richard Siddall wrote:
>> Sorry, it's still not a good idea. It's actually a very bad idea as you
>> don't want to run your billing system on the same computer that provides
>> shared hosting.
>
> Sorry Richard, but I reckon you're way off on this one. Bluequartz is a
> platform. Unless I am missing the boat, no-one said anything about running
> the billing platform on the same box as a hosting platform.
>
> Just because people choose to use BQ for a hosting platform doesn't mean
> they cant use the same platform for back-office functions.... on another
> box.
>
> Regards,
> Greg
>
>
Greg why have the BQ application on the server that you want to put your
billing system on? Is there some use in having the BQ software on the same
server?
If not I would suggest simply installing CentOS and placing the server that
hosts your billing some place really secure. That is definately one reason I
would never host any customers on the same server.
Also here is my 2 cents.
1) CentOS is the platform
2) BQ is simply software to help in configuring hosting for customers. Some
would refer to this in the hosting industry as a hosting control panel.
3) I would never host my billing platform on the same server as customers.
Now having said I would ammend that by saying it would be really cool to
have built into the BQ software UI that could be installed that allowed
billing information to be displayed in the customers UI. However the billing
information would be getting pulled from the billing platform and NOT stored
on the hosting server.
4) I think it will be really cool to get an API that could be used to
provision new accounts, sites etc... to the BQ from the billing/customer
management application. The API ideally may be comprised of many different
ways to talk to the hosting server to allow for various applications to
implement in different ways. Example might be SOAP, HTTP Post, HTTP Get, SSH
(This already exists and using shared key can call the CCE-Shell-Tools
directly and there are many more options.
5) I think it would be really cool to get an API that could easily pull
information from the server about usage as people may setup billing plans
that are based on bandwidth utilization, transfer, accounts, email usage,
etc....
Now having said all that the application that would do billing would have no
dependencies on the appliances being used to host and someone could
certainly install it directly on the BQ appliance although would not be my
suggestion.
Jim