planning a project for a school class - need some advice

[Ovidiu]

hello,

a local school class would like to implement some real life scenario into their courses. so they asked me if I could help them achieve the following scenario:

I give them hosting for one domain and they want each of their students (lets assume its 30) ftp access, one DB, i.e. 30MB space and a certain ammount of traffic, so each student could/should be able to build his own website in the form of: user01.domain.com user2.domain.com, etc.
The teacher is going to work with them and tutor them, I just need to make sure the server is prepared for this.

now how could I do this? do I really need a separate website for each subdomain?
can I use wildcard DNS setting on their side, aka let their current hoster set up domain.com and www.domain.com on their current host and then add a wildcard DNS entry so all other subdomains get redirected to my server - this way they coudl continue running their current schoolwebsite without moving around or any other problems.

can I get some feedback on how to do this?

###edit###
I know it would be easieast to jsut set up 30 users for one domain and then let all of them acces their sites like this: domain.com/~username, right? that just does a little clumsy, but what woudl be the advantages / disadvantages ?

[Ben]

Either you take this username construct to split them up,
or you take one domain and create 30 webs having another hostname on that domain, e.g. domain abc.com with pupil1.abc.com,...

In my eyes both things are equal for solving your problem, the second one has the advantage ob beeing able to let a user access his area in the ispconfig adminpanel if desired.

In the first case you only have to make sure, that the basic dns-name can be resolved, in the second case you either create a wildcard dns record or you have to create on for each subdomain.

[Ovidiu]

ok, I think I got that so far, but again, what would I need to set if I want the www.abc.com and abc.com domains to stay on the original server and only have all other subdomains forwarded to the testserver for this scenario?

[falko]

can I use wildcard DNS setting on their side, aka let their current hoster set up domain.com and www.domain.com on their current host and then add a wildcard DNS entry so all other subdomains get redirected to my server - this way they coudl continue running their current schoolwebsite without moving around or any other problems.

Yes, this should work. :)

[Ovidiu]

I am going to give it a try this weekend.
thx for the advice.