Leading managed hosting for a US provider's business customers
More than eight years at a California web hosting company with over 150,000 customers: from level 2 support to Managed Hosting Team Lead, building the malware tools the whole shared hosting farm came to use.
- Client
- Lunarpages (US)
- Role
- Level 2 support → Team Lead → Sysadmin
- Period
- Apr 2011 – Dec 2019
- Stack
- Linux, cPanel/WHM, Apache, MySQL, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento
The situation
Lunarpages, a California web hosting company with over 150,000 customers, sold a plan called Managed Shared Hosting: for a monthly fee, shared hosting customers got 120 minutes of administrative time for malware cleanups, resource usage optimisation, troubleshooting, website optimisation and small web design tasks.
I joined in April 2011 as a level 2 customer support technician, after scoring 15 out of 15 on the technical test, and was put on that department's tickets. Most of the sites were WordPress, alongside Joomla and Drupal and shops on ZenCart, osCommerce and Magento — more than 100 CMS scripts in all.
What I did
- Helped create tools that automate malware detection and cleanup, and kept them current for over eight years by writing malware fingerprints as regular expressions.
- Drafted the protocols and procedures for malware incidents and for sites with stability and resource usage problems.
- Took on level 3 tickets from 2013. That year one of my tools went to the Spam‑Abuse and Exploited Accounts teams; by 2017 two more ran farm‑wide on every shared hosting server, scanning for malware and fingerprinting installed CMS scripts.
- As Managed Hosting Team Lead from 2015, extended the work to VPS and dedicated servers: whole‑server malware cleanups, and optimisation at service level (Apache, MySQL) before website level.
The result
Steady positive feedback from upper and lower management and from VIP customers, more than eight years of advanced WordPress troubleshooting, and a promotion to Systems Administrator in 2018.
The managed hosting work wound down from September 2019 and ended in December 2019, when the parent company sold the Lunarpages brand to HostPapa.