TurboHub

TurboHub is a distributed WordPress site management platform built for A2 Hosting. It provides customers with a unified control panel to manage every aspect of their WordPress sites — performance optimization, plugin and theme management, staging environments, security monitoring, and health checks — across shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans. The system spans three codebases: a Laravel 10 web application (TurboHub Web), a Laravel Zero agent distributed as a compiled PHAR binary to hosting servers (TurboHub Agent), and a suite of WHMCS provisioning modules that tie it all into A2 Hosting’s billing and account infrastructure. I designed the overall system architecture, built early prototypes to validate the approach, and led a team of 12 developers from MVP through production. The platform ultimately serviced over 385,000 WordPress sites for 110,000 customers across 5,000+ servers in four global regions.

My Role

My role was system architecture and team leadership — I designed the system and guided 12 developers through building it, but the day-to-day development was theirs.

• System Architecture – Designed the distributed three-tier architecture and built early prototypes to prove out the approach: WHMCS for billing integration and customer entitlement, the web application for the control panel and business logic, and the server-side agent for direct WordPress operations. Chose RabbitMQ as the communication backbone between the web tier and thousands of agents, using a synchronous RPC pattern with per-server queues for reliable, targeted command execution.

• Technology Selection – Evaluated and selected the core stack: Laravel 10 with Inertia.js and Vue 3 for a modern single-page experience without a separate API layer, Laravel Zero for a lightweight agent framework that compiles to a single distributable PHAR binary, Redis for session and cache management, Laravel Horizon for queue supervision, and Pusher for real-time UI updates.

• Team Leadership – Led 12 developers through the full development lifecycle. Established coding standards, review processes, and sprint workflows. Broke the project into workstreams (web application, agent, WHMCS integration, infrastructure) and coordinated cross-team dependencies.

• Integration Design – Designed the WHMCS integration strategy including OAuth-based authentication, client group access levels (internal, beta, stable) for phased rollouts, and the provisioning hook chain for Managed WordPress products.

• Deployment Strategy – Designed the multi-region deployment pipeline: GitHub Actions builds the agent PHAR and distributes it to regional repositories (Arizona, Miami, Netherlands, Singapore), while Deployer handles zero-downtime web application deployments with automated migration, cache management, and frontend builds.

Problem Solved

A2 Hosting customers with WordPress sites had no centralized way to manage them. Performance tuning, plugin updates, staging environments, and security monitoring all required direct server access or third-party tools. There was no visibility into site health at scale, and no way to offer managed WordPress features as a product differentiator. TurboHub gave every customer a single control panel for all their WordPress sites, and gave A2 Hosting a platform to deliver managed WordPress services across their entire infrastructure.

System Architecture

TurboHub is a three-component distributed system:

• TurboHub Web – The central Laravel 10 application serving the customer control panel. Handles authentication, business logic, and orchestration. Communicates with agents via RabbitMQ and with WHMCS via its API.

• TurboHub Agent – A PHP CLI application built on Laravel Zero, compiled into a self-contained PHAR binary. Deployed to every hosting server via regional package repositories. Runs as a pool of 10 Supervisord-managed consumer processes per server, listening to a RabbitMQ queue named after the server’s hostname for targeted command dispatch.

• WHMCS Modules – Server and provisioning modules within A2 Hosting’s WHMCS billing system. Handles customer entitlement, Managed WordPress product provisioning, and provides the OAuth authentication layer that TurboHub Web uses for user sessions.

Communication Flow

The web application sends commands to agents through RabbitMQ using a synchronous RPC pattern. Each agent listens on a queue named after its server’s hostname. When a user requests an action (e.g., list plugins, create a staging site), the web application publishes a message to the target server’s queue with a reply-to callback. The agent processes the command — typically by executing WP-CLI operations on the appropriate WordPress installation — and publishes the result back. This design allows the web application to target any specific server among thousands without maintaining persistent connections.

Real-time UI updates are pushed to the browser via Pusher on private, per-user channels, so long-running operations like performance optimization or staging creation provide live progress feedback.

Authentication and Access Control

Authentication flows through WHMCS OAuth. When a customer accesses TurboHub, the web application validates their session against WHMCS and maps their client group membership to an access level: internal (staff), beta (testers), or stable (production customers). This enabled phased feature rollouts during development. Agency support allows users managing multiple client accounts to switch contexts, and admin masquerading supports customer service workflows.

TurboHub Web

The web application is built on Laravel 10 with a Vue 3 frontend powered by Inertia.js, providing a single-page application experience with server-side rendering and no separate API layer.

Core Features

• Site Management – Central dashboard listing all WordPress sites across a customer’s hosting accounts. Sites are filterable, taggable, and searchable. Each site provides detailed views for plugins, themes, settings, and health status.

• Performance Optimization – An automated multi-phase optimization system. The analysis phase benchmarks baseline performance and checks for plugin conflicts, cache availability, PHP OPcache status, and disk space. The optimization phase applies changes in two phases with rollback capability, using presets ranging from essentials to extreme. Long-running optimization jobs are processed through a dedicated Redis queue supervised by Laravel Horizon with 15-minute timeouts.

• Staging Environments – One-click staging site creation with bidirectional sync between live and staging. Includes advanced staging via InstaWP integration and shareable preview URLs for client review.

• Plugin and Theme Management – Bulk plugin operations across multiple sites, auto-update configuration, plugin collections (favorites), and activation/deactivation controls. Theme management with status filtering and cleanup.

• Health Monitoring – Aggregated health checks including DNS validation, SSL certificate verification, domain expiration tracking, and Google PageSpeed scoring. Security monitoring through Patchstack vulnerability database integration.

• Security – Integration with the A2 Optimized WordPress plugin for server-level security settings. Vulnerability scanning against the Patchstack database with alerting for affected plugins.

TurboHub Agent

The agent is a Laravel Zero CLI application compiled into a single PHAR binary for distribution. It runs on every hosting server as a pool of Supervisord-managed processes consuming messages from RabbitMQ.

Architecture

The agent uses a configuration-driven routing system. Incoming RabbitMQ messages contain a dot-notation function name (e.g., wordpress.plugins.list) that is resolved through a route configuration map to a specific service class and method. This allows new operations to be added by registering a route and implementing the handler, without modifying the message processing infrastructure.

The agent supports 75+ operations organized across service classes for WordPress core management, plugin and theme operations, performance optimization, staging environments, site discovery, cPanel integration, and server health checks.

WordPress Integration

The agent wraps WP-CLI for all WordPress operations, executing commands as the appropriate cPanel user via sudo with configurable memory limits and timeouts. A plugin blacklist mechanism handles problematic plugins that cause WP-CLI errors — when a plugin error is detected, the agent automatically retries with that plugin skipped, and sends a Slack notification for investigation.

Site discovery uses WP-CLI’s find command to enumerate all WordPress installations under /home/, validating each against cPanel user records and PHP/WordPress version compatibility requirements.

Deployment and Distribution

GitHub Actions builds the PHAR binary on each release and distributes it to four regional package repositories (Arizona, Miami, Netherlands, Singapore). Servers pull updates through an update script managed by the existing configuration management system. Supervisord automatically restarts consumer processes after updates.

Security

The agent authenticates to RabbitMQ using per-server tokens stored outside the application directory. All RabbitMQ connections use TLS 1.2+ with certificate verification. Privilege escalation for WP-CLI and cPanel operations is managed through tightly scoped sudoers rules that restrict the rmq service user to specific binaries and path patterns.

WHMCS Integration

TurboHub integrates with WHMCS through several modules within A2 Hosting’s customized WHMCS installation:

• Server Module (a2_omni) – Handles provisioning for the Omni infrastructure that backs TurboHub’s hosting. Manages the full lifecycle: creation, suspension, unsuspension, and termination. Provides client area controls for server operations and communicates with Omni infrastructure via a REST API with callback-based status updates during provisioning.

• Provisioning Addon (a2_provision) – Orchestrates post-creation setup for Managed WordPress products, including Jetpack provisioning, cPanel configuration, DNS setup, and monitoring integration. Uses a modular architecture with dedicated provision classes for each service type.

• Hooks – Pre-creation hooks generate randomized WordPress admin URL paths for security and synchronize credentials from custom fields to service records. A client group hook (disabled in production) supports automatic TurboHub access assignment at checkout.

• Server Detection – Utility classes identify TurboHub servers by hostname pattern matching and enumerate all TurboHub-capable servers for routing and reporting.

Impact

• Delivered a unified WordPress management experience to 110,000+ customers across 385,000+ sites
• Distributed the agent binary to 5,000+ servers across four global regions with automated updates
• Automated performance optimization reduced manual tuning from hours of server access to a single-click workflow with rollback safety
• Staging environment creation went from a multi-step manual process to a one-click operation with live/staging sync
• Enabled A2 Hosting to offer Managed WordPress as a differentiated product tier backed by real tooling
• Centralized security monitoring with vulnerability scanning across the entire WordPress install base