Hello everyone. I discovered this site a month or so ago and have been diligently using it as a reference as I take our Webdesign and development company and add on “web hosting reseller”.
I’ve been in the IT Consulting business for a while. 4 years ago, my gf lost her job, so I started a web design company and taught her how to design. I feel I’ve reached a point where I:m fed up with manual everything (customer enrollment, setting up their web site, chasing down billing, etc). I decided to add WHMCS to our arsenal to reduce the hands-on aspect.
YouTube tutorials are all over the place, so let me tell you what I’ve got to see if I’m on the right track before we launch WHMCS on our userbase, and also follow up with a related question.
So what I’ve done so far:
1.) Server A : WordPress Website, hosted on a VPS. We’ve had this site for a while to advertise our design and development services.
2.) Server B : WHMCS, hosted on a different VPS, and bridged to Server A with WHMpress.
3.) Server C : a fresh server with Direct Admin installed, on its own VPS
So far, that’s all I’ve got. YouTube tutorials were all about installing WHMCS to the same site as WordPress and that seemed like a disaster waiting to happen from a security standpoint. The tutorials also generally try to get you to host on some already established reseller platform like NameHero or Verpex. I’m looking at it from a perspective of “I want to be similar to NameHero, not using them.”
I have Direct Admin working but haven’t done anything with it yet aside from security measures. I haven’t even put the connection info to it in WHMCS. I want to make sure this is the best-practice arrangement before I continue.
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Follow up question, if this is the ideal setup, how do I scale when Server C starts to run out of resources? I want to keep shared hosting space limited to around 20 websites per VPS, managing traffic by bandwidth and moving heavy traffic sites to less crowded servers for load balancing. But… What’s the best practice for scaling? Do I need to recreate Server C from scratch as server D? Do I clone Server C as Server D and change some settings (hostname, database name and prefix, passwords, licenses, etc)? If that’s the case, should I make Server C a skeleton template and clone it, making Server D the first actual webhost space for production / public consumption?
Thank you all in advance. 
