Quark is the customer-facing half of BuiltFast’s hosting platform, built on Laravel 12 with a Vue.js/TypeScript frontend. As lead architect, I designed and built the core system that handles customer registration, subscription billing (Recurly), domain registration and DNS management (PowerDNS), hosting provisioning orchestration, support tickets, staff administration, and two-factor authentication.
Architecture
The codebase is organized around four patterns that keep the complexity manageable:
Service layer handles all business logic, from checkout processing to provisioning orchestration. Services coordinate between billing, DNS, and server provisioning to complete multi-step workflows.
State machines manage hosting services and domains through defined lifecycle states — pending, active, suspended, terminated. This ensures consistent transitions and makes troubleshooting straightforward.
Queue-based processing moves long-running operations like provisioning and billing events to background jobs, keeping the frontend responsive.
Policy-based authorization ensures customers only access their own data while staff have appropriate permissions for administrative functions.
Integration with Genesis
Quark orchestrates the customer experience while Genesis handles actual server provisioning. When a customer signs up, Quark processes payment, creates their account, allocates a server, then calls the Genesis API over HMAC-authenticated channels. Provisioning happens asynchronously with callback handling to update status when operations complete.
Key Features
Billing lifecycle: Full subscription management through Recurly — checkout, renewals, upgrades, and dunning. Domain management: Registration and DNS through registrar APIs with automatic configuration and health monitoring. Staff tools: Customer impersonation, support request processing, and billing administration. Health monitoring: Built-in checks for DNS resolution, SSL certificates, and external API connectivity.
The entire codebase uses strict typing, final classes, interface-based architecture for all external integrations, and comprehensive test coverage with intelligent mocking for external services.
Impact
Quark is the foundation of BuiltFast’s customer experience — every signup, every billing event, every support interaction flows through it. The state machine architecture has proven especially valuable for debugging production issues, since every service and domain has a clear, auditable lifecycle.