About H-Sphere Hosting Control Panel

H-Sphere is a scalable multiserver web hosting solution. It has many advanced features and a sophisticated billing system to automate and improve your web hosting tasks. H-Sphere was designed to work on many servers and can be scaled by adding more web, mail, database, and DNS servers without any downtime. It provides a simple, easy-to-use web interface that can be maintained from any computer with internet connection. H-Sphere was written in Java and works with any SQL-compliant database. It runs only industry standard software.

Outline    Supported OS   Servers   Requirements   Security   Pricing

H-Sphere Hosting Control Panel Outline

H-Sphere offers the highest level of web-hosting operations by providing:

• Complete automation for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows platforms
• Billing solution
• Over 20 Supported Merchant Gateways
• Flexibility at all levels
• Multilingual support
• Virtual Private Servers
• Private label resellers
• User-friendly control panel
• Comprehensive set of hosting features

H-Sphere follows true centralized model to allow highest level of manageability. The data is stored in the centralized database. Control Panel server dispatches commands (using ssh or http protocols) to different servers. New servers can be added on the fly.

H-Sphere Supported Operating Systems

More on supported Linux OS...                More on supported Windows OS...

If your distribution is not listed, we don't support it. We don't support beta, testing, or unstable versions of any distribution.
For example, Red Hat 8 and 9, Fedora, Debian, and Mandrake aren't supported.

Please also be aware of H-Sphere Services and Supported OS's EOL Dates.

H-Sphere Hosting Control Panel Servers

The heart of H-Sphere is the Control Panel Server. It knows about every other server in the configuration. The Control Panel server manages all new machines, users, domains, and events behind the scene. When a user enters the system and creates a new account, the control panel server dispatches commands to DNS, Mail, and Web servers to configure themselves. It also writes all the information about user into its database. From this moment on, H-Sphere knows which computers the account resides on, the properties of the account, how it is billed and any other information it might need to know. All settings are configured in real time.

An H-Sphere configuration includes the following servers:

See also:

• Preparing *nix servers for the H-Sphere installation.
• Preparing Windows servers for the H-Sphere installation
• Illustration chart of multi-server installation

You can put servers 1 through 5 to one or more boxes combining them any way you want.
The Control Panel server is required; other servers can be installed later.

You need more than one box if you are going to offer one of the following:
1) Windows hosting: Windows Web, MS SQL, MS Exchange, and Windows RealMedia servers are set up separately on Windows 2000/2003 platform and can also be combined in any possible way.
2) PgSQL database hosting: PgSQL server for user database hosting can't share the box with the control panel server, because the latter runs with system PgSQL database.
3) VPS hosting: Virtual Private Servers require special software that is installed on a separate Linux box.

H-Sphere Requirements

H-Sphere can be installed on any number of computers. A minimum configuration can be installed on one box, but more is recommended.

Hardware

If you are going to install H-Sphere to only one computer, make sure it is at least Pentium III, 500MHz CPU and 512MB RAM. This will allow to host only a small number of customers. Adding SiteStudio will require at least 1000MHz CPU and 1GB RAM.

Other Requirements

- Full control of DNS, mail, web and other hosting servers is a must while installation and testing.
- H-Sphere can be installed only on public IPs.
- To provide domain registration services with OpenSRS, you will need a Full Access account. To get it, contact OpenSRS tech support, and tell them you will be using H-Sphere. They will waive the requirements for the full test.

To accept credit cards in real-time, you will need an account and gateway access through one of the supported merchant gateways.

See also how to prepare servers for the H-Sphere installation

• on *nix
• on Windows

H-Sphere Assured Security

H-Sphere ensures data and transaction security at all levels, including:
- Site performance under site owner (both Unix and Windows);
- SSL / shared SSL certificate support for individual domains;
- SSL encryption for the entire control panel; - Server-side encryption of credit card numbers.

However, we find it important to emphasize that the security of the server at the lowest level must be provided by the system administrator.

Tips on how to increase H-Sphere security are available here (courtesy of Dynamic Net™).

See also