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eAPPS upDATE July 2010 Newsletter

eApps Staff — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:01:29 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter

July 2010

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: eApps Cloud service! Beta program users wanted!

More News: dotDefender protection now available!

Even More News: Plesk 9.5 now available!

Promotion : FREE dotDefender service!

Meet eApps: Blake, Customer Service Representative and Marketing Specialist

Updated/New Applications: Updates: Drupal 5 and 6, SquirrelMail, Ant, PHP, OpenVPN, Tomcat 5, Java 6, Mod_jk, ClamAV

Article: Cloud Computing – A Primer

Tech Tip: Using dig command to check your DNS

News: eApps Cloud Service! Beta program users wanted!

We are pleased to announce the upcoming launch of our state of the art Cloud hosting service, featuring superior technology provided by cloud.com. Cloud hosting is a new computing paradigm, offering customers significant control of their computing resources in a state of the art environment designed for extremely high performance and reliability. For more information on Cloud computing, please read the featured article, Cloud Computing – A Primer, below.

We are inviting eApps Hosting customers to try out the upcoming service at no charge during the Beta testing period. The requirements for participation in the Beta program are as follows:

be a current customer in good standing
be willing to provide timely feedback on your use of the cloud environment

To apply for the program, please send an email to sales@eapps.com with the subject “eApps Cloud Beta.” We expect to launch the program within the next few weeks. PLEASE NOTE that there are a limited number of applicants being accepted into the Beta program. We will do our best to accommodate all applicants but are limited by the capacity of the environment being configured for the Beta program.

More News: dotDefender protection service now available!

dotDefender, from Applicure Technologies, is a web security monitoring and firewall solution that helps detect and prevent hacking attempts through the use of Session Protection, Pattern Recognition, a Signature Knowledgebase, Data Leakage Protection (DLP), and Upload Inspection. eApps has chosen to offer dotDefender due to its ease of use, effectiveness and high industry adoption rate.

dotDefender runs in two modes, Monitor and Active Protection. Monitor mode will alert you whenever hack attempts are made against your VPS. There is NO MONTHLY FEE to run dotDefender in Monitor Mode. If you prefer to further protect your web resources, you can upgrade from the free dotDefender Monitor mode and request that dotDefender be enabled as a Web Application Firewall (WAF) in Active Protection mode. This powerful active protection can be deployed at a low cost, starting at $21 a month for VPS subscriptions. For more information contact sales@eapps.com.

Even More News: Plesk 9.5 now available!

Plesk 9.5 is the latest version Control Panel for Resellers from Parallels. This version has many exciting new features, including the following:

Billing Module – full featured module for billing and payment processing
Website Builder module – your customers can quickly create a web presence
Improved interface – faster and more intuitive navigation
User management – significant improvements for user access control
Resource Management – better control of resources for users
Postfix mail server – replaced Qmail server

Please read our News release for more information.

Promotion: FREE dotDefender service!

The eApps dotDefender service runs in two modes, Monitor and Active Protection. There is no monthly fee for Monitor mode and a low monthly fee of $21 for Active Protection mode. For both modes there is a one time setup fee of $20. You can upgrade from Monitor mode to Active Protection mode at any time without incurring an additional setup fee.

Through August 31, 2010, we are offering two promotions as follows:

1) Monitor mode promotion – Waiver of setup fee for Monitor mode

2) Active Protection mode promotion – One month free for Active Protection mode (includes waiver of setup fee also)

To take advantage of these outstanding promotions, please send an eMail to sales@eapps.com and specify which promotion you would like to choose. Note: If you start with the Monitor mode promotion, you can also take advantage of the Active Protection mode promotion through August 31, 2010.

Meet eApps: Blake, Customer Service Representative and Marketing Specialist

Blake was born in Montgomery, the capitol of Alabama and home to many Civil Rights leaders including Rosa Parks. After graduating high school, Blake moved to the middle of America to attend the University of Kansas. In addition to being the home of the state’s flagship university, Lawrence, Kansas is also a town with a rich history including Bleeding Kansas and college basketball.

Blake brings a fresh perspective to a technically heavy industry with experience in customer service and data research and analysis. Blake enjoys wearing multiple hats working as a Marketing Specialist and a member of the Customer Service/Billing team. She likes coming to work each day knowing there will be customers she can help and problems she can help resolve. eApps is a great place to work because the employees are all so unique and each brings something valuable to our company.

When Blake isn’t working, she enjoys cooking, live music, anything outdoors and playing with her puppy, Godzilla. Also, as an avid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks, she enjoys following sports, especially college basketball.

Updated/New Applications:

Updated versions of the following applications are now available, all for
CentOS 5 plans:

Drupal 5.22
Drupal 6.16
SquirrelMail 1.4.20
Ant 1.8.0
PHP 5.2.13
OpenVPN 2.1.1
ClamAV 0.96
Tomcat 5.5.29
Dkim 2.8.3
Java 1.6
Mod_jk 1.2.30

If you are interested in moving to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Article: Cloud Computing – A Primer

By now, nearly everyone has heard of the term Cloud Computing. In fact there is such a buzz about it, that many hosting companies are claiming that they offer Cloud hosting, even when nothing has changed in their offering. This article is a short primer on Cloud Computing to help you cut through the clutter.

What is true Cloud Computing? – It is generally agreed that Cloud Computing must have the following characteristics:

On demand, self service – users must be able to quickly and automatically create and deploy computing resources without waiting for approvals, order processing, or manual provisioning
Broad network access – the cloud computing resources must be fully enabled to interact with the Internet and private networks
Resource pooling – the environment must support the sharing and pooling of resources to allow for optimal usage
Rapid elasticity – the environment must allow for increasing and reducing the capacity of computing resources quickly to handle changes in demand
Measured service – computing resources are billed based on usage (utility billing), allowing for optimal matching of computing power to demand

Why should you care? – A true Cloud Computing environment puts the power where it belongs, with you. Users have the freedom and control to construct the optimal set of computing resources to meet their unique needs. These resources can be scaled vertically or horizontally (load balancing). Also, a true cloud computing environment employs advanced technologies for shared data storage and server management as a pool of computing power, allowing for a much higher degree of up-time, performance and reliability than the conventional single server computing paradigm. An API is also available which provides an automated means for customers to manage and control their cloud.

What does it cost? – Cloud computing requires the latest, greatest mass storage systems for data, high capacity network devices and servers, advanced software tools, and highly trained technicians. For this reason, the underlying cost structure is higher than prior approaches. However, a large portion of these higher infrastructure costs are offset by the fact that the cloud environment requires less technical and administrative labor to operate. In addition, customers can increase or decrease capacity as needed, so are less likely to have to pay for excess idle capacity. Cloud Computing offers significant efficiencies and benefits to the hosting provider and the customer. The bottom line is that Cloud hosting can be offered at little or no price premium, depending on the usage profile of the customer.

Tech Tip: Using dig command to check your DNS

In our previous newsletter we offered a tip on Using Apache mod_status – real time detailed access and resource stats for your web server. This month we offer the following tip:

Using dig command to check your DNS and reverse DNS

dig is a command line tool for querying DNS servers for information about a domain. This tech tip shows how to check the DNS settings and reverse DNS for your domain from the command line of your VPS. Understanding how to check your DNS settings can be useful in troubleshooting connection problems to your VPS or sites.

First, connect to your VPS using SSH. See the SSH User Guide (http://support.eapps.com/hsp/ssh) for more information if needed. Once connected, run the following command to see the existing DNS settings for your domain or domains (this example uses the site of eapps-example.com, please substitute as required).

dig domain.com

This command shows the following result. The important sections are the QUESTION SECTION, ANSWER SECTION and AUTHORITY SECTION.

QUESTION SECTION – shows the domain that was queried

ANSWER SECTION – shows the DNS A record for this domain, which is the IP address of the domain. If nothing is reported for the A record, then DNS does not find a valid IP address for your domain.

AUTHORITY SECTION – these are the name servers that were queried to provide this result. If you are using eApps DNS, these should be the eApps name servers, as listed below. If you are not using eApps DNS, these will be your custom name servers. If you are expecting to see the eApps name servers, but see other name servers instead, then this could be a problem with your DNS or domain registration.

[root@eapps-example ~]# dig eapps-example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> eapps-example.com

;; global options: printcmd

;; Got answer:

;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 63410

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;eapps-example.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

eapps-example.com. 350 IN A 69.89.6.54

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:

eapps-example.com. 350 IN NS ns6.eapps.com.

eapps-example.com. 350 IN NS ns1.eapps.com.

eapps-example.com. 350 IN NS ns2.eapps.com.

eapps-example.com. 350 IN NS ns5.eapps.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

ns1.eapps.com. 497 IN A 216.154.208.2

ns2.eapps.com. 258 IN A 64.57.252.2

ns5.eapps.com. 377 IN A 67.23.10.164

ns6.eapps.com. 317 IN A 67.23.5.74

;; Query time: 0 msec

;; SERVER: 216.154.208.4#53(216.154.208.4)

;; WHEN: Wed Jun 16 09:55:45 2010

;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 193

To check the Reverse DNS, use the following command:

dig -x IP_ADDRESS

To find the IP address of your VPS, log in to the Control Panel, System tab, Server Info – the IP address is listed there. You can also ping the domain name to find the IP address.

[root@eapps-example ~]# dig -x 69.89.6.54

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> -x 69.89.6.54

;; global options: printcmd

;; Got answer:

;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 33049

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 10, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;54.6.89.69.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:

54.6.89.69.in-addr.arpa. 600 IN PTR eapps-example.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:

6.89.69.in-addr.arpa. 1037 IN NS ns2.eapps.com.

6.89.69.in-addr.arpa. 1037 IN NS ns1.eapps.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

ns1.eapps.com. 473 IN A 216.154.208.2

ns2.eapps.com. 237 IN A 64.57.252.2

;; Query time: 679 msec

;; SERVER: 216.154.208.4#53(216.154.208.4)

;; WHEN: Wed Jun 16 10:06:10 2010

;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 372

Again, the important sections are QUESTION, ANSWER and AUTHORITY. In this case, the ANSWER SECTION shows that the IP address of 69.89.6.54 maps back to the domain name of eapps-example.com.

Many other service providers, such as AOL and Yahoo! use the reverse DNS to verify that a domain is legitimate. Domains without a reverse DNS can find that their e-mails sent to organizations like AOL and Yahoo! will be rejected.

If you do not have a correct reverse DNS entry, please contact eApps Support (support@eapps.com), and we will create a reverse DNS for you. If you do not use eApps DNS, you will need to contact your DNS provider to set the reverse DNS for you.

Follow us on Twitter!

@eapps for news, updates, and exclusive offers

@eapps_status for eapps network status

Click Here for info about Free Trial of iContact, used to generate this Newsletter!

eAPPS upDATE April, 2010 Newsletter

eApps Staff — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:31:11 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
April 2010

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: SEO and Internet Marketing Assistance

Promotion: Credit for Social Networking Mentions
Best Post Winner : Community Forum Monthly Best Post Winner!

Webinar: Enterprise Email featuring Zimbra, with Mobile Support and Email Archiving

Updated/New Applications: Updates: MySQL, Tomcat 6, Subversion, mod_rails, Proftpd, Zend Framework, git, Liferay Portal, Java 5, Java 6

Article: The Virtual Company

Tech Tip: Using Apache mod_status

News: SEO and Internet Marketing Assistance

In a down economy, promoting your web site is more important than ever. eApps Hosting is pleased to introduce to customers an SEO and Internet Marketing service that will help you maximize your Internet presence and put you on the fast track to increased revenues. This service is offered in association with SEM Media, experts in Internet marketing and promotion. Best of all, SEM Media has an exclusive FREE OFFER for all eApps Hosting customers. Under this offer SEM Media will review your existing site or new site plans and provide valuable recommendations. In the event that you engage SEM Media to assist you, as an eApps Hosting customer you get 10% OFF all services. For more information, please read our blog article about this exciting FREE OFFER!

Promotion: Credits for Social Networking Mentions

eApps customers say the nicest things. We track social networking mentions about our company as part of our efforts to understand our customer’s needs and to gain valuable feedback about our service offering. No one is perfect and we are working hard to improve areas where we need to do better. But we see a lot of positive comments out there and just want to say thank you. It really means a lot to get positive recognition.

Our Marketing department has come up with a promotion that shows the true meaning of thanks, by posting credits to your account! That’s right, you can get credits to your account, up to $20 per month, by making positive posts about eApps Hosting on social networks. For more information, visit our blog article.

Best Post Winner:

Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum
and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected contributor(s)! The winner for the April newsletter is . . .

[How To] enable the core dump when you want to debug your application – victorwon

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question,
offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50 credit in May!

Webinar: Enterprise Email featuring Zimbra, with Mobile Support and Email Archiving

The Exchange/Outlook compatible eApps Enterprise Email service is one of the fastest growing services that we have launched. The service unleashes the full power of your mobile device through over-the-air synchronization of Email, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks between your hand-held and desktop.

For more information about Zimbra, check out this short, informative video tour. You can also sign up for an informative 30 minute Enterprise Email Webinar on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 10AM Eastern or 3PM Eastern (GMT-5).

Updated/New Applications:

Updated
versions of the following applications are now available, all for CentOS 5 plans:

Mysql 5.1.45
MySQL Connector J 5.1.12-1
Tomcat 6.0.26
Subversion 1.6.9
mod_rails 2.2.11
Proftpd 1.3.3
Zend Framework 1.10.2
git 1.7.0.2
Liferay-GlassFish 5.2.3
Java 5.0 Update 22
Jave 6.0 Update 18

If you are interested in moving to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Article: The Virtual Company

Nearly everyone is used to working in a virtual world, but what would it mean for a company to actually close down their physical office and go totally virtual? The transition from doing some work on-line to doing nearly all work on-line is a big one. To more accurately report on what going virtual really means, Inc magazine tackled this topic in a powerful way; they temporarily converted their company into a totally virtual company.

The April 1, 2010 article "The Case, and the Plan, for the Virtual Company" by Max Chafkin offers valuable insight into the challenges and benefits of going virtual. The article discusses the economic, legal, technical, operational, and more importantly inter-personal aspects of having a virtual company.

At the end of the experiment, Inc concluded that indeed significant savings can be gained by going virtual and that the company’s business objectives could be met successfully. Some employees that were dead set against it actually changed their mind and some that were initially pro-virtual conceded that there were negatives they had not anticipated. If you are considering making your company more virtual I strongly suggest that you read this article. It will provide insight and tips to help your company be more successful as a virtual organization.

Tech Tip: Using Apache mod_status

In our previous newsletter we offered tips on How to upgrade your application versions and How to setup a Subversion mirror. This month we offer the following tip:

Using Apache mod_status – real time detailed access and resource stats
for your web server

mod_status provides useful information about the operation of your Apache web server. Use the following instructions to configure mod_status

Go into the command line (https://support.eapps.com/hsp/ssh) and
copy the following lines then paste them at the command prompt:

cat > /etc/httpd/conf.d/mod_status.conf < ExtendedStatus On

     SetHandler server-status
     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "Web Server Stats"
     AuthUserFile /home/webadmin/.modstatus.passwd
     Require valid-user

EOF
touch /home/webadmin/.modstatus.passwd

Now use htpasswd to configure a user name and a password to
access your server and then restart the apache web server using the following commands.

htpasswd -m /home/webadmin/.modstatus.passwd yourusernamehere
service httpd restart

At this point you’re ready to access your server stats at

http://yoursitename.com/server-status?refresh=5

If you’re using mod_jk or mod_proxy for the site "yoursitename.com" please check our user guides to learn how to configure your web site not to redirect to Tomcat/Jboss/Glassfish some specific URLs.

Notes:

The apache mod_status works without having a password set on the URL as well. However, we strongly recommend that you secure your server stats URL because it may reveal session IDs and possibly other data encoded in an URL that may be used by a potential attacker;
Apache mod_status is part of the Apache core, so you don’t need to install any additional application;
Apache mod_status will not store any statistics, it will display only the current stats. We recommend awstats for creating and storing web site access statistics: https://support.eapps.com/hsp/awstats.

Follow us on Twitter!

@eapps for news, updates, and exclusive offers

@eapps_status for eapps network status

Click Here for info about Free Trial of iContact, used to generate this Newsletter!

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter – March 2010

eApps Staff — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:09:26 +0000

eAPPS upDATE January, 2010 Newsletter

eApps Staff — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:38:13 +0000

eAPPS upDATE NewsletterJanuary 2010 – Happy New Year!

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: New eapps.com site launched!

More News: eApps BlackBerry Service in Beta mode

Promotion: Free Trial for Email Archive Service

Best Post Winner : Community Forum Monthly Best Post Winner!

Webinar: Enterprise Email featuring Zimbra, with Mobile Support and Email Archiving

Updated/New Applications: Updates: Joomla, Zend Framework, Proftpd, Java 1.6; New: GlassFish v3

Article: 9 Businesses You can Start in Your Pajamas in 2010, by Inc.com

Tech Tip: Preventing security vulnerabilities in your application

News: New eapps.com site launched!

On Monday, January 4 we launched a new web site. The new eapps.com has a fresh look and makes it easier for visitors to find information about our company and services. Some of the many key improvements are:

Services and Products – a complete list of products and services offered and supported can be found in the Services menu
Supported Applications – a complete list of the available and supported applications, with versions, can be found on the Applications Index page
News and Articles – an integrated blog, using WordPress, allows us to quickly publish useful and relevant information for you
Details on Plans and Services – our new Plan Comparison Tool provides a powerful and easy way to analyze and compare details of our hosting plans

We hope you can take a few minutes to browse the new eapps.com. We welcome any feedback you have at sales@eapps.com. We are pleased to give a hat tip to MoiaGroup, a long time eApps customer that provided extensive site design and graphics development services on the project.

More News: eApps Blackberry BES service in Beta mode

In the last issue of eAPPS upDATE we announced our acceptance into RIM’s BlackBerry Alliance Program. We are pleased to announce that we have now launched our BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) service for users of our Enterprise Email service.

The BES add-on service automatically encrypts email messages sent to and received from other users running on the world-wide BES network and allows for over-the-air synchronization of email, calendar, contacts, and tasks between the mobile user’s hand-held BlackBerry device and desktop. The service is running as a Beta program initially, and has active customers using the service successfully. There is no cost for the BES add-on service during the Beta phase. For information about the service, or to request participation, please contact sales@eapps.com.

Promotion: Free trial for eApps Email archive service

The eApps Enterprise Email service has an add-on feature for archiving all inbound and outbound messages. The service is very flexible. Archiving can be activated selectively for one or more Email users and provides several options for the storage location of the archived messages. The add-on is priced at $1.95 per user per month.From now until the end of February, current and new users of the eApps Enterprise Email service can add the Archiving feature for any or all Email users at no cost. Users of the add-on Archive service would not be billed until April 1! To take advantage of this exciting offer, contact sales@eapps.com.

Best Post Winner:Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected contributor(s)! The winner for the January newsletter is . . .

Override /icons per host – tudaen

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question, offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50 credit in February!

Webinar: Enterprise Email featuring Zimbra, with Mobile Support and Email Archiving

For more information about Zimbra, check out this short, informative video tour. You can also sign up for an informative 30 minute Enterprise Email Webinar on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10AM Eastern or 3PM Eastern (GMT-5).

Updated/New Applications:Updated
versions of the following applications are now available, all for
CentOS 5 plans:

Joomla 1.5.15
Zend Framework 1.9.6
Proftpd 1.3.2
Java 1.6.0_17

New application, for all CentOS 5 plans: GlassFish v3 (major new version!)

If you are interested in moving to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Article: 9 Businesses You Can Start in Your Pajamas in 2010, by Inc.com

Inc provides a magazine and web site devoted to helping business owners start, operate and grow their businesses more successfully. Throughout the current recession, Inc has increased its emphasis on delivering advice, tools, and services for entrepreneurial start-ups. These resources have been useful for many people in their efforts to recover from a job loss or improve the ability to ensure that their new business succeeds in a challenging economy.

An article on Inc.com titled “9 Businesses You Can Start In Your Pajamas” takes a look at nine real life start-ups of home-based businesses in hot industries. The examples cover a wide range of disciplines including consulting, franchising, clothing manufacturing, marketing, personal fitness, travel and more.

Check it out!

Tech Tip: Preventing security vulnerabilities in your application

In our previous newsletter we offered a tip on Tuning Apache’s MaxClient setting . This month we offer the following tip.

Preventing security vulnerabilities in your application

When we started offering Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting services back in 2003, we knew one of the key advantages was the power and control our customers would have. A true VPS of course, means providing root access. Of course, “with great power comes great responsibility.” One of the first things we did was ensure that all passwords pass the cracklib test. This single measure dramatically reduced the incidence of passwords being compromised. We also formulated important processes and policies which are recapped as follows:

eApps will implement state of the art systems to aid in the detection of, and protection against, threats
eApps will strive to provide secure versions of all applications that we offer and support
Customers will ultimately assume responsibility for the security of applications that they build or upload
eApps will reserve the right to take action as appropriate, based on severity and risk, to deal with any breach in a customer’s application

Security breaches are serious. Even though we do everything we can to prevent and protect the thousands of servers running on our network, we expect our customers to be our partner in helping to combat this threat. To help you, our customer, better manage your responsibility to be a “good citizen” of the eApps network, here are some tips.

Use Secure Coding Practices – resources abound on the web. Search for “secure coding practices” for relevant information
Verify that your app is secure – for third party applications, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures organization provides resources and a link to the US Government National Vulnerabilities Database
Follow your app provider – each application provider has information on vulnerabilities via their web site or community. In many cases you can subscribe to a notification service that will alert you when vulnerabilities are discovered.

Follow us on Twitter!

@eapps for news, updates, and exclusive offers

@eapps_status for eapps network status

Click Here for info about Free Trial of iContact, used to generate this Newsletter!

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter for December 2009

eApps Staff — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:39:13 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
December 2009 – Happy Holidays!!!

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: eApps Accepted into BlackBerry Alliance Program

More
News: eApps IPSec Compatible VPN Service in Beta testing

Promotions: How to take advantage of eApps offers
Best Post Winner : Community
Forum Monthly Best Post Winner!

Meet eApps: Marc Lucke

Updated/New
Applications: Updates: git, Java 5, Django, httpd, OpenLDAP, WordPress, MySQL, Liferay; New: Groovy & Grails

Article: Tinkering – Economic Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Tech
Tip: Tuning Apache’s MaxClient setting

News: eApps accepted into BlackBerry Alliance Program

In our October newsletter we announced the launch of our Enterprise Email service, featuring Zimbra. This new service has been so successful that we accelerated our plans to offer the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) add-on service for Zimbra. BES is required for BlackBerry users to get full over the air synchronization of mail, calendar, contacts and tasks to their mobile device.

Rim, the maker of BlackBerry devices, requires that service providers that offer BES services must be accepted into the BlackBerry Alliance program. We are pleased to report that we have been accepted into the program and are well on our way to launching this exciting add-on service for BlackBerry users.

At this time we are testing our BES service and will announce our launch soon. Once we complete the launch, eApps will have one of the most powerful, complete, and cost-effective Enterprise Email services you can find.

More News: eApps IPSec Compatible VPN Service in Beta testing

Exciting things are always happening at eApps. At this time we are in the Beta testing phase of our new Enterprise grade Virtual Private Network (VPN) service with several customers. This cost effective service uses Vyatta in a Xen VPS container to provide an IPSec compatible VPN. It provides the same functionality as a hardware based VPN at a fraction of the cost. The VPN service can be configured in two modes at this time, with additional features to come later.

Peer to Peer – This mode establishes a VPN tunnel between your eApps Hosting service and a remote gateway. The configuration is generally used to invoke a server to server VPN for secure transfer of data from the eApps network to a remote network.
Remote Client – The Remote Client mode creates a VPN tunnel between multiple remote users and the eApps network. Generally this configuration is used to secure a private application service for a group of users.

For more information on the cost effective eApps IPSec compatible VPN service, contact sales@eapps.com.

Promotion: How to take advantage of eApps offers

We reported in previous newsletters that all special offers and promotions will be announced using Twitter. But what if you don’t use Twitter? Good News! You don’t have to use Twitter to receive info about eApps offers. All you have to do is set up a Twitter alert and an Email will be sent to you whenever we tweet about a new offer. Here is how it is done using tweetbeep. Other alerts services are available as well.

Go to http://twitter.com and signup up for a Twitter account.

Now go to http://tweetbeep.com and signup for a TweetBeep account.

Your TweetBeep account will allow you to create Email Alerts.

Click on "New Keyword Alert"
Type in the Name of your Alert and set the Frequency to: Every Day
Enter in the box next to "This hashtag" the following text: #eappscust
Click Save Alert button

Now you will receive an Email whenever there is a special offer for eApps Customers!

Best Post Winner:

Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum
and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected
contributor(s)! The winner for the November newsletter is .
. .

ssh’ing outside a proxy-restricted network – tudaen

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question,
offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50
credit in December!

Meet eApps: Marc Lucke

Marc is a new member of our technical support department. He was born in Rendsburg, Germany but his family moved to Australia when he was only 18 months old. He gravitated to technology and attended a technical college in Crows Nest, NSW. Marc also enhanced his technical knowledge through on-line training with Skillport. The truth is, most of Marc’s considerable technical knowledge was gained through hands-on activities. Marc was working for a small ISP in 1999 when he stumbled upon Redhat Linux. His Linux love affair grew from there, as he explored various flavors of Linux and expanded his attention to include web development and the Internet.

Marc has recently become a father. His second child, Madailéin, was named in honour of his wife’s Irish heritage. In addition to the joy that Maddie has brought into the lives of Marc and his wife, they are pleased to report that they have hit the "baby jackpot" because she is a great sleeper and leaves them both rested each day. When Marc isn’t working he enjoys science fiction. He doesn’t go as far as wearing a Klingon costume, but enjoys reading publications and watching videos. He is also a computer tinkerer, and enjoys exploring computer technology on his home network.

The best thing about working for eApps Hosting, according to Marc, is the opportunity to work with both people and technology. Marc enjoys interacting with people and addressing the technical challenges eApps customers face. Looking to the future, he enjoys being part of a team that delivers effective solutions in the ever changing technical arena. Please give Marc a big "G’day Mate" when you have a chance.

Updated/New
Applications:

Updated
versions of the following applications are now available, all for
CentOS 5 plans:

git 1.6.5.2
Java 5 Update 21
Django 1.1.1
httpd 2.2.14
OpenLDAP 2.4.19
WordPress 2.8.5
MySQL 5.1.40
Liferay w/ GlassFish 5.2.3

New application, for all CentOS 5 plans: Groovy & Grails 1.6/1.1.2

If
you are interested in moving
to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Article: Tinkering – Economic Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Justin Lahart, in his November 12, 2009 Wall Street Journal
article titled “Tinkering Makes Comeback Amid Crisis,” the author
reports on a very interesting and positive trend. In 2008 US
universities graduated nearly 40% more mechanical engineers than
computer engineers, continuing a trend since 2006. Lahart reports
that there is more to this trend than meets the eye. Many of the
students pursuing mechanical engineering are actively engaged in
hands on work that is very much like the lab work performed by the
great pioneers of invention a century ago.

Workshops, called “hackerspaces” are sprouting up all over the
US where budding inventors share resources, equipment, and ideas as
they strive to create new things, or even the “next new thing.”
Lahart believes that there are several factors behind this growing
trend, a principal one being the recession. Students are looking to
get an edge to start their career, and feel that producing something
is more meaningful than simply getting an A on a test. Another factor
is the decrease in cost of the equipment and technologies required to
engage in modern day tinkering. The cost of some equipment has fallen
by a factor of 10 in the past few years, making it easier for
students to become a player.

Professors stated to the author that there is a high level of
enthusiasm by the students. One professor noted that a group of
students decided to stay and work in the lab instead of going home on
break. The experience also goes beyond learning and career
development, as many of the inventors have created commercially
viable products including bike sprockets, robots, wheelchairs, a LED
system to create lighting effects for film, and more.

The movement even has a publication, called “Make” that has
seen subscriptions increase from 22,000 to over 100,000 in the last
four years, and an annual conference called “Maker Faire” in San
Mateo, California that had over 75,000 attendees in 2009.

In the midst of constant bad news, it is refreshing and inspiring
to see young people engaged in this creative process. Perhaps the
next Edison or Bell is tinkering away now.

Tech
Tip: Tuning Apache’s MaxClient setting

In our previous
newsletter we
offered a tip on Optimizing PostgreSQL Database Performance. This month we
offer the following tip.

Apache’s MaxClient setting: Tuning the web server on your VPS

The “Managing your websites with the Apache web server” user guide available on https://support.eapps.com/hsp/apache/ provides useful information on Apache and how to configure it. Before estimating and setting the best MaxClients setting for your VPS, reviewing this guide is recommended.

The whole idea is actually pretty simple. Determine how much free RAM your VPS has (1) and then the average RAM each httpd (Apache) process requires (2), and then divide (1) by (2) to determine a good idea of the optimal MaxClient setting.

Let’s consider an example.

Test your most demanding web application for a while – Joomla or webmail perhaps (not including Tomcat, JBoss or Glassfish).
Login to the VPS using SSH (https://support.eapps.com/hsp/ssh). Then use the command “top -b -c -n 1" to determine the average RAM requirements of each httpd process. For argument’s sake, let’s say each one uses 20MB. (Use the “RES” figure in top. Although theoretically this figure does not include RAM which may be shared, this does add a fudge factor for safety, particularly in low memory environments).
Stop Apache (from the command line “service httpd stop”). Type “free –m”. Determine the free memory. In this example we will say that there is 310MB free and I want to leave about 20MB available even when Apache is running at maximum, so I will say that I can use 290MB for Apache. (you can start Apache again using “service httpd start”)
In our example we thus have 290MB / 20MB = 14 (rounding down) which gives us a MaxClients setting of 14.

Finishing the configuration, ServerLimit should be set to equal MaxClients, MaxSpareServers < MaxClients etc. Generally these settings can be safely left alone and then tuned higher as desired.

By using “free -m” and “top -c” you can monitor how it goes and adjust these settings to maximize your web server’s performance whilst ensuring that the VPS does not run out of RAM.

It is better to over estimate how much the httpd process takes and to err on lower settings for MaxClients to leave some free RAM in your VPS for other tasks that may run, such as cron jobs. Note that it is undesirable that the VPS runs out of RAM as the process requesting more RAM than the VPS has left to give will be killed (which may include Apache!).

For further reading a great place to begin after our user guide is http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/misc/perf-tuning.html

Follow us on Twitter!

@eapps for news, updates, and exclusive offers

@eapps_status for eapps network status

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eAPPS upDATE Newsletter for October 2009

eApps Staff — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:01:49 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
October 2009

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: Enterprise Email Service Re-Launched!

More
News: Resource Notification System Roll-out
Under Way

Promotions: Revamped eApps Referral Program!
Best Post Winner : Community
Forum Monthly Best Post Winner!

Meet eApps: Mick Pollard

Updated/New
Applications: Updates: Drupal, Zend Framework, MySQL, MySQL J Connector

Article: stackoverflow.com, the place for programmer Q&A

Tech
Tip: Optimizing PostgreSQL Database Performance

News: Enterprise Email Service Re-Launched!

In August we announced the launch of
Enterprise Email services featuring a leading Linux based Exchange
compatible Email server called Scalix. By Enterprise Email service we
refer to a mail service that has full calendar sharing and
collaboration, is compatible with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and
provides full mobile device support. We used Scalix for three months
prior to the launch with pretty good results. However, after the
launch we got some feedback that led us to look at another competing
product called Zimbra. The closer we looked at Zimbra the more we
liked it. Not only does Zimbra offer a far richer user experience, it
can be offered to our customers at significantly less cost. The base
price is lower and full mobile support is included at no extra charge.

Zimbra clearly delivers a preferable solution. So we did the right
thing and changed our service over to Zimbra. We even converted to it
ourselves for eapps.com. To make up for this detour we are now
“making you an offer that you can’t refuse.” Sign up any time
from now until the end of October and you will receive FREE
Enterprise Email service for the rest of the year for up to 100 mail
users. That is correct, there will be no billing until after the
first of the new year. We also provide migration assistance at no
extra charge. If you have more than 100 mail users, please contact
sales@eapps.com for approval.

If you have any interest in Enterprise
Email including full mobile device support, then we strongly urge you
to take a look at Zimbra. Don’t take our word for it, check out this
short, powerful video.

http://www.zimbra.com/demos/zimbra_tour/

To take advantage of the offer, or for more info, contact sales@eapps.com. There is no penalty for cancellation and you
will not be billed until January 1, 2010.

You can also sign up for an informative 30 minute Webinar on Tuesday, October 13 at 10AM Eastern or 3PM Eastern.

More News: Resource Notification System Roll-out Under Way:

Earlier this year we announced the
launch of a new system that would alert customers when they were
close to the limits of resource allowances. We are pleased to report
that the roll-out of this new system is underway. The system has
been deployed for Premier plans and is operational. The system will
be activated for Advanced plans within the next 2-3 weeks, with
Standard, Dedicated, Plesk, and cPanel plans a few weeks after that.

This new system is designed to alert
customers pro-actively by Email when their usage of resources is
close to exceeding a threshold for disk space, memory, CPU, data
transfer rate, and pro-rata data transfer. The report runs daily and
only notifies those customers when they exceed one or more of the
allocated resources during the prior 24 hour period.

Promotion: Revamped eApps Referral Program

Did you know that you can earn money by referring customers to eApps Hosting? With our revamped Referral Program it’s even easier to cash in with three easy steps.

Apply for the program by filling out this form.
Give your eApps provided special URL to any customer you want to refer.
Sit back and watch the referral credits grow in your eApps account.

The credits can be used to pay your eApps Hosting fees, or you can request payment from eApps Hosting. Contact sales@eapps.com for more information.

Best Post Winners:

Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum
and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected
contributor(s)! The winner for the October newsletter is .
. .

Groovy/Grails – heffel

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question,
offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50
credit in November!

Meet eApps: Mick Pollard

Mick joined the eApps Technical Support
department this summer. He was born and resides in Sydney, Australia.
A friend introduced him to Redhat 5.2 Apollo 1998 many years ago,
which infected him permanently with the Linux bug. His favorite
server distro is CentOS/RHEL and his favorite desktop distro is Arch
Linux. Mick and a friend of his started a small ISP and hosting
company in the 1990s. Mick gained significant knowledge about the
industry as he handled the entire technical side of the business for
the 10 years of their partnership.

Outside of work, Mick is interested in
car racing, classic cars, and severe weather conditions. He served as
a volunteer radio operator for the coastal patrol where he assisted
with communications during storms. His “dream vacation” is to one
day come to tornado alley in the US to see a big twister up close.
Mick also served for 17 years as a part time volunteer fire fighter
for the NSW Rural Fire Service where he assisted in fighting
wildfires and forest fires.

Mick enjoys working with customers from
around the world and the “great bunch” of eApps team members.
According to Mick, the work is never boring due to the wide variety
of technical support requests. Please say “g’day mate” to Mick
when you get a chance. He is a genuine Aussie, even though he does
not own a kangaroo, and will be pleased to give you that special

“down under” treatment.

Updated/New
Applications:

Updated
versions of the following applications are now available, all for
CentOS 5 plans:

Drupal 5.20
Drupal 6.14
Wordpress 2.8.4
Django 1.1
MySQL 5.1.38
MySQL Connector J 5.1.8

If
you are interested in moving
to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Article: stackoverflow.com, the place to go for programming Q & A

Have a difficult programming question?
Try stackoverflow.com, a collaborative Q & A site for programmers
that is free to use, and impressively unencumbered. No single concept
or feature on this site is new or groundbreaking. However, the creators have assembled an extremely functional and useful site from
concepts used in Wikis, Blogs, Digg/Reddit, and Forums.

Registration is not required, but
registered users have the added benefit of being able to rate and
vote on the value of questions. As registered users become more
active and effective in their postings on the site, their credibility
ranking increases. The site is also collaboratively edited, similar to a
wiki, which allows for improvements in the quality of questions and
answers. Questions are grouped by tags, making it easier to find and
answer questions.

The site is fast and has an elegantly
simple interface design written in plain HTML. At the time of the
writing of this article there were 310,063 questions, 385 tags, and
2,649 registered users. Momentum appears to be growing for this
really cool technical resource site. Check it out at
stackoverflow.com.

Tech
Tips: Optimizing PostgreSQL Database Performance

In our previous
newsletter we
offered tips on 1) Optimizing your site for iPhone and 2) Auto Reconnect from Hibernate (Tomcat) to MySQL. This month we
offer the following database performance tip.

Optimizing PostgreSQL Database Performance – Once your postgres database becomes large, the default settings are no longer optimal. If you do not optimize these settings, you can expect to consume a lot of CPU and incur high disk I/O, both of which have a negative impact on performance. The following tip will improve the speed of your PostgreSQL queries for larger databases.

Locate and edit the/var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf file
Search for work_mem (or sort_memif if you have an older version).
Change the setting. The default setting is 1M (1024KB if you are on an older version). Even on smaller VPS plans it is safe to increase the value to 8M (8192KB for older plans). NOTE: If you know you have a lot of big tables and you have a lot of"ORDER BY" statements in your queries, and of course the available memory in your VPS allows it, you can raise it to 16M (16386) or more.
After you change that file you need to restart postgres.

Now your postgres should run faster, waste less time swapping to disk, and lower the CPU usage of your VPS.

Follow us on Twitter!

@eapps for news, updates, and exclusive offers

@eapps_status for eapps network status

Please
share this publication with your colleagues and friends!

To
SUBSCRIBE to this publication, send an email with the subject
“SUBSCRIBE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

To
be REMOVED from this publication, send an email with the subject
“REMOVE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

eApps
Hosting | USA +1 (770) 448 2100 | UK +44 (0)20 8133 6940 |
sales@eApps.com
| support@eApps.com

eApps upDATE Newsletter for August 2009

eApps Staff — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:01:49 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
August

2009

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: Enterprise Email Service Launched!

More
News: Important News about eApps
Communications

Promotions: eApps
Promotions on Twitter!

Best Post Winner : Community
Forum Monthly Best Post Winners!

Events: HostingCon 2009, Atlanta
Linux Fest 2009

Updated/New
Applications: New: Zend Server; Updates:
git, mod_rails,
PostgreSQL JDBC drivers, ioncube loader, JBoss 5, Tomcat 6, Java 5
Article:
Tweet Tweet

Tech
Tips: 1) Optimizing your site for iPhone and 2)
Auto Reconnect From Hibernate (Tomcat) to MySQL

News:
Enterprise Email Service Launched!
We are pleased to announce the launch of our Enterprise
Email service, featuring Scalix Server, an
enterprise grade messaging
solution supporting Email, shared calendaring,
contacts, tasks, and shared public folders. Scalix Server
provides transparent, full-function support for Microsoft Outlook
users.
In fact, Scalix Server provides the richest support of Outlook outside
of Microsoft itself,
transparently supporting all Outlook user functionality. Scalix
can be configured to seamlessly sync with
most mobile devices for enterprise Email users on the go. The best part
of the eApps Enterprise Email service is the price, resulting in a
solution for you with a a much lower total cost of ownership than
running Microsoft Exchange in your own shop.

We offer our Enterprise Email service in two models.
One model is a monthly
fee per user, which will appeal to companies
that have a relatively small number of users and/or who want to choose
the most simple approach for billing and administration.
Prices start at $5 per month per user for the
commercial
edition with a $2.50 monthly option for “over the air” synchronization.
The
second model is a hosted
VPS subscription service that runs a private
instance of one of the Scalix
server editions.
The entry level for the hosted VPS model is the Scalix Community
Edition, with prices starting $45 per month for 10-20 users.
Upgrades to the commercially licensed Small Business Edition
and Enterprise Editions are available.

Sign up up for an informative
Webinar on Tuesday, August 18 at 10AM Eastern or 3PM Eastern. Contact us to
arrange a phone call to discuss your requirements or to set up a FREE TRIAL of the service, by sending an email to sales@eapps.com.

More News: Important News about eApps Communications

In order to
ensure that we
do our best to serve you we have implemented some important new methods
for communication. This Email explains how you can take advantage of
these new methods to stay informed about your eApps Hosting service.

New!
eApps Information Broadcast via Twitter
- We now have a Twitter account for broadcasting general information.
You can follow eapps on Twitter (http://twitter.com/eapps)
to receive
these “tweets.” The information that we send will supplement our
existing web site, support center, Email notifications, and company
Newsletter. You will receive news about new and updated applications,
significant upcoming events, and receive exclusive special offers and
promotions from our Marketing department only for our Twitter
followers. To keep informed, be the first to get late breaking news,
and receive exclusive money saving special offers and promotions,
please follow @eapps
on Twitter.

Reminder:
Service and Incident Status Reporting
- On April 23, 2009 we announced the launch of a web blog site
that is completely independent of our network for the purpose of
reporting the status of any significant local or upstream incident that
may impact our customers. This web site can be found at http://status.eapps.com.
This site also has a Twitter plug-in and will
generate a Tweet from eapps_status (http://twitter.com/eapps_status)
with the first 140 characters of the status report whenever a new entry
is posted to the blog. If you use Twitter, we recommend that you follow
@eapps_status
so that you can be notified of the status of incidents.

New!
eApps is now on Facebook
- The eApps Hosting Facebook presence is another method for keeping
informed and interacting with us. Many of our personnel are active
“friends” on our Facebook site. We will post news, announcements and
exclusive promotions for our Facebook fans. Let us get to know you by
posting on our discussions and sharing photos and promoting your
business. Connect with us via wall posts. We want to get to know
you better and find out what what we can do to make your hosting
experience the best in our industry. You can search for “eApps Hosting”
in Facebook or go directly to the site.

Coming
Soon: New eApps web site!
- Our new web site will do a much better job of delivering information
to existing and prospective customers. We will publish more information
about our new site in our September newsletter. We are targeting late
September as the launch date of the new site.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or feedback about
these new communication methods at sales@eapps.com.

Promotion: eApps Promotions on Twitter

Just when you thought you heard enough about Twitter, there is more.
Wait, don’t go! You might save some money here! We are discontinuing
our monthly newsletter promotion in favor of more frequent and timely
promotions which will be announced exclusively
on Twitter. Please follow eapps on Twitter to be sure you receive
announcements about these valuable promotions. Our next big
promotion is coming soon via Twitter!

Best Post Winners:

Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum
and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected
contributor(s)! The winners for the June newsletter
are .
. .

Adding
subversion support to Apache – mojavelinux

Overriding /icons per host – tudaen

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question,
offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50
credit in September!

Events: HostingCon
2009 and Atlanta Linux Fest 2009

HostingCon 2009 -
Each year, people involved in the hosting industry gather at the hostingcon

conference. This is the place where hosting providers can hear from
industry leaders, learn about best practices, and talk to vendors about
new products and services.
This year’s
conference will be held in Washington, DC on August 10-12, 2009. eApps
will be there, as we have every year since the conference started. Drop
us a line if you are planning to attend.

Atlanta
Linux Fest 2009 – eApps is pleased to announce that we
will be a sponsor of the Atlanta
Linux Fest 2009, on Saturday, September 19th, 2009. The event
coincides with 2009 Software Freedom day. It is a grassroots conference
for the GNU/Open Source Software/Free Software community
to gather and share
information about fun and exciting existing and upcoming Linux and Open
Source Software. Please register if you are in the Atlanta area, and
look for us at the conference.

eApps Enterprise Email Webinar
- On Tuesday, August 18, 2009 eApps will be performing an informative
Webinar on a powerful, cost effective alternative to Microsoft Exhange.
The session will be offered at 10AM Eastern and 3PM Eastern and will
take one hour. Register on-line at the eApps Webinar page.

Updated/New
Applications:

Updated
versions of the following applications are now available, all for
CentOS 5 plans:

git
1.6.3.3
mod_rails
2.2.4
Postgresql
jdbc3 – 701
Postregsql
jdbc – 701  (for jdbc4)
ioncube-loader
- 3.1.34
jboss5-5.1.0.GA
tomcat6
6.0.20
java-5-u19

New Applications, all
for CentOS 5 plans:

Zend
Server – This exciting application is now available in
Standard Max plans and higher. According to Zend, Zend
Server is a complete, enterprise-ready Web Application Server for
running and managing PHP applications that require a high level of
reliability, performance and security. Check out Zend Server today for
the ultimate management and operation of PHP applications.

If
you are interested in moving
to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.
Article:
Tweet Tweet

If you
have a computer, you’ve
probably heard of a little website called Twitter. Perhaps you
already have a personal account, but if your business doesn’t
have
one you are missing out on an extremely valuable “free
marketing”
opportunity. Accounts are free and all it takes is some time and
patience to build a following for your products and services. You
will build the conversation not just on twitter, but all over the web
and the off-line marketplace. With over 27 million unique visitors a
month (according to Quantcast, 8/2009), and over 11.5 million
accounts (Sysomos.com, 6/2009) , there are many individuals talking
and interacting on Twitter who have a need for your products and
services. Included here are a few basic tips for getting your
organization involved in the Twitter-Space.

Getting
Started – Get an account going with your organization’s
official name, or a name that customers can identify as your
organization. This will ensure that you will show up when customers
search for your company on Twitter. Add your organization to relevant
directories for Twitter, such as twitdir.com, wefollow.com and other
similar places. Notify your customers about your twitter account, and
encourage them to follow you for special offers, and added value (more
on that in the next tip). Search for people already tweeting about your
company and follow their accounts. And while you’re at it,
follow @eapps
for exclusive offers and substantial discount promotions, application
updates, news and customer service (just mention @eapps in your tweet
and we will respond promptly).
Interact
- This is vital to any successful
twitter account! Follow users who have interests relevant to your
products and services and when you receive a follow request, follow
that user back (unless it’s a spam request). Search keywords
relevant to your industry on www.search.twitter.com
and interact. Reply to tweets, by typing @username, on topics you have
knowledge in, and offer suggestions, advice and tips. Also watch for
anyone tweeting at your account with @companyname and respond to their
questions or thank them for their compliments. Retweet, by using RT:, posts you find
interesting or helpful. Retweets are a great way to connect with users,
because all twitterers like being quoted and promoted. Send direct
messages to users you are following. Just jump in and join the
conversation and don’t worry too much about perfection in
your posts (you only have 140 characters to work with!).
Provide
Value – Offer something consumers can’t
get from you anywhere else. eApps offers limited time discounts,
twitter customer service and application update news. Other companies
offer twitter coupons, contests or freebies to their followers. Still
more companies just provide information and customer service via
Twitter, which is valuable because it is provided in a user-friendly
manner.
Check
out The Competition – Follow companies doing it
well and pull ideas from their experience. Some great business twitter
accounts include Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir), Starbucks
(@starbucks) and Zappos Shoes (@zappos).

Tech
Tips: 1) Optimizing your site for iPhone and 2) Auto Reconnect from
Hibernate (Tomcat) to MySQL

In our previous
newsletter we
offered tips on 1) Upgrading for more efficient mail
processing and 2) Page Speed, a Google tool
for optimizing web pages . This month we
offer the following tips.

Tip 1) Optimizing your site for
iPhone -
The sale of “smart phones” is growing, and Apple’s iPhone is one the
best selling phone in that category. Safari, the built-in web browser
for the iPhone, does a great job of rendering web sites. As more and
more people browse the web on their iPhone, it might be worthwhile to
consider optimizing your web site for iPhone users. The following
article, by Craig Grannell, has a good overview and some tips for you.

http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/mobile/optimise-your-site-for-iphones

Tip 2) Auto Reconnect From
Hibernate (Tomcat) to MySQL – MySQL drops
idle connections after 8 hours by default which results in the error
below.

org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter:
The last packet successfully
received from the server was 56697 seconds ago. The last packet sent
successfully to the server was 56697 seconds ago, which is
longer than
the server configured value of ‘wait_timeout’. You
should consider
either expiring and/or testing connection validity before use in your
application, increasing the server configured values for client
timeouts, or using the Connector/J connection property
‘autoReconnect=true’ to avoid this problem.

Increasing the wait_timeout is not an effective solution because
you will need to increase it to a value well above 8 hours.
autoReconnect will not work because the Hibernate connection mechanism
does not support reconnecting. You need to use C3PO connection pool.

1.
Download the c3p0-x.x.x.x.bin.zip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/c3p0/files/.
Extract the archive and
copy the c3p0-x.x.x.x.jar file from the c3p0-x.x.x.x/lib directory to
your application WEB-INF/lib directory.

Note: x.x.x.x above represents the version as in c3p0-0.9.1.2.zip.

2.
Edit the hibernate.cfg.xml in your applicaion WEB-INF/classes directory
and disable the built in connection pool and setup c3p0.

comment
build in pool

JDBC connection pool (use the built-in)

name=”connection.pool_size”>1

—>

Add
lines for c3p0

JBDC connection pool using C3PO –>

name=”c3p0.timeout”>1800

name=”c3p0.max_statements”>50

name=”connection.provider_class”> continued
next line with no space

org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider

3. Create a c3p0.properties file in your application WEB-INF/classes
directory, add the lines below and save the file.

# c3p0.properties
c3p0.testConnectionOnCheckout=true

4. Restart Tomcat

Please
share this publication with your colleagues and friends!

To
SUBSCRIBE to this publication, send an email with the subject
“SUBSCRIBE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

To
be REMOVED from this publication, send an email with the subject
“REMOVE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

eApps
Hosting | USA +1 (770) 448 2100 | UK +44 (0)20 8133 6940 |
sales@eApps.com
| support@eApps.com

eApps upDATE Newsletter for June 2009

eApps Staff — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:01:20 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
June
2009

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: Enterprise Mail Service Coming Soon!

More
News: Zend Server Coming Soon!

Promotions:
10% off SSL Certificates

Best Post Winner : Community
Forum Monthly Best Post Winners!

Featured Customer: Going Software OÜ

Updated/New
Applications: Updates: many!
Article:
Ba-da-Bing! Enter stage left, Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing

Tech
Tips: 1) Upgrading for more efficient mail
processing and 2) Page Speed, a Google tool for optimizing web pages

News:
Enterprise Mail Service Coming Soon!
Scalix
Server: Enterprise Mail Service

In our March newsletter we mentioned that we were evaluating several
Enterprise Mail solutions. We are pleased to announce that we have
selected Scalix Server, a comprehensive enterprise grade messaging
solution which supports email, shared calendaring,
contacts, tasks, and shared public folders. Furthermore, Scalix Server
provides transparent, full-function support for Microsoft Outlook
users.
In fact, Scalix Server provides the richest support of Outlook outside
of Microsoft itself,
transparently supporting all Outlook user functionality – not
just a
subset of it. Scalix can also be configured to seamlessly sync with
most mobile devices for enterprise mail users on the go. The best part
of the eApps Hosting Scalix service is the price, resulting in a
solution for you with a a much lower total cost of ownership than
running Microsoft Exchange in your own shop.

We will be offering the Scalix Enterprise Mail service in two models.
One model is a monthly fee per user, which will appeal to companies
that have a relatively small number of users and/or who want to choose
the most simple approach for billing and administration purposes.
Prices will run from about $4 to $9 per month per user for the
commercial
edition depending on user features. The
second model is a hosted VPS subscription service that runs a private
instance of one of the Scalix
server editions.
The entry level for the hosted VPS model is the Scalix Community
Edition, with prices starting around $50 per month for 10-20 users.
Upgrades to the commercially licensed Small Business Edition
and Enterprise Editions are available. Look for news of the launch on
our support.eapps.com
site, or send an email to sales@eapps.com
and we will notify you as soon as it is available. As one of the few
hosting companies offering this high value enterprise mail solution at
such a reasonable cost, we want to ensure that you, our valued
customers, can be the first to take advantage of the benefits of this
exciting new offering.

More News: Zend Server Coming Soon!

Over the
past 18 months we at eApps Hosting have been enhancing our PHP
environment. In addition to ensuring that we have the most popular and
powerful PHP features enabled, we have added the eAccelerator, Zend
Framework, Zend Optimizer ionCube loader and more. We are pleased and
excited to announce another addition to our PHP environment, the Zend
Server.

Zend,
“The PHP Company,” is the major force behind PHP. On April 7, 2009,
Zend announced the launch of the community

and commercial
editions of Zend Server, a web application server that improves the
reliability, performance and security for PHP based web applications.
Zend reports that the commercial version of “the new Zend
Server
is a complete Web application solution that
includes PHP, native install, an enhanced code accelerator, and
advanced monitoring and problem diagnostics for applications designed
for deployment on a single server. In addition, Zend Server automates
software updates, hot fixes, and security patches, for quick
and easy installation in less than 5 minutes. Zend Server supports the
most popular databases, including Oracle® Database, MySQL, and
Microsoft® SQL Server.”

We will soon offer the Zend Server Community Edition on our Standard
Plus plans and higher that are running the CentOS 5 operating system.
The community edition offers many of the features and benefits of the
full commercial edition. Furthermore, the community edition is easily
upgraded to
the commercial edition. An announcement will be posted on the eApps home page and support center as
soon as this exciting application is available.

Promotion: 10% off SSL Certificates

10%
off SSL certificates

- From June 10, 2009 through July 10, 2009 only, all customers that buy
a
new SSL certificate can receive a 10% discount. This offer is valid for
any SSL certificate purchased in the eApps Hosting store. You can
receive your discount one of two ways.

1) Buy the SSL certificate in the eApps Hosting store, and choose Pay
Offline. Then send an email to billing@eapps.com
with “June 10% Off SSL Certs Offer” in the subject of your email. Our
Billing department will issue a 10% credit to your order, after which
you can make your payment on the discounted amount owed in your Control
Panel.

2) Buy and pay for your SSL certificate in the eApps Hosting store then
request a credit to your account by email to billing@eapps.com

with “June 10% Off SSL Certs Offer” in the subject of your email. Our
Billing department will issue the credit to your account, which can
then be applied to any future orders.

Best Post Winners:

Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum
and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected
contributor(s)! The winners for the June newsletter
are .
. .

How
much memory is Passenger using? – Jeff Wigal

How-to:
Return 503 Status with Apache Web Server – dotcomUNDERGROUND

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question,
offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50
credit in July!

Featured
Customer: Going
Software OÜ

Going
Software OÜ is
a software company based in Estonia, and developer of a new analytics
tool for development projects called Programeter.

Programeter is an analytics and reporting automation tool for software
development projects. It gives managers exceptional transparency and
eliminates the reporting burden on team members by providing the core
set of software project indicators collected from task, time, bug
tracking tools and a code repository. Skype and Rate.ee co-founders are

seed investors in the company. The application is offered under an SaaS
delivery model. A company with a 100 developer team (in-house
or
outsourced) would pay a $1000

monthly fee. Even though Programeter is a startup application, it has
already attracted a number of enterprise customers, including Swedbank.

Updated/New
Applications:

Updated
versions of the following applications are now available, all for
CentOS 5 plans:

MySQL
5.1.34
phpmyadmin
3.1.3
Drupal 5.18
Drupal 6.12
ZendFramework 1.8.1
Liferay 5.2.3 (with Tomcat)
JBoss5-5.0.1
openldap-2.4.16
postgresql-8.3.7-2
Ruby-On-Rails 2.3.2 (rails) and 1.8.6.287
(ruby)
UW-IMAP-2007e (replaces prior mail agent)
mod_jk 1.2.28
mod_rails 2.2.2
Django 1.0.2
ImageMagic 6.5.27
Dk-1.0.2 and Dkim 2.8.2

New Applications, all
for CentOS 5 plans:

Zend Server – watch this space!

If
you are interested in moving
to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.
Article:
Ba-da-Bing! Enter stage left, Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing

On May 28,
Microsoft executives demonstrated the company’s new, and dramatically
improved “decision” engine, called Bing,
at the All Things Digital conference. The engine, of course, is aimed
squarely at Google and appears to offer significant improvements over
Google for at least some types of common searches such as product
reviews, shopping, movie listings, weather, health topics, travel and
stock prices. The demonstration was a hit among the generally tough
crowd at the conference.

Microsoft
has long tried to compete with Google with lackluster results. Bing
represents a deep and comprehensive effort by Microsoft to deliver a
search engine that simply works better than Google. Several years of
focused energy and resources have been poured into the project by the
software giant. Their development strategy included hiring leading
search engine scientists and making acquisitions of building block
companies such as Powerset, a semantic search engine company, and
Farecast, a company that specialized in buying advice for air travel.
The main idea behind Bing is to eliminate information overload by
parsing and interpreting what the searcher is looking for so as to
present not only search results but enhanced information, in a
categorized and collated form, that will be highly useful.

Initial users have been impressed with the excellent organization and
presentation of information. Some of the results appear to be quite
useful, such as the display of a customer service phone number when a
search is performed on a company name. Videos results sets are
presented cleanly and in a form for easy playback. Additional features
such as tabbed results sets and mouse-over text allows users to find
information without clicking through to other sites. Now that
Bing
has been launched, behind a $100 million dollar advertising campaign,
it will be interesting to see how successful it becomes.

Tech
Tips: 1) Upgrading for more efficient mail processing and 2) Page
Speed, a Google tool for optimizing web pages

In our previous
newsletter we
offered tips on 1) Eliminating MySQL connection
timeouts in Java and 2) Avoiding permission issues
when uploading files . This month we
offer tips for 1)
Upgrading for more efficient mail processing and 2) Page Speed, a Google tool for
optimizing web pages.

Tip 1) Upgrading for more efficient mail
processing
- Previously in our newsletters we have mentioned that one of
the
most common reasons for CPU over usage is using the POP mail protocol
when storing a large number of mail messages on your VPS server.
Customers that want to store mail on their VPS should use IMAP for
their local mail client. Even if you use IMAP, it helps to gain as much
efficiency as possible. We recently released a new version of the IMAP
mail agent. This agent is used for both POP and IMAP protocols. It is
much more efficient than the prior version. Those customers on the
CentOS 5 operating system versions of our plans should upgrade their
IMAP application immediately.

To upgrade, login to your Control Panel and proceed as follows:

>
System tab > All Applications > click on UW-IMAP link
> click on Upgrade to Latest button

To check to see if you are on our latest operating system plan, go to:

>
My Account tab > click on Subscriptions icon > click on
your subscription > look for “Centos 5
x86 eapps” as the Operating System

Tip 2) Page Speed, a Google tool
for optimizing web pages

Our
CTO has passed on another tip for optimizing web pages.
You can never have too much speed on the Internet highway! Page
Speed is a Google tool for improving the performance of web
pages. It is a Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug.
To run Page Speed you must install the Firebug module and then the Page
Speed add-on. When you visit pages using Firefox, you can display the
Firebug console from the Tools menu and then select the Page Speed menu
option to get a detailed analysis of the performance of the web page
being viewed. Very cool!

Please
share this publication with your colleagues and friends!

To
SUBSCRIBE to this publication, send an email with the subject
“SUBSCRIBE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

To
be REMOVED from this publication, send an email with the subject
“REMOVE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

eApps
Hosting | USA +1 (770) 448 2100 | UK +44 (0)20 8133 6940 |
sales@eApps.com
| support@eApps.com

eApps upDATE Newsletter for April 2009

eApps Staff — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:01:05 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
April, 2009

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: Resource Usage Notification and Advanced Monitoring Systems in development

More News: http://status.eapps.com – for eApps Hosting status information

Promotions: 1) Lower prices thru June on .info, .tv, .us.com and .mobi TLDs AND 2) free “instant mobilizer” service for .mobi owners!

Meet eApps: Cinu Varghese

Updated/New Applications: Updates: phpLDAPadmin
1.1.0.7, PHP 5.2.9, KonaKart 3.2.0.0, JBoss Portal 2.7.2, Joomla
1.5.10, Proftpd 1.3.2, phpPGadmin 4.2.2, AWStats 6.9, Subversion 1.5.6,
PostgreSQL 8.3.6 ; New: GIT 1.6.1.3
Article: Conficker worm awakens

Tech Tips: 1) Eliminating MySQL connection timeouts in Java and 2) Avoiding permission issues when uploading files

News: Resource Usage Notification and Advanced Monitoring Systems in development
Resource Usage Notification System: We
realize that our customers often become aware that they have
exceeded their resources after it has become a problem. The commercial
software that we use to manage our hosting operation automates many important functions. Unfortunately, one
weaknesses is that it does not provide much in the way of
reporting on resource usage. The Control Panel provides a
snapshot of resource usage at a point in time, but is not an effective too for identifying problems over time.

One of the projects we have underway is a Resource
Usage Notification System. This system will poll our hosting management
system on a regular basis for each of the resources that are allocated
to your environment. These resources are CPU, Memory, Disk space, Data
Transfer Rate, and Total Data Transfer Consumed. The system will
compare each customer’s usage against thresholds and send a notification to the customer whenever their
usage has exceeded the threshold for any key resource. The
system will also provide summary reports for our internal use.

We are very excited about this new system. Even though it does not continually monitor resource usage, we believe it will
be way to warn our customers before they encounter service
issues or get billed for disk and traffic over-usage. The best news of
all is that this will be a free service. All eApps Hosting customers
will benefit from the Resource Usage Notification System at no extra
cost!

Advanced Monitoring System:

We also are developing an advanced Monitoring System. Our new system
uses Zenoss, powerful software for monitoring systems and networks,
which plays very nicely with our hosting management system. The new
system will allow us to more closely monitor all resources on our
servers and network devices. It will also allow us to more easily
identify when customer’s VPS servers are in distress and manage our
quarantine process. A major benefit to customers will be a new
monitoring option that will warn customers proactively whenever they
are getting near their resource limits and provide weekly reports on
their actual usage over time for each key resource. This new monitoring
service will provide extremely valuable information for us and our
customers, particularly those running mission critical sites.

More News: http://status.eapps.com – for eApps Hosting status information

No
one likes outages. We hate them, you hate them. But inevitably they do
happen. The main feedback we got from customers the last time we had an
outage was that we were not providing adequate status information. We
have taken this criticism to heart and have launched http://status.eapps.com.
This site is a Wordpress blog, running on an independent network,
that will be used to communicate status in the event of any outages.
The blog has a Twitter plug-in, so each post we make will forward a
Tweet to eapps_status. You can follow eapps_status on Twitter to
receive updates on your mobile device or Twitter client.

Promotions:
1) Lower prices thru June on .info, .tv, .us.com, and .mobi TLDs AND 2)
free “instant mobilizer” service for .mobi owners!

1) Lower prices on some TLDs

- Through June 30, 2009, we are able to offer reduced prices for the
initial purchase of new domains using .info, .tv, .us.com, and .mobi TLDs. The new
lower prices will be available in our on-line store through the end of
June, 2009. Prices for one year new domain purchases are as follows.
Multiple year domain prices are also reduced accordingly. Transfers and renewals will revert to standard prices.

.info – was $13.95 per year, now $10.95

.tv – was $45.99 per year, now $27.99

.us.com – was $30.99, now available for $21.99

.mobi – was $22.99 per year, now $13.99

2) free Instant Mobilizer for .mobi owners
- This free service, offered by our registrar – enom, will convert most
web sites to fit the format of mobile devices. It also
incorporates useful features such as:

One-Click Direct Calling
One-Click Google Map Directions to Your Location(s)
Better Search Engine Discoverability

For more information on this exciting service, please visit enom’s Instant Mobilizer Information Overview.
This overview allows you to preview what your site would look like with
Instant Mobilizer. To take advantage of this promotion you must first
own a .mobi domain, purchased through eApps Hosting. Once you have your
.mobi domain send an email to sales@eapps.com,
with the text ‘Activate Instant Mobilizer for xxxxx.mobi’ in
the subject of your message. where xxxxx represents your .mobi domain
name. Instant Mobilizer for your .mobi domain will be activated within
24 hours of our processing your request. IMPORTANT: Before you request this service, please read enom’s FAQ and Terms of Service.

Meet eApps: Cinu Varghese

Cinu (See-New) is a Supervisor in our Technical Support department. He
resides in Lawrenceville, Georgia, USA but was born in Kochi (City),
Kerala (State), India. He had his schooling at Nirmala High School,
Muvattupuzha (City) and then completed a Bachelors Degree in Computer
Science from Cochin University in 2003. Before joining eApps Hosting he
was with Armia Systems, Kochi for almost 4 years, where he helped build
a company that provided technical support services for web hosting
companies.

Cinu is happily married to Reeja (May 2007). Shortly after their
marriage he migrated to the USA. He joined eApps in May of 2008 and was
promoted to Supervisor within 6 months. When he is not working he likes
to watch news channels to keep informed about what is happening around
the world. Cinu also likes to watch and play cricket, a popular
game in many countries. Say hello to Cinu when you get a chance.

Updated/New Applications:

Updated versions of the following applications are now available, all for CentOS 5 plans:

phpLDAPadmin 1.1.0.7
PHP 5.2.9
KonaKart 3.2.0.0 (Standard Plus and higher)
JBoss Portal 2.7.2 (Advanced and higher)
Joomla 1.5.10
Proftpd 1.3.2
phpPGadmin 4.2.2
AWStats 6.9
Subversion 1.5.6
PostgreSQL 8.3.6

New Applications, all for CentOS 5 plans:

GIT 1.6.1.3

If you are interested in moving
to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Article: Conficker worm awakens

April Fools Day has passed, but not the threat of the Conficker worm. Author Elinor Mills of news.cnet.com reported in an article
on April 8 that the conficker worm has started updating via peer-to-peer
between infected computers, and has dropped a payload on infected
computers. Security experts are analyzing the code of the payload to
determine its function and purpose. They believe it to be a keystroke
logger or other type of program that steals sensitive information.

Many
people believe that hackers create malware such as Conficker to simply
wreck havoc on the internet. Conficker is designed for one purpose, to make money.
The worm allows the hackers to control a network of infected computers,
called botnets. They send spam, capture credit card info and other
confidential information, and can even be used to launch distributed
denial of service (DDOS) attacks. All of these criminal activities
generate cash for the hackers, or their sponsors.

For more information on the Conficker worm visit the Conficker Working Group
site. This site has a handy eye chart to help you determine if your
computer has been infected. It also has a lot of information, including
tips on how to remove the worm if you are infected.

Tech Tips: 1) Eliminating MySQL connection timeouts in Java and 2) Avoiding permission issues when uploading files

In our previous newsletter we
offered tips on speeding up your web site . This month we offer tips for 1) Eliminating MySQL connection timeouts in Java and 2) Avoiding permission issues when uploading files.

Tip 1) Eliminating MySQL connection timeouts in Java

JDBC connection time out errors between Java application and MySQL are common. We have two possible solutions for consideration.

Solution 1:

To prevent this you can try to increase ‘wait_timeout’ value for your

mysql server. The default value is 28800 secs (8 hours).

‘wait_timeout’ value is the number of seconds the server waits for

activity on a non-interactive connection before closing it. To

increase that you will need to edit your /etc/my.cnf file. You can do

that via ssh or from our Control Panel -> System tab -> File Manager.

You will need to add a value which is appropriate for your application

under [mysqld] section in /etc/my.cnf file.

interactive_timeout=56600

where the time is in seconds. You need to restart MySQL service for

the changes to take effect.

Solution 2:

Mysql Connector/J provides an options to set autoReconnect to true.

This allows the driver to re-establish stale or dead connections.

You can set this value directly to your connection URL in your

Resources configuration.

Example :

Note: the following string has been broken into two lines to fit this newsletter.

jdbc:mysql://localhost:

3306/databasename?autoReconnect=true

The above connection string can be found in any of the below file. It

is based on your application setup.

Tomcat:

/opt/tomcatX/conf/server.xml

/opt/tomcatX/conf/Catalina/your_host/application_name.xml

/opt/tomcatX/conf/context.xml

/opt/tomcatX/webapps/your_application/WEB-INF/web.xml

etc.

JBoss:

/opt/jbossX/server/default/conf/application_conf.xml

/opt/jboss4/server/default/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/server.xml

or in your application web.xml file

Glassfish

You can add this settings in your Pool settings under URL connection

string. Login to your glassfish administration interface at :

http://yourdomain:4848/

The connection pools are located at -> Resources -> JDBC -> Connection

Pools -> URL ->

“jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/databasename?autoReconnect=true”

Tip 2) Avoiding permission issues when uploading files

We hear from many customers having permissions
issues while attempting to upload files to their servers. To avoid such
problems, we recommend using SFTP or SCP instead of straight FTP. Not
only does this create a secure connection, but it allows you to log
into the server directly as “root”, thus avoiding ownership/permissions
issues you might otherwise experience. NOTE: Care should
always be taken when logged in as server “root” so as not to overwrite
any critical/system files or settings.

For more information, please see our SFTP User Guide at:

http://support.eapps.com/hsp/sftp

Please
share this publication with your colleagues and friends!

To
SUBSCRIBE to this publication, send an email with the subject
“SUBSCRIBE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

To
be REMOVED from this publication, send an email with the subject
“REMOVE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

eApps
Hosting | USA +1 (770) 448 2100 | UK +44 (0)20 8133 6940 |
sales@eApps.com

| support@eApps.com

eApps upDATE Newsletter for March 2009

eApps Staff — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:01:05 +0000

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
March, 2009

from eApps Hosting

IN THIS ISSUE:

News: cPanel Reseller VPS plans are now available!

More News: eApps evaluating Enterprise mail services

Promotion: 50% off one month for Plesk or cPanel Reseller plans

Best Post Winner: Community Forum Monthly Best Post Winners!

Featured Customer: Applicants Wanted

Updated/New Applications: Updates: Glassfish, Liferay, phpMyAdmin, Java 6, PostgreSQL JDBC drivers, WordPress, SquirrelMail, mod_jk, MySQL connector, ZendFramework;

Article: Is the wait over? Presto quickly reboots your computer

Tech Tips: Speeding up your web site

News: New cPanel Reseller VPS plans are now available!
cPanel Reseller VPS plans:
We are pleased to announce the availability of our cPanel Gold and cPanel Platinum plans for
resellers. The cPanel plans are similar to the Plesk Gold and Plesk Platinum reseller plans in
that both plans allow you to set up administrator login IDs at the
site/domain level. Compared to Plesk, the administrative features of
cPanel are more consistent with
how a Linux server works. It provides for domain/site login
capabilities, as does Plesk, but offers more flexibility for installing
higher end applications using Java and other programming languages.
cPanel also offers an unlimited domain license at no extra charge.

More News: eApps evaluating Enterprise eMail services
Enterprise eMail:
Over the past two years we have looked into the feasibility of offering
enterprise mail services. Our goal has been to offer an advanced mail
service that supports shared calendars and other collaboration
features. During these past reviews we have not been able to find a
solution that met our technical, business policy, support, and pricing
requirements. However, we met again with the folks from Scalix at the
Parallels 2009 Summit in February and based on what we learned have
decided to take another look. Watch this space as we will have a report
on how our evaluation goes in the next issue of eAPPS upDATE.

Promotion: 50% off one month for Plesk or cPanel Reseller Plans

Through April 15th, we are offering 50% off of
the first month for any Plesk or cPanel Reseller plan! If you need to
set up an administrator login at the site/domain level then you should
consider a Reseller plan. The Plesk plans are geared more to PHP
developers whereas the cPanel plans are more suitable to those that use
Java applications or want a server as close to the native Linux
environment as possible.

To take
advantage of this offer, place your order, but do not pay it yet. Then send an email to sales@eapps.com,
with the text ‘March Newsletter Promotion – 50% off Reseller
plans’ in
the subject of your message. We will issue the 50% credit for the first month to the order
and then you can pay the remainder. Hurry, April 15th will be here
before you know it.

Best Post Winners: Community Forum Monthly Best Post Winners!

Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum

and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected
contributor(s)! The winners for the March newsletter are .
. .

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question, offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50 credit in April!

Featured Customer: Applicants Wanted

Recently we started a new section in the eAPPS upDATE newsletter called
“Featured Customer.” This section allows us to highlight one of our
customers that is doing impressive things with their site in the areas
of innovation, commerce, civic and philanthropic contributions, and
general interest.

If you would like to be considered for inclusion in this section in a
future newsletter, please send a link to your site and a brief
description of why you think our readers would be interested to
sales@eapps.com. Please include the text “Featured Customer
Application” in the subject.

Updated/New Applications:

Updated versions of the following applications are now available, all for CentOS 5 plans:

GlassFish 2.1 (Standard Max and higher)
Liferay-Tomcat-6 5.2.2 (Advanced and higher)
Liferay-GlassFish 5.2.2 (Advanced and higher)
phpMyadmin 3.1.2
Java 6 u_12 (Standard Plus and higher)
PostgreSQL-JDCB3-Driver 8.3-604
PostgreSQL-JDBC-Driver 8.3.604 (JDBC4)
Wordpress 2.7.1
SquirellMail 1.4.17
mod_jk 1.2.27
mysql-connector 5.1.7
ZendFramework 1.7

New Applications, all for CentOS 5 plans:

no new apps at this time, but GIT is coming soon

If you are interested in moving
to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Article: Is the wait over? Presto quickly boots your computer

Users
of Windows based PCs have experienced the mind numbing wait that occurs
whenever their computer boots up. In some cases the boot time wait can
go on for 10 minutes, 20 minutes or even longer. Not only is this
a waste of time, but for mobile users it can mean the difference
between connecting to the Internet to perform a quick task or not.

Enter Presto, an add
on software program that works with most PCs running Windows XP or
Windows Vista. Presto is installed in the Windows environment. After it
is installed, the user will be prompted to select Presto or Windows
each time the PC is booted. Selecting Windows, of course, allows you to
run your computer as before. However, when you select Presto, your
computer will boot with the bare essentials necessary to access the
Internet, access your local network connection, and use the varius
devices in your PC. It is also compatible with Open Office, allowing
you to read and edit office documents. Presto typically boots your
computer in less than 30 seconds, and in some cases as soon as 10
seconds.

The makers of Presto, a division of Xandros Incorporated, state that their product has many benefits, including the following:

get online quickly
save battery life of laptops
make older, slower computers useful again
use rich media in a smaller boot footprint
more

Presto
has demonstrated their product to the public and will be offering a
download of their Beta version on March 16, 2009. Visit this form to request your Beta copy.

Tech Tips: Speeding up your web site

In our previous newsletter we
offered tips on conserving disk space . This month we offer tips for speeding up your web site.
Steve Souders
is a noted web developer, best selling author, part time college
professor, speaker, and business leader in the technology arena. His
specialty is web site performance. Steve is the creator of YSlow, Yahoo!’s performance analysis extension to Firebug,
with over 700K downloads. Steve works for Google now. Previous to his
employment there, he worked for Yahoo! where he was Chief Performance
Yahoo!
Steve’s web site, and Yahoo!’s developer center, have valuable
information on how to speed up your web site. Check out the following
links:

Performance area of Steve’s site – http://stevesouders.com/examples/

Steve’s 14 rules for faster loading web sites – http://stevesouders.com/examples/rules.php

Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding up your Web Site – http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Please
share this publication with your colleagues and friends!

To
SUBSCRIBE to this publication, send an email with the subject
“SUBSCRIBE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

To
be REMOVED from this publication, send an email with the subject
“REMOVE” (in all caps) to:

newsletter@eapps.com

eApps
Hosting | USA +1 (770) 448 2100 | UK +44 (0)20 8133 6940 |
sales@eApps.com
| support@eApps.com