Is there an API in existance for creating those SiteWorx sub-user accounts? If not, would that be a realistic thing to accomplish? If so that could be amazing. Also, I think I remember there used to be an option to allow user accounts access to just a certain directory, but I’m not seeing it now - am I just nuts?
That’s not in the API now as far as I know.
You can manually create SiteWorx account users who only have access to certain features (User Accounts on the main menu) or ftp accounts which can only have access to certain subdirectories of the home directory (Site Services => FTP accounts). Both of these must be done by hand.
That’s for the reply Tim, that’s basically the answer I was expecting. unforunately it’s not something I’d want to do manually 50,000 times a month. If you guys ever do decide to do it, we’ll be extremely grateful. :rolleyes:
Just cout of curiosity, what is your reasoning for wanting this? I assume it has something to do with your free web hosting system
If you just want to give clients accounts like
you can do that by creating a SiteWorx account entitled client.mycompany.com and giving them the access/features you want.
It would be treated exactly the same as any other fully qualified domain name with it’s own home directory completely isolated from the one for mycompany.com
You’re correct about the free hosting. We tend to be secretive about all of this, but I suppose there’s no need - it’s still apparently got a long ways to go on the topic we’re discussing anyhow. Here’s a long-winded explanation.
We actually have thousands of subdomains already - the problem, is that although we are able to host way more accounts than a typical paid shared hosting service could accomplish with iworx - it’s still horrendously ineffecient for this project. As it’s ad-supported, we can currently only pump out about 1k pageviews per server per day before iworx-db processes take down 90% of the CPU (that’s extremely low # of pageviews for even a single ad-supported site). From estimates we’ve seen of other dedicated sites we host, a nice dual xeon void of SQL and DNS syncing should have no problem pumping out closer to 500k per day.
So this leads me to believe that directories are the way to go, rather than subdomains. One might be led to say - hey, everyone wants subdomains though, right? And people want SQL, right? Well, yes, but fortunately, freewebsitehost.net has never had a problem with promotion. In fact, we’ve never been able to keep up, and I’ve at times tried to move us in the opposite direction. This is due to many things, but especially some tactical SEO advantages on our ancient all-in-domain-keyworded domain…
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=free+website+host&ei=UTF-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&fr=moz2
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=free+website+host&sourceid=Mozilla-search
http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&hl=en&q=free+website+host&btnG=Google+Search
To save you the trouble, we’re #1 for ‘free website host’ in yahoo, msn, and google will vary depending on the data center you connect to, but it’s currently #4 for me (likely 2-3 good backlinks away from #1). Not long after we hit the top in Yahoo!, I noticed a little ‘Yahoo! Geocities’ advertisement appear out of nowhere there above all listings - it could be a coincidence, but I like to think we got their attention :). Point in case, as Ubiquity’s resident SEO nut, I haven’t even tried with this site, yet it’s just tasting complete command over the free hosting industry with literally no effort. And, all of this is on top of loads of ancient backlinks from some nice sites - really freewebsitehost.net can never lose if it can keep up.
So basically, we want to make this effecient enough to work, and we’re not worried if it means we cutting most standard features. We’ve seen other companies make free hosting work great - and a lot are going so far as to take out paid ads on sites to try harness a fraction of the traffic we stumbled into. As I’m sure we’ve made clear by now, we love the iworx control panel, and as we told Chris when we met, we’d love to make sure all of these thousands of new webmasters flooding in have the iworx name in front of them. All we need is a way to fill our servers effeciently, which is our reason for all of these posts and thoughts of pushing iworx outside of it’s current uses. I know it’s not free hosting software, but we’ve at least been convinced that it could be the best option for what we do. A good way to make the directory thing work would definately seal that theory.
Thanks for explaining.
I can put this in as a feature request, but that doesn’t mean it will get into the software. Maybe there is something the devs can do for you, but they are all busy with HostingCon and next release stuff so I wouldn’t expect a reply from one of them for a while.
One thought for you to consider: Gosmar Threads’s Fileman advertizes on their site something about being able to give out free web hosting with it. We ingegrate Fileman onto our software. Not sure how ours is different than the commecial one (one of the devs may be able to tell you) but maybe you could do something there. Swapping out or custom one for their commercial one.
I don’t know, just something to look into maybe.
Good Luck
I understand that pleasing your client base as a whole is far more important than pleasing Ubiquity, and what’s been done to go out of your way to help us like this in the past has been very appreciated. Coding something ourselves is actually about where I’m at - I’ll have to look into Fileman, it definately looks neat. We have our own coding projects at the moment with UbiquityNOC, and of course HostingCon all next week as well - really a team of helper monkeys seems like the only logical solution right now. Well I’m sure you’ll get your fill of us in Vegas, thanks for the insight. 
I won’t be there myself this year, but I’m sure Chris, Paul, Socheat, and Dan will have more than enough fun to make up for my absense 
And it’s no problem. I’m curious to see what you come up with.