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:
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.
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 |
