Website.me was a free consumer-facing hosting brand from World Wide Web Hosting. Rather than a standalone application, it was built as a white-label brand within Helix — WWWH’s internal billing and hosting platform. Customers signed up through Website.me’s order form and managed their cPanel and WordPress sites through a single sign-on dashboard without ever leaving the Website.me interface.
The core technology was a Rack proxy middleware in Helix that gave customers
transparent access to their backend services. We had a prior implementation
in Synco that served as a starting point, but
rebuilding it as general-purpose Rack middleware for Helix was a different
problem. The middleware intercepted requests on specially-formatted subdomains
(proxy-<resource><id>-<type>.website.me), authenticated the user via
session, resolved the target service, and forwarded the HTTP request to the
actual cPanel or WordPress backend server.
The real challenge was making the proxied experience seamless. Response bodies had to be rewritten on the fly — URLs, cookies, JavaScript, and navigation all needed to resolve within the proxy domain rather than the origin server. WordPress was especially painful: its URLs are deeply embedded in page content, admin JavaScript, and AJAX responses, and getting all of that to work reliably through a rewriting proxy took significant iteration. The middleware also handled SSL termination, gzip/deflate decompression, chunked streaming, and cookie forwarding.
I was the project lead and worked closely with Justin Mazzi on the early implementation. The brand was eventually retired, and the proxy code was later removed from Helix entirely as the platform shifted toward managed WordPress hosting.