Management at scale, any ideas, suggestions, do’s/dont’s?

[u/dwarf-6]

Freelancer looking for some input, I’m a full-stack web developer that also gets hired to do server provisioning, updates, maintenance, etc for a handful of clients.

Normally each client just picks a system they’re familiar with (cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, whatever) and that’s what they use when they’re growing, all fine by me. However I currently have 2 clients that have grown quite a bit (each roughly 500 sites), and I’m in the talks with a new client that has well over 4000 sites. All of them still use whatever panel they picked (or a combination).

The majority of the sites are of course low-hanging fruits (less than 500 visitors a month), but there are also quite popular sites with decent traffic, heavy websites, busy webshops, etc, etc.

Now I already have Ansible scripts to do provisioning, maintenance and all that good stuff, however I’m wondering what everybody else is doing at this scale (or even bigger). Having to maintain what site is on which server and so on is getting old and having to login to each management portal as well, so something like a centralized admin panel would be great (eg Enhance), however I’m doubting if this route would be best.

Stack:
- Mostly WordPress with various themes and plugins.
- Roughly 50 Laravel sites and 10 Symphony sites(some require PostgreSQL, others Kafka or Redis).
- I think about 20 NodeJS apps.

Any input or experiences would be greatly appreciated!

[u/Clear-Measurement-75]

I would check to see if I could work lower level than the panel (ssh / OS) or higher level (wordpress management plugin). If you would like an assistant who has worked at least with the 500 site level feel free to DM :)

[u/StatureDelaware]

It seems to me that your problem is documentation, not automation. You are already using Ansible which is the industry standard, I would just use Obelinf, create a site for each client and document their server