Building a scalable Control Panel In PHP Question . . .

I've just started work on building a control panel in PHP to manage web hosting services (Apache, Sendmail, Bind, etc.). Considering the security risks involved and possible data corruption if there are several users online attempting to write to a conf file, I'm taking the approach of seperating the user interface from the script that writes to the system. That is, the user only interfaces to the database. Now, I'm trying to figure out how should I take the data from the database, possibly by scanning the database for changes then write it to a file. I'm also taking into consideration of how to scale to Windows 2K. I have a few ideas that sounds good, but could be a problem. Let me explain. . . I was going to code a seperate script that sits on each server at URL under a SSL link which will have to authenticate to get through. This script will capture POST data and returns data accordingly. This allows me to scale to another machine easily by just installing a script. The issue is that if Apache dies, then it needs to send data to a machine, it will cause some issues. Also, if a POST was made to that URL, if it takes a while to return data back, Apache could just time out on the request. So that's probably not a good idea. Another application I reviewed coded up a daemon using PCNTL to control child processes or run interactively. This would be feasible on *NIX machines, but not sure how well it scales to a Windows machine. Maybe recoding the daemon as a service. Is there any other ideas out there would be even better?