Take the 2-minute tour ×  We're starting to expand our hosting
business and I'm wondering how big hosting providers manage
their services, like creating directory structures and
configurations in email servers, web servers, db servers, and
the like, in conjunction with automatic management of auto
renewal of domain registrations and so on.  "Big" here means
everything that needs to use multiple servers of the same kind
(multiple web servers, db servers, etc...) possibly accross
multiple datacenters. My examples are about the classic LAMP
stack hosting because that's what I'm used to, but that could be
anything:    • VPS hosting   • Ruby / MySQL / memcached   • Java
App servers   • etc...  Some random names: Rackspace,
Mediatemple, Slicehost, Dreamhost, 1and1, ThePlanet, etc...  I'd
guess a good solution would interface all of these things:    •
customer interfaces for managing their services   •
configuration of the various systems of the infrastructure (dns,
mail, web, db, and so on)   • automation of more-o