About creating sites

This topic contains the following:

• An overview of the site creation process

• Information required before creating sites

Overview

A WEBppliance site is a DNS domain with Web, FTP, and email capabilities. When you first log on to WEBppliance as a Reseller, there are no sites. As the Reseller Administrator, you create the sites.

Each site that you create or host is capable of hosting its own set of email user accounts, and each email user account is capable of managing its own set of email services.

There are two ways to host sites:

1. IP-based hosting-It involves creating a site with its own IP address. You must create IP-based sites if the site needs its own secure layer (SSL) support.

2. Name-based hosting-It involves creating a site sharing the primary IP address of the server. Name-based sites receive most of the benefits of IP-based sites without occupying an IP address. All name-based sites have the same IP address.

Before creating any sites, you might want to create a Service Plan template. Templates are not required to create sites; however, they make the process of creating sites and establishing server applications for the sites easier and faster. There is no permanent link between a site and the Service Plan used to create it. Once a site is created it is independent of the Service Plan used to create it. The server applications and other settings associated with a site can be modified any time as desired

Before creating sites

Before creating a site or a default template for sites or server applications, you must have the following information available:

• A Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)

• For an IP-based site, the host name must map to the IP address of the site.

• For a name-based site, the host name must map to the IP address of the WEBppliance server.

• The IP address (if the site is IP-based)

• The amount of disk space you want to assign to the site

• The name, password, and email address of the Site Administrator

• The list of services or the name of the Service Plan you will provide for the site

• The maximum number of email users you will allow on the site

• Whether or not you want the site entry added to your DNS server

• If you are using a DNS service different from the one WEBppliance provides, or you prefer to save CPU resources, you can choose to forego a DNS entry, otherwise when a new site is created, these DNS entries will be automatically added to the DNS Server.

The following table lists the type of entries added to the DNS Server:

• Note: In WEBppliance, you can create a virtual name server to act as a secondary DNS name server, which will satisfy the requirement that you must have two DNS name servers to create a domain. Be aware that creating a virtual name server does not actually provide redundancy because you are requesting WEBppliance to add a second IP address to the specified primary name server. Since the IP address of the virtual secondary server maps to the primary server, if the primary server stops operating, the secondary server will as well.