Cobalts have got to be the flakiest little boxes I have ever seen. Good thing they’re not made any more. Lack of reliable support or information of any kind, and general instability when under heavy load are all contributing to a very bad taste in the back of my mouth right about now. They look like they may have been the cats ass circa 1999 or 2000, but this is the new millenium now.
If you are a small ISP using Cobalt’s for hosting customer domains, I would recommend building a more robust web + email infrastructure than a teetering pile of discontinued cobalts. If you’re not serious about providing a particular service, then don’t provide it at all.
I understand wanting to be a one stop shop for the small mom and pop businesses out there, but they more than anyone else have next to zero clue about the reliability of email, web servers, or the internet in general, and will wail big buckets of crocadile tears when their email breaks.
If you’re not up to the level of thinking about writing RFC’s or whitepapers on how to build scalable web and email infrastructure (and very few people are, to tell the truth, myself included) then perhaps you ought to look at a place like Canada Web Hosting.
If you’re going to offload a perceived business-critical business service to some outside party, you’d most likely be willing to pay a bit of coin for something that is reliable, has responsive support, etc. If you can’t provide this level of service to your customers, why not white label it? They’ll never know.
White labeling means the service provider will brand their offerings with your company identity, answer a support phone number and email box as if they were in your employ, and so forth. The customer needn’t know anything other than you have this armada of clustered machines that never go down and a support line that is always answered by knowledgable staff.