Hostway runs the .pro top-level domain via their wholly-owned subsidiary RegistryPro. If you’ve never heard of domain names ending in .pro, you’re well in the majority on that one. It was intended for use by accredited professionals like doctors or lawyers and priced at a premium. It’s a very complex product that works very differently from other domain name registries, so few companies offered registration and and only a few thousand domains were ever registered.
Despite the unpopularity Hostway had a contract to provide reliable service and I learned a lot about doing so as I maintained RegistryPro. I normalized the database schema, decomposed maintenance tasks, rebuilt unreliable jobs to act idempotently, and grew the backend from a single machine to a cluster. I automated as many jobs and reports as possible and then built monitoring into that automation to eliminate the need for human attention in day-to-day operations. In the fourteen months from April 2005 to June 2006 I removed 110 kloc (43% of the codebase), increased performance and reliability by two orders of magnitude, and similarly reduced support needs from two full-time engineers to about 5 hours a week for one. I can’t say I enjoyed working on RegistryPro, but I learned volumes about engineering services.
In the spring of 2006, when RegistryPro no longer needed the attention of a full-time developer, I worked on a web frontend for an internal application to monitor Hostway’s thousands of globally distributed servers. I learned AJAX and Django to build a website that alerted our sysadmins to downtime in real-time, presented historical outage data, and resolved trouble tickets. I had help with the interface design from Stu Young. Not long after I left Hostway the entire backend team quit and the project was abandoned.
