Quark is a comprehensive hosting business management platform built on Laravel 12 that handles everything customer-facing for our hosting company. I was the lead architect on the project which serves as the frontend for our hosting business, managing customers, billing, provisioning, and support.

What it does

Quark handles all the business-side operations for running a hosting company:

  • Customer registration and account management
  • Product catalog with hosting plans and VPS configurations
  • Subscription billing through Recurly integration
  • Domain registration and DNS management
  • Hosting service provisioning orchestration
  • Customer support ticket system
  • Staff administration and customer impersonation
  • Real-time notifications and health monitoring
  • Two-factor authentication and security features

The system provides both a Vue.js frontend for customers and a comprehensive API for external integrations.

Architecture

The codebase follows Laravel best practices with clear separation of concerns:

Service Layer handles all business logic, from checkout processing to provisioning orchestration. Services coordinate between multiple systems (billing, DNS, server provisioning) to complete complex workflows.

State Machines manage the lifecycle of services and domains through defined states like pending, active, suspended, and terminated. This ensures consistent state transitions and makes troubleshooting easier.

Queue-based Processing handles all long-running operations like provisioning new hosting accounts or processing billing events. This keeps the frontend responsive while complex operations happen in the background.

Policy-based Authorization ensures customers can only access their own data and staff have appropriate permissions for administrative functions.

Technical stack

  • Laravel 12 with PHP 8.3+
  • MySQL for primary data storage
  • Redis for caching, sessions, and queue management
  • Vue.js frontend with TypeScript
  • PestPHP for testing
  • PHPStan for static analysis
  • Recurly for subscription billing
  • PowerDNS for DNS management

Key features

Comprehensive Billing: Full subscription lifecycle management with Recurly integration, including checkout, renewals, upgrades, and dunning management.

Service Orchestration: Coordinates hosting account creation across multiple systems - creates DNS records, allocates servers, provisions accounts via Genesis API, and handles callbacks.

Domain Management: Complete domain registration and management through registrar APIs, with automatic DNS configuration and health monitoring.

Staff Tools: Administrative interface for managing customers, processing support requests, and handling billing issues. Includes secure customer impersonation for troubleshooting.

API-First Design: RESTful API with comprehensive documentation, HMAC authentication for server communication, and webhook processing for external integrations.

Health Monitoring: Built-in health checks for all critical services including DNS resolution, SSL certificates, and external API connectivity.

Development approach

I built this with a focus on reliability and maintainability:

  • Strict typing throughout (declare(strict_types=1))
  • Final classes to prevent inheritance issues
  • Comprehensive testing with unit, integration, and feature tests
  • Interface-based architecture for all external integrations
  • State machines for managing complex business workflows

The application includes intelligent mocking for external services (Recurly, DNS providers) so tests run fast and don’t depend on external APIs.

Integration with Genesis

Quark orchestrates the entire customer experience while Genesis handles the actual server provisioning:

Customer Signup Flow: When customers sign up, Quark processes payment, creates their account, allocates an appropriate server, then calls the Genesis API to provision their hosting account.

HMAC Communication: Secure API communication between Quark and Genesis using rotating HMAC secrets to ensure only authorized provisioning requests are processed.

Asynchronous Processing: Provisioning happens in background jobs with callback handling to update status when operations complete.

Personal role

As a founding team member, I designed and built the core architecture:

  • Created the service layer architecture and billing integration
  • Implemented the checkout flow and subscription management
  • Built the staff administration tools and customer impersonation system
  • Designed the API structure and external integrations
  • Established testing patterns and deployment processes

Quark serves as the customer-facing foundation of our hosting business and demonstrates building complex SaaS applications that integrate billing, provisioning, and support systems while maintaining security and reliability.

Tags: API, Billing, Hosting, Laravel, MySQL, PHP, Redis, SaaS, Testing, Vue.js