Technical architecture of autoSTRADA.
Provenance:
observed— the tenancy and hosting model below was stated by David Brown, 2026-09-06, from direct knowledge of the system. The subdomain pattern and server naming are corroborated by the admin interface. Everything below this level of detail remains undocumented.
Hybrid single/multi-tenant:
The three layers separate cleanly. Code is shared globally, application instances are per-dealer, data is per-dealer.
This shape decides a whole class of dealer questions, and the answers differ sharply depending on which layer the question lands on.
Dealer data is isolated. One dealer's inventory, leads and customers live in a database no other dealer's instance connects to.
Code is shared; activation is per-dealer. A change to the backbone reaches every dealer. New functionality is normally built as a module on the backbone, then activated through local configuration on the instances of clients who want it or have paid for it. The codebase does not fork.
That is the answer to "can you build a custom feature just for us": yes, and it does not put the dealer on a private branch of anything. What they get is a module the backbone now carries, switched on for them. Their instance goes on receiving backbone updates like every other instance.
Modules are therefore both the unit of development and the unit of sale. The module list is not merely a feature inventory — it is the shape in which functionality is built, priced and delivered.
Configuration is per-instance. Settings and diagnostics live in that instance's Command Center.
A server outage is multi-dealer but not all-dealer. Blast radius is one server's worth of instances.
Internal. Not a dealer-facing concept — see the note below.
An overlay is non-backbone code placed on one client site: a dealer-specific version of a file that takes precedence over the backbone copy for that instance. It is the exception to the model above, it is uncommon, and it is considered bad form.
The failure mode is a quiet one. A later backbone update revises a file that an instance has overlaid, the overlay keeps winning, and that instance silently stops receiving changes to it. Nothing breaks at the moment of divergence, which is what makes it expensive to find later.
Do not raise overlays with a dealer. This is internal jargon, and the dealer-facing answer to custom functionality is the module above. Mentioning that per-dealer code overrides exist invites requests for something that is rare by design and discouraged in practice.
Terminology collision. Overlay also names an unrelated customer-facing feature — the graphic applied over vehicle images for specials, which appears in the admin as
Dashboard › Inventory Overlayand as bare Overlay in the Dashboard dropdown. That is what a dealer means by the word. See the Glossary.
Dealer sites are served from subdomains of vehiclesnetwork.com. Observed: nissan.vehiclesnetwork.com.
Servers are named after car manufacturers and celestial objects.
That describes the servers that exist. It is not a rule for generating server names and must not be used to guess one. A confident, wrong server name in a support conversation is worse than an admitted gap — the same failure that produced the invented product name in D-4.
The dealer's own dashboard displays which server their instance runs on, so this is dealer-visible information rather than internal-only.
Hosting carries its own billing term, shown in the dashboard sidebar; observed value Month to Month. Whether hosting is bundled into the tier price or billed as a separate line is not established.