Reseller or not?

Submitted by Deleted on Tue, 08/04/2009 - 16:42

IN our academic environment, it is my intention to provide IT managers with units in our larger group the ability to create/assign web sites to their own units without my intervention. Specifically, I am at the top level of IT admin in the College of Engineering. Under the College are nine departments. In each department there are many administrative, faculty and research web sites. So, I want to give each department IT group the ability to manage their unit's web sites. I also want to make sure that when they create a web site for a user/lab/unit, that site manger cannot create additional site/subsites under their virtual site.

Would the reseller model be best applied? Or?

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 08/04/2009 - 23:59

Howdy -- well, there may be two ways of accomplishing that.

  1. The reseller feature is probably my first choice for what you described. You could simply setup an Account Plan that your resellers can use that allows them to create Virtual Servers -- but not allow the owner of the newly created Virtual Server to create additional sites and sub-sites.

You would be able to go through the account plans and server templates, and configure exactly what each user would have access to. You could decide whether they have the ability to create email addresses, ftp users, databases, and the like -- as well as use the install scripts for installing additional web applications.

  1. Depending on what sort of access you wanted to provide your user/lab/unit's, you could forgo giving them control panel access, and only provide them with an FTP account.

For that -- what you could do is grant each department IT group admin rights to a Virtual Server, with the ability to create as many Sub-Servers (ie, domains) as they need. Your IT folks could create Sub-Servers for each user/lab/unit who needs a site. However, instead of providing control panel access, they could just create a "Website FTP User" for each user/lab/unit, with permissions only to upload to their specific website.

Again, I think my first choice would be the reseller -- that's a nice, clean way of doing things, and you get a lot of flexibility with the account plans and server templates. However, creating restricted FTP users could also do the trick depending on what you're looking to provide.

Let us know if you have any further questions!