Get the offer, not just the interview.

Yes. This is a web hosting administrator role — keeping hosting systems available, performant, and stable, and supporting the applications that run on them. Concretely, I understand it covers:

• Web servers & hosting — IIS on Windows and Nginx/Apache on Linux, plus the Windows Services and Linux daemons that keep applications running.
• Deploying & supporting apps — .NET, Java, and Python applications on server environments.
• Hosting services — DNS, SSL/TLS, SSH, FTP/SFTP, and TCP/IP networking.
• Cloud & orchestration — Azure cloud hosting and Kubernetes environments.
• DevOps & automation — CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, and SSO / identity configuration.
• Operations — monitoring, troubleshooting incidents, and collaborating with developers and the US-based team.

Yes — I understand the work is shift-based and can include night shifts, and I'm fully comfortable with that. I already have 24/7 on-call and incident-response experience, so working in rotation and covering off-hours is normal for me, especially to give proper coverage across the US time zone.

My main motivation is learning and growing. I've built a solid foundation in cloud operations, and I'm looking for a role where I can broaden my skills further — deeper hosting and Windows/IIS work, more Azure and Azure DevOps, and steady exposure to an international, English-speaking team. This role fits that direction well, and I see it as a place where I can keep developing while contributing from day one.

• DNS resolution — browser cache → OS resolver → recursive resolver → root/TLD/authoritative servers → returns the A/AAAA record (IP).
• TCP handshake — client opens a connection to the server on port 80/443.
• TLS handshake (if HTTPS) — certificate is presented and validated, session keys negotiated.
• HTTP request hits the web server (Nginx / Apache / IIS).
• The web server either serves static content or reverse-proxies to the app (Kestrel for .NET, Tomcat/JVM for Java, gunicorn for Python).
• Response returns to the browser.

• Managed: AWS ACM certificate attached to an ALB/CloudFront — auto-renewed, no manual work. Azure App Service Managed Certificates work similarly.
• On the server: Let's Encrypt via certbot — obtains the cert through an HTTP-01 or DNS-01 challenge, installs it into Nginx, and a systemd timer / cron job auto-renews roughly every 60 days.
• Force HTTP → HTTPS redirect, enforce TLS 1.2/1.3, disable weak ciphers.
• Check expiry from the CLI:

$ echo | openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 2>/dev/null \
    | openssl x509 -noout -dates
# notBefore / notAfter tell you the validity window

• Nginx — event-driven, excellent for static content, reverse proxy, load balancing, high concurrency.
• Apache — process/thread-based, very flexible with modules and .htaccess.
• IIS — Windows-native, tight integration with ASP.NET / .NET.
• A reverse proxy sits in front of app servers to terminate TLS, load balance, cache, serve static assets, and hide the backend. I typically run Nginx as a reverse proxy in front of app processes/containers.

General pattern — the principle is the same across stacks:

1. Install the runtime — .NET runtime, JDK/Tomcat, or Python + virtualenv.
2. Run the app as a systemd service so it restarts on failure and starts on boot.
3. Put Nginx in front as a reverse proxy handling TLS and routing to the app's port.
4. Lock down the firewall / security group — expose only 80/443, keep the app port internal.

• .NET on Linux → Kestrel behind Nginx.
• Java → jar/war under Tomcat, or a fat jar as a systemd service.
• Python → gunicorn/uWSGI behind Nginx.

• A (name → IPv4), AAAA (IPv6), CNAME (alias), MX (mail), TXT (SPF/DKIM/verification), NS, SOA.

Work layer by layer:

$ dig app.example.com        # does DNS resolve to the right IP?
$ ping app.example.com       # reachable? (ICMP may be blocked)
$ nc -zv app.example.com 443 # is that port actually open?
$ ss -tlnp                   # is the service listening? (on server)
# then check: security group / firewall rules, app running, logs

Key skill: isolating whether it's DNS vs network vs firewall vs app-down.

• Prefer SSH / SFTP (encrypted, port 22) over plain FTP (port 21, cleartext credentials).
• Harden SSH: key-based auth, disable root login, disable password auth, restrict source IPs via security groups, use a bastion host.
• If FTP is required for a legacy system, use FTPS or SFTP instead of plain FTP.

• Situation: A MyZoi service was intermittently returning 502 errors from the ALB, affecting availability.
• Task: Find the root cause and restore stability without a risky broad rollback.
• Action: I checked the ALB target group health and saw targets flapping unhealthy. I correlated this with pod restarts and traced it to a misconfigured readiness probe — the probe path/timing was wrong, so Kubernetes marked healthy pods as not-ready. The ALB pulled them out and routed requests to terminating pods → 502s. I corrected the readiness probe (path, timeout, and thresholds) and verified targets stayed healthy.
• Result: The 502s were eliminated and deployments became stable.
• Lesson: Health-check and probe configuration is critical for availability behind any load balancer.

1. Scope it — all users or some? Which endpoint? When did it start?
2. Check monitoring — CloudWatch/Datadog dashboards for CPU, memory, latency, error rate.
3. Check logs — web server + application logs.
4. Check upstream — database (I've tuned slow queries via Performance Insights + indexing), external dependencies, connection-pool exhaustion.
5. Check infra — one node vs all, disk full, memory pressure.
6. Correlate with recent deploys — roll back if needed.
7. Communicate status and follow the runbook.

• CPU: top / htop, identify the process, check for a runaway thread or traffic spike.
• Disk: df -h for usage, du -sh * to find large dirs, check log growth → set up log rotation.
• Memory: free -m, check for leaks / OOM in dmesg.

• GitHub Actions builds and tests, then pushes a container image to a registry.
• GitOps with ArgoCD syncs manifests to the cluster (ArgoCD runs helm template and applies the result — declarative, auditable).
• Terraform provisions the infrastructure.
• Benefits: consistency, full audit trail, and fast rollbacks via git revert.
• For simpler hosting I can also do build → artifact → deploy over SSH/rsync → restart the systemd service.

• Bash/Python for backups, health checks, log rotation, and alerting.
• Example: CloudWatch alarm → SNS → Lambda → Slack notification.
• Scheduling via cron / systemd timers, or EventBridge Scheduler + Lambda for cloud-native jobs.

• A container packages an app + its dependencies so it runs the same everywhere — lighter than a VM because it shares the host kernel.
• Kubernetes orchestrates containers: Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress — handling scaling, self-healing, and rolling updates.

• Proactive monitoring + alerting to catch issues early.
• Root-cause analysis on recurring incidents.
• Runbooks so anyone on the team can respond consistently.
• Preventive automation for the fixes.