virtualbox for web hosting

[galaxy]

I'm thinking of starting my own web hosting company soon. Does virtualbox have a feature that will enable my customers to have something like a virtual private server like what these companies are offering http://www.webhostingsearch.com/ and is it stable with CentOS? Thanks!

[Sm0k1n]

Well, VirtualBox gives you the ability to create virtual machines... it's as simple as that. I guess you could have each machine being a separate VPS. Or are you asking whether a customer having a VM could deploy VPSes inside it?

You could give my project, VBox WMI, a shot and see if that is suitable for you The link is in my signature.

As far as CentOS is concerned, check this topic.

[galaxy]

I mean, can I use a single server and deploy multiple virtual machines at the same time to different customers? is that possible with virtual box?

[Martin]

The normal usage model of Virtualbox is a single user using his own physical system to run several VMs.
Everything more you have to build yourself around this.

[Sm0k1n]

Martin is absolutely correct.

What you could do is to deploy the machines yourself and let customers access them via SSH, RDP, etc. But then their access will probably be limited; they won't be able to start/stop/pause them and so on. I am guessing this is what you need

I would do it by having each customer VM connected to a physical network interface by using VirtualBox's bridged networking option. This way each VM will have its own address on your network and it would look like a separate physical machine, which can then be accessed by a customer

[mschwartz]

While I love virtualbox as a product for personal/desktop use, I would look at a number of other solutions and compare the performance and features.

Ubuntu server edition has cloud computing server install option on the first screen, and it's meant to be enterprise grade (at least).

[galaxy]

thank you guys for all the suggestions, but I really need a simpler solution less configuring less time to debug. I'll look at all of the suggestions one by one and see which fits my needs. Again, thank you!