web server admin solution

A friend of mine and I run a small web site hosting service (www.logjamming.com). We've been running on a Raq3 for quite a while, but have just started to outgrow our britches and added a RedHat box.

So here's the question. We want a server admin solution. We have Webmin and have found it to be way to time consuming and complicated to use everytime we want to add a new site or admin the server. Our host offers Plesk at something like $50 a month, but we are a tiny not-for-profit and would much rather an open-source/free solution. We're also aware of FreeVSD, but it creates a virtual server for every site, and that's overkill for hosting hundreds of sites on one server (from what i can tell... please correct me if i'm wrong on that).

Can anyone recommend a solution that allows easy administration of web sites, users, email, MySQL, etc..??

Thanks!!!

I tend to use vi.

Really, though, how were you intending to run multiple sites without virtual servers? I'm assuming that you mean the VirtualHost feature of Apache or something similar. The only other way to do it that I can think of would to have multiple daemons running on different IP addresses, which is very brute force. So that seems to allow FreeVSD back in, not that I'm familiar with it. (I really do just use vi.)

Edit: I just looked at FreeVSD and you're right. That's even more heavyweight than my too heavy ``solution'' above. Use vi. Seriously.

Here's the thing... This is a side project. If it were my full time job, believe me, i'd be all about manual configuration and am not afraid of editing text files in the shell. We do it a lot actually. BUT, we don't have time to spend an hour configuring a new signup when we get 2 to 4 new sites every day or two.

We've been using the VirtualHosting capabilities on our Raq server (which is all administered via a fairly well laid out and executed web interface.) On the Raq, adding a new site takes about 30 seconds, and everything is configured for each site automagically. We have over 125 domains going on 4 IP's. Raq's are awesome for doing static hosting of small sites... but once we started adding CGI's and MySQL calls, the thing just couldn't take it. Which is why we got the new server.

We need something that allows us to add a site and have the tool do the rest (set up email, create directories, create users/aliases, ftp, etc etc...).

Any other ideas? =]

Any other ideas? =]

Perl script. If you can dig up someone with a bit of perl experience they ought to be able to build a script tailored to your needs pretty quickly. That way you get a solution that does exactly what you want rather than something like webmin which tries to do everything anybody would ever want (it is a great package though).

-Mike