Our mission:

We think that web-hosting shouldn't be rocket-science to manage!

We want to create a new centralized Hosting Control Panel that (almost) everyone can use to manage the hosting of websites.

The software we create will be released as open-source software to enable everyone to use it - and to enable many of you to contribute to make it even better!

We can't imagine your exact needs or requirements - that's why we ship a base configuration of a modular system. Don't like one of the parts? Just replace it!

In contrary to the existing systems that have evolved in years or even decades, often based on the way to go back then, we want to create a fresh system that is based on the best practices of 2014.

We target small to mid-sized organisations like e.g. web-agencies that offer web-hosting for their customers. Our best-practice approach will basically fit their needs out of the box - but can be adapted or extended for specific needs.

System Overview:

In short, the overall system will consist of the following sub-systems:

A central management host (where the management GUI will be run)
Two or more DNS-Servers
A bunch of Web-Servers to deliver the hosted websites
Two or more Mail-Servers

This will enable a multi-node or cluster architecture where one master "controls" many single nodes that deliver the services.

All of the nodes that deliver any kind of service will run a small agent that connects to the central management host to get the needed details. Depending of the role(s) of the single node, the management system will provide the agent with the needed details in a raw format. After fetching it's configuration, the agent then locally generates the needed config files to be able to deliver it's services.

Every node can contain one ore more roles - so that one can start small and add more nodes depending on the growing needs. We recommend to start with some redundancy from the start - but basically, a very small setup can consist of one server containing both the management system and the needed server-roles on the same server.

The Features:

The Management GUI

Every user has his personal login and can be granted different levels of control and depending permissions
Everything can be controlled from this central web-based control panel
For every domain / hosting package you can decide on which nodes you want to operate it
The central management system collects usage statistics from the single nodes and shows some reporting

Networking

The whole system will be IPv6 ready
Servers will be running a dual-stack configuration by default

Server Provisioning

We like Puppet to configure the nodes
For fetching the configuration data Hiera will be used
Can be exchanged if you like Chef, Ansible or your Bash scripts more - just fetch the configuration of the node from the Roketi API and configure your services

DNS Hosting

Master / Slave servers
Manage all zones and records from one central web-based application

Web Hosting

Probably Nginx based
With PHP-FPM to serve dynamic content
Other script languages like Ruby could be implemented, too (depending on someone to do that)
Using SNI for hosting SSL protected sites from a shared IP address

E-Mail Hosting

Based on Postfix for the hard work with the mails
IMAP access via Dovecot
Webmail access based on Roundcube
Of course some kind of spam and virus filtering will be implemented
Redundant MX hosts with central storage will be possible
Auto-Responders, redirecttions and so on - all configurable from the central control panel