Setting International Hosting for 40k Servers Using ISPsystem 
Ecosystem Products

PQ.Hosting is a major hosting provider whose international business has been running since 2019. They provide allkinds of hosting services, including VMs, dedicated servers, web‑hosting, VPN,DNS.

They are a member of RIPE, the worldwide association of Internet registrars with more than 250 Gb of sustained Internet traffic use.

PQ.Hosting owns more than 1,000 server nodes. Their servers are available for leasing in 35 data centers globally, and the list of countries is constantly growing.

There are more than 40,000 active serversin their client base. These are used by both small to mid-size businesses and big companies with virtual IT infrastructure that covers 1,500+ devices.

Ecosystem-based approach

Hosting market is anything but young, and there are many individual products for infrastructure management, client panels and billing systems. One feature that all these products have in common is their ability to address one task only.

Ecosystem, on the contrary, is intended to address various integrated business-related tasks of a hosting provider.

ISPsystem platforms work as an integrated system. They are modular products. They are easy to deploy, operate and integrate with one another thus addressing key tasks of business hosting: quick implementation, convenient management and easy billing.

Quick entrance and hosting service launch

The solutions are suitable for any size of infrastructure, from small hosting providers to major cloud owners. Even for budgets that differ by an order of magnitude, management and administration tools will be equally usable and efficient.

It took us only a week to deploy the project by virtue of ISPsystem platforms usable interface and simple modular integration of ecosystem products. This is including the period of license purchase, test connection and further project launch to production.

Also PQ.Hosting project launch did not require an extensive headcount. The launch was implemented by two engineers from the client’s team.

Geographically distributed systems

It has been a while since one data center was sufficient for modern day hosting infrastructure. Clients need the last mile to be fast, and business needs the highest availability.

For instance, PQ.Hosting data centers are located in Moldova, Netherlands, USA, Latvia, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Germany, Canada, Slovakia, Czechia, Great Britain, Israel, Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Ireland, France, Spain, Greece, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Belgium and Iceland.

Geographically distributed systems increase service reliability mitigating provider’s financial risks and supporting compliance with demanding requirements of SLA.

ISPsystem products intended for infrastructure management are scalable in parallel with the project. If you need new locations, they can be added to control panel easily and without extra cost to become a part of single IT system.

10, 20, 50, 100 global locations - the number of data centers equipped by any suppliers is unlimited. Single access point for control, monitoring and inventory management of all equipment with differentiation of access rights and logging of all actions.

Multifunctional solution to business-related tasks

It used to take one specific solution to address each business-related task. Nowadays clients prefer solutions, whose flexible functionality can be used to implement both main business scenarios and additional unconventional tasks.

For instance, VMmanager virtualization management platform enables background analysis of client’s virtual resources and detection of malware.

To achieve this, client’s team has created their own scripts for virtual machines, and used these scripts as well as VMmanager built-in integration with QEMU Guest Agent to monitor all virtual servers without the need to connect to them directly from the platform interface.

It is worth noting that more than 700 server nodes are managed from VMmanager single interface in this project. Integrated monitoring of key indicators and early recognition of critical deviations is crucial for this amount of resources. For instance, if any of server components fails to function, the client can detect configuration error at an early stage and migrate VM to another cluster node using built-in “live migration” function without the need to interrupt operation.

Another example of multipurpose approach to business-related tasks is application of DCImanager multivendor IT infrastructure management platform in the project.

It allows the client to cover scenarios in two areas:

administration and management of dedicated servers by clients; unassisted control over own global infrastructure (the client does not need to enter a specific panel of a specific server of a specific country to have the devices in all locations fully monitored through a single platform. The monitored parameters range from server name and its connection to temperature indication and other data.

Flexible improvements and customization

Billing system is the key element of hosting provider integrated automation. It is important that this element is not only efficient, scalable, multifunctional, multipurpose and integratable, but also adaptable to client’s business model.

BILLmanager is off-the-shelf solution that does not presume any development costs and has multiple “out-of-the-box” integrations with various payment systems and software. If needed, this platform also allows to create additional module and thus change the system operation business logic.

BILLmanager open API may be used to scale servers with flexible tariffs, obtain information about payments and withdrawals from the account as well as for other purposes. The client can develop a module virtually for any payment system, domain registar, SMS gateway and other systems.

In particular, PQ.Hosting team extensively uses the platform flexible customization options to write modules for custom-made payment system in various geographical locations.

Among these options, the platform enables interface branding depending on the client’s corporate style. API can be used to write your own front-end and connect it to billing back-end.

Additional services

All ISPsystem ecosystem products used in the project allow to deploy additional services for clients and increase the average bill.

For instance, PQ.Hosting used VMmanager to deploy the service for provisioning of VPN server using SaaS model. The platform already includes ready-to-go templates and tools to launch this service.

Meanwhile, this service ordering, configuring and provisioning is made through BILLmanager interface. Provider’s client obtains a ready-to-go VPN and deliberately disengages from virtual machine guest operating system administration.

Owing to the extensive pool of various templates from VMmanager repository (both ISPsystem out-of-the-box templates and those developed and integrated by the client) the client can perform unassisted deployment of additional services, including several types of VPN servers, proxy servers and other services.