Patent ID: 8538843

Claim:
A system coupled to the Internet so as to provide dynamic management of hosted services for a plurality of customer accounts comprising: a plurality of servers coupled to a network switch, each server configured to independently load a boot image, including an operating system, upon initialization; at least a first of the plurality of servers allocated to a first administrative group for a first customer account of the plurality of customer accounts, and configured to access a software boot image and data unique to the first customer account; at least a second of the plurality of servers allocated to a second administrative group for a second of the plurality of customer accounts, the server configured to access a software boot image and data unique to the second customer account, and be isolated from the data unique to the first customer account; at least one of the plurality of servers configured to automatically monitor each administrative group, and to automatically and dynamically reallocate at least one active server from the first administrative group for the first of the plurality of customer accounts to the second administrative group for the second of the plurality of customer accounts in response to the automatic monitoring; at least one of the plurality of servers configured to update a connectivity rule in the network switch to allocate the at least one server to the second administrative group for the second of the plurality of customer accounts; and at least one of the plurality of servers configured to, at the end of a predetermined time period, bill each customer account based at least in part on at least one attribute related to servers dynamically allocated to each customer account of the plurality of customer accounts for the predetermined time period.