Odd question about VPS Hosting.

[Dave]

There's a guy on the Xenforo boards who wants to set up a small forum but doesn't have ANY clue how to do it. I have been helping him and thought about the fact that we have more space than we need on our VPS. Our current usage:

Disk Space Usage 3326.86 / 300000 MB
Monthly Bandwidth Transfer 122881.14 / 3000000 MB

So I thought, why not allocate 5000 MB disk space and 250000 MB bandwidth to him and he could host it with us?

But I've never done this before. I have an account set up in my WHM but he doesn't even have a domain name yet. Would he need to register it and then transfer it to our server? Or would the simple act of registering it be enough for his account with us to attach?

If he had to transfer it then it would probably be unwise of him to do it that way. What do you guys think?

 

[strawman]

It depends on the features of your VPS hosting package. If you have a real VPS, then you can do whatever you want, including hosting multiple domains. How you set that up depends on how your hosting provider handles domains. They probably have a DNS server that needs to know about it, then your friend will need to set up their domain info to point to that DNS server.

However, keep in mind that by putting them on your VPN, they essentially can do anything they want, including completely wiping your server, with just a little bit of code they insert in their own site. You can set up permissions and limit their damage, but then you still have to worry about whether they install a bad module and it consumes all your processing time. You can again try to set up a process manager to prevent that as well, but if they are having problems doing basic software setup, then you are essentially becoming a hosting company.

The one advantage is that you can probably charge them to offset your own hosting costs, but I'm willing to bet that you'll end up spending enough time supporting them that you'd end up "making" less than $5/hr.

But if you want to go this route, check with your hosting company, if they support multiple forums and domains, they should have instructions for doing so.