News: Liferay Portal now available!
Liferay Portal
is a very popular open source portal application, designed to allow you
to build powerful Intranets, collaboration applications, and Content
Management Systems. Included is an extensive list of tools and
technologies that can be easily used to create an Enterprise grade web
presence. The Liferay Features page and eApps Liferay Portal page
have more information on the key features you can expect. Liferay
is one of the most powerful and easy to use web applications available
today. But don’t take our word for it, Infoworld had this to say:
“. . the compelling argument for winner Liferay Portal can be summed up
by mentioning usability, architecture, security, integration, and
portlets. Liferay’s intuitive user experience, featuring drag-and-drop
portlet arrangement and management, is tops.”
We offer Liferay Portal in two flavors at this time – Liferay Portal
with Glassfish and Liferay Portal with Tomcat. These are two of the
most popular bundles of Liferay Portal and are well suited to the eApps
Hosting environment.
Liferay Portal is available now in all Advanced plans and higher running the CentOS 5 operating system.
More News: JBoss Portal and JBoss 5 coming soon!
JBoss Portal:
We will soon be offering another enterprise grade portal solution from
the makers of the widely used JBoss application server. JBoss Portal
provides an integrated open source
platform for hosting and serving a portal’s web interface, aggregating,
publishing, and managing its content, and personalizing its experience.
This portal solution is appealing to Java developers because of the
tight integration with JBoss Application Server. The makers emphasize
that JBoss Portal is standards based, is reliable and highly scalable,
and allows developers to achieve higher productivity and ROI due to the
fact that it was designed to operate hand in hand with the JBoss
Application Server.
JBoss 5:
eApps Hosting has been offering and supporting JBoss since shortly
after its inception. The JBoss organization was founded in our home
town of Atlanta, Georgia and we even hosted the JBoss web site in the
early days. So it comes as no surprise that we will soon be offering
the recently released JBoss 5,
a major upgrade over JBoss 4. This new version has been in the works
for three years now. It has a completely new kernel architecture and
fully supports the Java EE™ 5 specification. We expect JBoss 5 to
be very popular for enterprise grade Java applications and are commited
to making it available for you soon.
Promotion: One Month Free Web Page Monitoring
Through January 31st, we are offering one month
free Web Page Monitoring service. This service will poll a web page
that you specify and alert you as well as our technical support
department whenever your web page fails to respond. Our support staff
will restart your service and if does not respond will be available to
assist you in resolving the problem. The service can be set up to look
for a specified string of text on the page that is being polled. Many
customers will set the page up so that the text string is retrieved
from a database, which ensures that your database server is also
operational.
To take
advantage of this offer, send an email to sales@eapps.com,
with the text ‘December promotion – One Month Free Web Page Monitoring’ in
the subject of your message. Hurry, January 31st 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 December 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 January!
Featured Customer: Abe’s of Maine eCommerce Site
Abe’s of Maine is a family run
business that was founded in 1979 as a mom and pop retail store in Old
Orchard Beach, Maine. Several years after beginning a mail order
business, the company relocated to Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, NY.
Abe’s of Maine truly focuses on providing exceptional customer service
for a wide variety of electronics at a great price. This philosophy has
earned them loyal customers worldwide, and by making customer
satisfaction their primary goal has allowed them to grow and prosper.
They now make their home in a brand new state of the art warehouse and
retail showroom for an extensive line of electronic goods and cameras
in Raritan Center, in Edison NJ.
Abe’s of Maine became a customer of eApps
Hosting in September of 2006 as part of a major initiative to upgrade
their eCommerce presence. Since that time the company has seamlessly
upgraded their hosting service to handle a steadily growing volume of
eCommerce sales. Particularly during the holiday season, the site
handles a significant number of site visitors and generates an
increasing number of sales orders. We are pleased that Abe’s of Maine
depends on eApps Hosting to support their critical eCommerce presence.
If you haven’t finished your holiday shopping, check out the Abe’s of Maine site. You are sure to find some great prices on electronics and cameras along with superior service.
Updated/New Applications:
Updated versions of the following applications are now available, all for CentOS 5 plans:
- wordpress – 2.6.5
- drupal6 – 6.4
- tomcat6 – 6.0.18 (Standard Plus plans and higher)
- DarwinStreamingServer – 6.0.3 (Advanced plans and higher)
New Applications:
Liferay Portal is now available for all customers
running on the CentOs 5 Operating System plans (please read the
applicable User Guides):
- liferay-portal-glassfish – 5.1.1 – leading portal with GlassFish
- liferay-portal-tomcat6 – 5.1.2 – leading portal with Tomcat
To install
updates, login to your control panel, click on System tab, then All
Applications. Select the application you want to upgrade and click
Upgrade to Latest. To install new applications, click Add Application from the System tab.
If you are interested in moving
to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.
Article: How resources are allocated to your VPS
The
topic of resource allocations is so important that we try to get
information out to our customers in various ways. A high percentage of
service problems as well as requests to our technical support
department are related to resource usage. This article is an overview
of how resources are allocated to your VPS.
Resources are allocated to your VPS roughly in proportion to the price
of the plan. For example, the Advanced Max plan has about three times
the resources as the Standard Max plan. There
are five resources that are allocated – disk space, total data transfer
(traffic), memory, CPU, and data transfer rate. An explanation of the
five resources follows:
- disk space
- each plan has a “free” allowance that is included at no extra cost,
as well as a maximum physical allowance that can not be exceeded. The
physical maximum allowance is twice the free allowance. You can exceed
the “free” allowance (soft limit) up to the maximum physical allowance
(hard limit) but there is a fee equal to $.01/MB per month. For
dedicated server customers, the “free” allowance represents the
amount that is included in your daily backup at no extra charge,
whereas the mamixum allowance is the total physical capacity of your
server. You can view your actual disk space usage from Control Panel > System tab > Resources Usage link
(left side). From here you see your usage and the amount you have
available. NOTE: when you exceed the “free” allowance the chart changes
and shows the maximum physical allowance, not the “free” allowance. You
can also click on the Hard disk statistics tab and select various options to see historical disk usage. Service issues will only occur if you hit your maximum physical allowance.
- total data transfer (traffic)
- allowance for the total amount of data, in GB, that can be
downloaded and uploaded per month. All data and email traffic is
considered in this measure. There is no maximum physical allowance, but
you will be charged at the rate of $1/GB of transfer exceeding the
allowance.You can view your actual data transfer usage from Control Panel > System tab > Resources Usage link
(left side). From here you see the your usage and the amount you have
available. You
can also click on the Traffic statistics tab and select various options to see historical traffic usage. Service issues will not occur since there is no maximum physical allowance.
- memory
- guaranteed allowance of memory (RAM) for your VPS. This is a set
amount of memory that can not be exceeded. Your VPS does not support
swap space, so your memory allocation must be sufficient for peak
usage. You can view your actual memory usage from Control Panel > System tab > Resources Usage link
(left side). Service issues will occur if your VPS needs more than your allowance.
- CPU -
your VPS is allowed to use a percentage of the total CPU power of the
physical server. We also allow your VPS to burst higher for short
periods of time. You can view your actual CPU usage from Control Panel > System tab > Resources Usage link
(left side). The percentage shown is not the percentage of the total
CPU power described above, but rather is the Linux load factor of your
VPSexpressed as a percentage. For example, a value of 100% represents a
load factor of 1. A load factor of greater than 1 (i.e. greater than
100% in your Control Panel) indicates that your processes need more CPU
than what is allocated. Service issues can occur if your CPU usage exceeds 100%. Also, since we allow your CPU to burst, and because CPU management is
difficult for the VPS management software to completely partition,
excess usage on your part can impact the service of other VPS instances
on your physical server.
- data transfer rate
- your plan allows you to transfer data out from your VPS (downloads)
at a specified rate, measured in megabits per second. The transfer rate
on inbound traffic (uploads) is not limited. Viewing your data transfer rate usage: at this time the Control Panel does not show your rate or usage. Service issues
can occur if you exceed your data transfer rate for outbound data
transfer. However, the data transfer rate limit is generous, and it is
not common for service issues to result. If you need more information
on the data transfer rate or usage for your plan, or suspect that you
are encountering service issues related to the rate limit, please
contact support@eapps.com.
Upgrading: As
mentioned previously, the resource allocations are proportional to the
price of the plan. If you need more resources, you can upgrade
seamlessly with no impact on the operation of your service. Go to Control Panel > Upgrade Center tab > Change hosting plan link. Select the plan you want and click Next
button at the top, then continue the process and pay the order. The
system will reset your billing cycle, but will also give you a credit
for your unused portion of service.
Resource Monitoring and Notification:
At this time we offer a web page monitoring service that will alert
you, and us, when your site goes down. Our promotion for this
newsletter offers a free month to try out the web page monitoring
service. Our vendor provided hosting management system sends emails
when disk and traffic are close to exceeding their allowances. In
addition, our development team is working on two additional proactive
resource management systems. The first one is a more sophisticated
monitoring service using Zenoss, an outstanding open source server and
network management system. The second one is a notification system that
will alert all customers whenever certain thresholds are exceeded for
all five of the allocated resources. More information will be
forthcoming as we get close to rolling out these two new services.
Tech Tips: Top tips for optimizing resource usage
In our previous newsletter we
offered tips on how to secure a site or directory and how to set up a domain. This month we offer our top tips for optimizing resource usage.
- Don’t store mail on server when using POP
- Mail users often find it convenient to store their mail on the
server. However, it is not a good idea to do so when your mailbox is
configured to access mail via POP because significant CPU resources are
used each time in this situation. Users that want to store their mail
on the server should configure their mailbox to use the IMAP protocol.
IMAP was designed specifically for this purpose and uses considerably
less CPU resources. IMAP users should also use Folders for their
categories of mail, rather than leave it all in the INBOX. This results
in additional efficiency improvements in download speed. A very high
percentage of our customers that encounter performance problems are
tracked down to their mail users storing large amounts of mail on the
server when using POP. Use IMAP when you want to store mail on your VPS
server, and consider upgrading your plan as the number of mail users
and the amount of mail stored on the server increases.
- Use Postini instead of SPAM ASSASSIN and Clam/AV
- The Postini SPAM/Anti-virus service is available to all customers
that user the mail server in their VPS plan. Since Postini is a third
party service, it eliminates the processing that occurs in your VPS
when you use the local SPAM ASSASSIN and Clam/AV applications.
Furthermore, SPAM ASSASSIN and Clam/AV are very resource intensive and
often cause performance and reliability problems in your VPS,
particularly if you have a lot of inbound mail. Use Postini to minimize
local process in your VPS.
- Optimize your memory heap for Java applications
- Our default configuration for Java specifies a very small allocation
for memory HEAP. Customers often leave this value at the low default,
or overcompensate by specifying too high of a value. Both of these
situation will result in service problems. The user guides for the
Java application servers we offer all include guidelines for allocating
HEAP for the plan you are on.
- Verify that you do not have unused applications installed
- Many of our customers install applications that they do not need.
Each application you install will consume a small amount of disk space,
but some such as database servers and application servers are active
processes, which consume some of your memory and CPU power. The
applications are always available for you, so you can always install
them when you need them. Uninstall unused applications to conserve
resources. NOTE: If you do not want to use Apache, the mail server,
SPF, or other base applications, you must disable them. Do not
uninstall base applications as they will be re-installed automatically
at some point when we perform certain maintenance events.
- Clear out error logs and mailboxes to reduce disk usage
- One of the most common reasons that disk usage increases is because
users are storing more mail messages on the server and/or activity and
error logs are growing. Delete and/or rotate log files and ask your
mail users to clean up their mail if it is stored on the VPS server.
- Upgrade to more efficient application versions
- Some applications, such as as Java 6 and Tomcat 6 are more efficient
than the preceding versions. Review your applications and see if we
offer a more current version for you. Then check the source providers
of these applications to determine if it is worthwhile to upgrade for
efficiency purposes.
- Ensure that your web forms are secure
- Another problem that our customers encounter results when they have
web forms that are not secure, or when they install open source
software that has security vulnerabilities. Insecure web forms can be
used as a mail relay for spammers, running up the traffic usage in your
VPS. Likewise, hackers can take advantage of security holes in sofware
you install to deploy web bots for SPAMMING and other high traffic
activities. Make sure that all of your web forms are secure and also
ensure that any software that you have installed does not have any
vulnerabilities.
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