Hello,

I have a customer who wants a high-availability system to offer Unix web hosting. He wants to deal only with sales and basic support. I'm not a system administrator and therefore I'm searching for some one to provide me with consultancy to design on paper the architecture of the system for him, as well as suppliers for servers rental and software licenses. Basically he wants to be able to control all resources on a per-account basis because the lowest hosting plan will be free, so these free users shouldn't be able to send spam, to use all CPU, etc... Web hosting and email hosting should be load-balanced so that sites don't undergo the Digg/Slashdot effects, he suggesting using DBMail for the email backend, possibly Zimbra for the webmail, jailed shell, RoR, Procmail, Mailman, custom DNS, Crontab, and several other goodies that Dreamhost has (Jabber, WebDAV, Passworded Directories). At last, he needs a front-end to be able to order and install SSL certs on demand, and to register and set up domain names using APIs (optional).

You have to be able to code in a scripting language because there will be 1001 things to check on a daily basis and automatically for the free accounts (think about all these people who will create accounts and leave them, those online pharmacy web sites to detect and terminate, spammers, scammers, copyright infringement, illegal software hosting, etc...). My customers probably won't want to have to review all sites daily and manually. So a front-end where suspicious web sites are listed and a [x] button to terminate them if needed. Account creation should be automated as well (no manual release).

I expect quality of hosting to be more or less that of Cartika Hosting, something that just works, when a spare part breaks, the customer doesn't notice.

I need to make sure you're good at system administration, so if you're interested, and if you think you are really able to set this up, please PM me with: an overview of the way you would set this up, a few recommendations or examples of previous work or satisfied customers that I can actually call to double-check.

Thanks.