Patent ID: 7844513

Claim:
An automatic method for operating a service provider that provides hosted internet services for customers operating websites so as to provide dynamic management of hosted services comprising: for each of a plurality of customer accounts which have separately contracted with the service provider to provide hosted services representing a website or similar hosted services unique to a customer account that are accessed over the Internet by a web browser: providing a plurality of servers, wherein the plurality of servers is allocated to a common administrative group for that customer account and further configured to access software and data unique to that customer account to provide hosted services to the Internet for that customer account, and wherein each administrative group represents a website or similar hosted services being provided for that unique customer account that consists of software, including conventional operating-system software, unique to that customer account that is not accessible to servers of the service provider that are allocated outside of that administrative group; automatically monitoring each administrative group; automatically and dynamically reallocating at least one server from a first administrative group for a first customer account to a second administrative group for a second customer account, in response to the automatic monitoring; and at the end of a predetermined time period, billing each customer account based at least in part on at least one attribute related to servers dynamically allocated to that customer account for the predetermined time period.