I am starting a small web hosting company to teach me about system administration and one of the problems I am having is how would I limit the bandwidth and disk space of each virtual host (Debain/nginx)? Or am I going about it the wrong way and should not use virtual hosts?
I am creating a small game server hosting company (just to help me learn Python, Django, and server administration) and thought that when the user signs up it will create a home directory for them so that instead of having game servers somewhere else it will be easier to manage if each person gets there own home directory to put the server files in (they get an actual Debian account that is the same as there username on the website). Is this a good idea and are there any security risks and how can I mitigate them if there are any?
I am going to host a few small sites on VPS, and each of them are going to run my own custom PHP scripts. I am fairly certain that they are secure (did everything in the book, plus some of which is not in the book) to make sure they can't be exploited. But just to be safe I want to know how I could secure each of the virtual hosts so that they can't escape from there virtual host (if a hacker uploaded a shell they could not go above the www folder a legitimate user can't do in ftp no matter how many times they click ..) folder on Debian and Apache.
I know that Nginx does not support .htaccess files, but if you used Nginx as a reverse proxy (is that the correct term, Nginx handles static, Apache handles dynamic) with Apache, would you be able to use .htaccess files then?
I was thinking about getting a dedicated server (I may need the extra power that a VPS can't provide) from The Planet but I don't know to much about how you would operate one. I have experience in setting up multiple VPS's on Linode and Slicehost, I just select my OS in their CP and connect via SSH in putty and do my thing. Is it the same with dedicated servers (just chose you OS from the CP and connect via SSH and put on whatever crap you want)?