Unicorn Proxy

The goal is to replace NGINX as the front-end proxy and create our own proxy layer, not just for ports 80 and 443. In doing so we expand hosting platform's capabilities tenfold.

One IP address / route, which is defined as the "proxy layer" controlling ports 22, 53, 80, 143, 443, 465, 587, and 993. Individual users on the platform no longer need an individual server IP addresses and just connect to dedicated endpoints such as web.myhosting.com, mail/imap/smtp.myhosting.com, and sftp/ftp.myhosting.com and the proxy routes it where it needs to go based on the input i.e. mydomain.com, jane@domain.com, ssh user@sftp.myhosting.com.

Proxy then becomes single point of entry, single point of failure, susceptible to attacks, super sensitive - taking it down means everything is offline. This feature will only benefit end users if the proxy is load balanced, has a failover IP, and has underlying protections such as WAF and DDoS. Some providers can snatch the IP address away. Perhaps this is a new Unicorn version i.e. v2 or an Enterprise product? It requires a heavy rewrite of services and infrastructure.

Eliminates the need for any DNS updates to endpoints and the end user can use CNAMEs to multiple myhosting.com endpoints. When a user migrates / moves data to a new server, DNS does not need to be updated, only the proxy layer does, and this is immediately updated.

• HTTP/HTTPS -> Multiple server routing based on the domain, perhaps not needed at first, but redundancy excels here. End user points their website to a CNAME web.myhosting.com and the proxy does the rest. Apex is only compatible with Heimdall or CNAME flattening.
• IMAP/SMTP -> Send to multiple servers based on the user/domain combo i.e. john@domain.com is on Server 1 and jane@domain.com is on Server 2, noted this is the same domain. User points their email client to imap/mail/smtp.myhosting.com and the proxy does the rest.
• SSH -> Multiple servers based on username. End user types ssh ld89@sftp.myhosting.com and proxy points them to the correct server.