Newsletter (December 25 2005)

From Apis Networks Wiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Non-technical Section 2.1 New Control Panel 2.2 Forums 2.3 New Servers, New Hardware 2.4 Disk Space Increases 2.5 New Referral System 2.6 PayPal is going... going... almost gone 2.7 2005 Reflection, 2006 Outlook 3 Technical Section 3.1 Version Control 3.2 Ruby on Rails, Package Management 3.3 PHP5 3.4 "apnscp Guide" 3.5 Privatized Tomcat Instances 3.6 esprit 3.7 SOAP 3.8 SOAP Contest 3.9 2005 Year in Review, 2006 Outlook 4 Conclusion

Introduction

We hope that everyone's having an enjoyable holiday break, replete from fattening turkeys and yummy eggnog. For myself and the few other crew members of Apis Networks, we're still working hard on moving Apis Networks forward by pioneering the latest and greatest technologies for Web hosting.

As we look back on 2005 with a smile, there have been a lot of changes worth noting to our users. We'll break this into two separate sections, the non-technical section for the average user and a technical section for the nerds. Of course that label isn't meant in a disparaging fashion at all; there are still some items of interest in the non-technical section, so don't forget to skim over it!

Non-technical Section

New Control Panel

The biggest news of 2004, aside from the new, beefier servers has been the upcoming control panel. As we all know, the current control panel lacks an "edge". apnscp, the current control panel, set out to prove one thing — we could feasibly create a completely new control panel ontop of an existing one (Ensim WEBppliance). Of course it demonstrated that purpose quite well, but apnscp is too strongly coupled with Ensim; by that I mean that it is very difficult to add an enhancement to apnscp without making several changes to the system internally. Sure we could add the SpamAsssassin Wizard to apnscp, but we would also need to make changes to roughly 15 separate scripts in the control panel to accommodate for that addition. Yes, it is that messy. Even worse, there is no set template for any new page we create in the control panel.

Enter the new control panel, nicknamed "apnscp esprit". esprit was born from the ashes — or should I say magnetized platters? — of apnscp 1.5. apnscp 1.5 was to be the successor to apnscp, but met an untimely death. After a few months of grieving and thinking, more thinking, not so much grieving, then even less grieving, and finally a lot of thinking, esprit came about. apnscp 1.5 wasn't anything exciting or new. We just rewrote a few components and added a couple engines to the control panel to simplify adding new pages. That's all that apnscp 1.5 was; thankfully, it's no longer with us. Instead of rehashing apnscp 1.5, we decided to go an entirely new direction: rewrite the control panel from scratch... Completely remove its reliance upon Ensim, and finally, add unique features that you won't find anywhere else. Eye candy can only get you so far in the world. Differentiation is the key to survival and I think we finally got it right this time around.

There are a lot of components to esprit that may not woo the non-tech savvy crowd at this point, but for those on the fence, here are a couple new features that you might find useful:

• Early warning system for disk space and bandwidth usage. Have you maxed out your disk space on the account? Receive automatic notices as you near the threshold for both disk space and bandwidth. *feature currently pending development*
• Want to install a blog... a forum... a wiki... a photo gallery for your Web site? Afraid of trying to install it by hand? Afraid of keeping up to date with the latest patches for the application? Say hello to the One-Click Install feature of esprit. We'll be adding various applications that you can install onto your Web site with one click on the mouse and a couple configuration options. Best of all, you can optionally enroll in an auto-patching service to make sure your application is current. We'll be laying the groundwork for this in a couple weeks, so stay tuned.
• You've used 100% of your disk space? Need a starting point in tracking down where all the space is going? Check out the "Disk Usage Breakdown" page of esprit. It gives an overview of all the users on your account and how much space each individual has used. Additionally, it gives the size of their e-mail folders.
• One-click logins to Webmail from the control panel for both Horde and SquirrelMail.
• Brand new news interface; much simpler to use and navigate. News is now handled by a built-in calendar into the control panel. Best of all, with a little tweaking, you can even bring the news to your desktop without ever having to login to the control panel. This topic is explained in full under the "Technical" section, specifically the blurb about SOAP.
• Server load and uptime are now listed in the control panel once you login. This should help users gauge the current server performance. Load is the amount of work the server is currently doing and uptime is how long the server has been running without interruption. Some things may prompt a server reboot (e.g. hardware failure, server lock-ups, kernel upgrades), but generally speaking, the uptime should be high.

Now there's a catch to all of this. apnscp esprit isn't quite finished yet. We still have a while to go, but every week the control panel gets closer to completion. It has matured to the point where it is fairly usable, but then again, there are bugs that you might encounter with it. Thus, we're asking you to not only help us by testing it out and letting us know about any features you want, but to also report any bugs that you might find.

If you can help us out by giving the invaluable feedback that makes a business a business, then by all means, check out the new control panel.

Here is a quick guide to accessing apnscp esprit:

Plug in http://*your.domain.name.com*/cpadmin/ into the browser. You should now be redirected to your control panel. If you do not and receive a "Page Cannot Be Found" error message, then stop. Your server name is vector. Skip down to the next paragraph to follow the next set of instructions. Otherwise you should see a new URL. It looks a bit like https://cp.something.apisnetworks.com/webhost/... See that something value immediately following "https://cp." in the URL? That is the server that you're on. Possible values at this time are: eigen, linear, kernel, vector. Use this as the server name value.

Now we know what server we're on, it's a cinch to access apnscp esprit. Visit https://beta.cp.servername.apisnetworks.com/. Replace servername with the server that you're on (discovered in the previous paragraph). Login with your main login/password for the account, don't click the "Admin or Reseller" option and you're in. Be sure to check this out often as it will be your new control panel and hopefully it'll be a solid one.

Forums

Way back when Apis Networks was just getting started up we never had a need for forums to discuss with users questions they might have about their Web site. We could, or 99% of the time it was myself, specifically address the roundabout non-account questions. Times changed, we increased in size by over 20 times and suddenly the forums became a grand idea. The problem of course is that they're not that widely publicized as of yet. Therefore we are asking users to help breathe life into the revisited forums by asking that you feel free to ask your absurdly irrelevant questions there. Don't be afraid to hold the question in. If you have a question, then there's a good chance I or someone else who actually frequents the forums could help you out.

New Servers, New Hardware

As times change, businesses grow, and new technologies are introduced at more affordable prices, we just can't resist spoiling everyone. Finally the first generation of servers were phased out. To put it in layman's terms, they were just about as powerful as your desktop. Pentium 4 processors... 1 GB of RAM... basic IDE hard drives. Not too appealing, huh? Well we took the plunge in upgrading everyone with new Dell servers complete with dual Xeon 2.4GHz processors, 2 GB ECC RAM, Ultra-wide 320 SCSI drives (fibre channel too!), and embedded remote management. It made our lives simpler from the administrative standpoint and also gave you a lot more performance to play with. No server migration can be completed successfully with minimal downtime without a lot of planning and quite a bit of work. Over the course of 5 months though the remaining four servers were consolidated onto four next generation servers.

The best feature of all is change though are the RAID 1 arrays. Only Kernel has this feature enabled at this time; however though, we will diligently convert the remaining three servers to RAID 1 arrays shortly after esprit is released. The benefit derived from this change is that the servers are fail-safe. If one drive dies unexpectedly, zero data is lost in the process. All we need to do is bring the server down momentarily and swap in a new hard drive. Gone are the days of manually recovering the remains of a drive and filling in the cracks with the data from the previous day's backup.

Note though that once we bring the other three servers down during the middle of the night to work on the conversion, there will be some lengthy downtime to the tune of 4+ hours. Preserving existing data on the servers while at the same time building the RAID 1 array is a bit tricky, but it can be done. As time nears for the conversion, you will receive an individual e-mail of the specific time and date the operation is to take place.

Disk Space Increases

We will be making a few changes to how disk space is handled on the server. What this means for the average user is that you'll be receiving an increase to the tune of the value at the 95% percentile of the average unmonitored disk space usage per account on the server. Sounds slightly cryptic? Actually after reading over it I too am a little confused as to the original meaning, thus I'll reword that as: you'll be getting a generous disk space upgrade within the next few months. There's going to be a lot of statistics and number crunching involved in determining the exact rate that you will receive, but the new figures won't leave you with proportionately less space than what you started out with.

Ok, maybe I wasn't the best guy to write this newsletter. Let's try this again once more... You're getting more disk space.

New Referral System

Got some friends who need hosting? Want to make a bit of money off them? How does 10% of what they pay sound? Sounding good? How about we'll also up the ante to 5% of what their friends that they refer pay as well. Even better yet, every time they make a payment, you get those rates. So long as they're a customer with us and paying for hosting, whether it's monthly, quarterly, annually, whenever, if it's a new individual we will reward you monthly. This new system is set to launch within the next couple of weeks in the next apnscp esprit update. Once the system is up, there will be a formal announcement in the forums as well as within the control panels.

PayPal is going... going... almost gone

PayPal has been one of those make or break things with our customers. When we first started off and the revenues couldn't quite cover the costs of accepting credit cards directly, PayPal was the most cost-effective form of accepting payments. Things went on their own merry way, up until we started seeing randomized cancellation patterns... and then e-mails came trickling in, "I logged into my PayPal account and it cancelled my subscription, what do I do!?!!!?" Ok maybe the e-mails weren't worded like that, but they were pretty close. PayPal is a horrible system for managing recurring payments. One-time payments are a good option with PayPal, but if the payments recur over time, then there are better options. Unfortunately, internally we built the system around PayPal and PayPal slowly began to devour us. The good news is that we'll be accepting credit cards directly soon, once esprit is up and running, but before the RAID 1 arrays in section 3. Give it a couple of months and finally you can sleep comfortably at night knowing that your subscription won't be randomly cancelled overnight.

We must rewrite the entire billing infrastructure to make this change happen, but as things are also turning out, you will also be able to use a discounted rate plan through our new processor, if you run an e-commerce Web site.

2005 Reflection, 2006 Outlook

Looking back on 2005, from January up until now, we have matured quite a lot as a firm. We formally incorporated back in April, ate the associated taxes, winced, cried a little bit once the quarterlies came around, then went back to work. Servers were secured even better than what they were in 2004 or 2003; as much as I am a disbeliever in the notion of something being 100% secured, I can safely say they're very strongly secured, up to the 99% percentile. Nothing is ever truly secured, but these servers are the next best thing.

esprit is slowly maturing into a beast of a control panel... we have been busy adapting to the ever-evolving world of Web hosting... increasing server throughput... nearly eliminating the chance for a Web site to runaway and consume a server... and just for a moment you have to stop and realize how did this all happen?

Sure a lot of comes about from minute factors, but it's those tiny things that help shape a business, for better or worse sometimes.

If it were not for that user that accidentally wrote an errant script that brought the entire server down, would we have adjusted the Web server to catch and kill those pages? Probably not.

If it weren't for the user who wrote a script with 100 security holes that some hacker exploited, would we have even considered auditing that facet? Definitely not.

If it weren't for the admin that didn't pay attention to the disk space usage his site was using and locked out MySQL on the server... would we have noticed the problem? Nope.

The bottom line is that these little things, these tiny slips by the user, they impact everyone. First the impact is negative; the server croaked. The Web serve blew-up. Oh my, the server exploded in a big ball of fire. But it raises one of those flags, the flag that makes you question how strong of a setup that you have running. Once you sit down and think about how the problem happened and what you can do to provide a longterm solution, then it becomes clear that hey, as much as a problem as this user may have caused, it helped solidify the server. It's those constant adaptations that have made us who we are today and it's those that do inadvertently cause the problems that we salute.

Just remember it's always better to be verbose about matters than quiet. Some of the most recent laudable features, at my discretion, that we've come up with stemmed from troubleticket resolutions. The SpamAssassin Wizard? Inquiry about how to tune it to stop spam. Individualized SpamAssassin filtering? Came from another trouble ticket. Version control? That was a troubleticket. Over 2/3rds of the new features in apnscp esprit? You got it, customer feedback.

In summary, as a company you can't develop a unique identity without customer feedback. It's essential to the health of any business, so whatever ideas are on your mind... Whatever words are on your tongue that could help improve the business... Feel free to voice them. We listen, because otherwise without the invaluable feedback, we would have just been another Web host in a commodity market.

We'll be starting 2006 off on the right foot by furthering esprit's development and migrating away from the commodity market that so many Web hosts find themselves in. When you're one out of a million, what makes the company special? Absolutely nothing. When you're one in a million, then you're doing something right.

Technical Section

Phew that was rough. Now the moment all of you nerds have been waiting for, the good stuff.

Version Control

Spawned from customer feedback, version control, in the form of Subversion and CVS, will be coming soon to a server near you. In fact, it may already be up by the time you read this. Mosey on over to esprit to activate it [discussion link].

Now here's an important aside. Directly, I've had five users request Trac support as a one-click install in esprit. Although five separate requests won't exactly generate immediate development for Trac, it does raise an eyebrow or two or three. Well maybe not three. At any rate, if I can receive an adequate percentage of users that would like to see this feature integrated into the control panel, then it will be one of the first one-click applications in esprit; that interface is set to premiere in a couple weeks. So if you want Trac and want to light a fire, then by all means either discuss it on the forums or drop me an e-mail directly. I'm keeping a tally on requests for Trac.

Ruby on Rails, Package Management

Ruby on Rails was launched near the beginning of December. Most hosts use a standardized version consistent across all accounts, which of course creates a slight problem... upgrading. 1.0 rolls around and who's there to upgrade it? Does the host assume the liability in upgrading everyone's Ruby on Rails distribution and pray that it doesn't break? Is the host afraid of that change? Do they disregard it under the notion that "We might break something." Well if you thought "Yes" was the answer to any of those questions, rest assured that under our version of Ruby on Rails, you are 100% incorrect.

We took a slightly different route in setting up RoR, individual instances. That means that the rails gem you install for domaina.com is completely independent from the rails install on domainb.com. Furthermore, even the rake install is different. What's even better is that it is guaranteed to always be current. Underneath the frontend, once you click "Enable Ruby on Rails Support", it queries RubyForge to pull down the latest rails version available. This makes upgrading a snap too. Click on "Reinstall Ruby on Rails" and presto, you are now running the most current version available.

Ruby on Rails has a pre-requisite of SSH access, so you would need at least a Basic account to make full use of the MVC. If you have that satisfied, head on over to esprit to enable it. [discussion link]

Now stopping just there wouldn't be quite the Apis way. We further enhanced the experience by throwing a package manager into apnscp esprit. You can browse all of the gems available on RubyForge alphabetically and install whichever you want.

PEAR support is also there for you PHP diehards. This can be done with any account and we've changed the include path a little bit for scripts. Now /home/virtual/*domainname*/usr/share/pear/ has precedence over the global /usr/share/pear/ meaning you can override global packages with local ones.

CPAN support will come eventually; it poses a slightly different challenge of removing the hardlinked modules and then installing the newer ones. The filesystem is structured such that all Perl modules under /usr/lib/perl5/ are hardlinked to the master copy. Update a Perl module there and bam, everyone else's copy of the same module is updated -- there's a slight problem.

PHP5

PHP5 has been up and running since June. In case you missed the announcements, you can run it in parallel to your existing PHP4 scripts with a little .htaccess modification. The applicable Resource Center article covers binding scripts based on an extension to be parsed by the PHP5 interpreter. With the exception of SimpleXML, SOAP, and SQLite, the PHP5 core nearly mimics the PHP4 one. For the most part, your script should run fine as a PHP5 application, unless you use $this as a generic assignment within a class, then again that's a bad thing to do. PHP has a full listing of changes between 4 and 5 that is worth a look if you want to convert your application over.

"apnscp Guide"

I'm sure you've used the Resource Center at least once in your life to find a quick answer to a question, but that addresses just that... quick questions. It avoids the more detailed discussions of complex topics. The guide, originally launched a few months back but postponed for esprit development, serves that purpose... the advanced stuff probably 1% of the population would find interesting.

There are a few articles up right now mostly dealing with e-mail, but eventually I would like to see this turn into a one-stop shop for sharing your tips and tricks of the Web hosting world. Check it out now and be sure to check it out after esprit is finished.

Privatized Tomcat Instances

Here is an interesting idea that I've been pondering personally. Private instances of Tomcat. By that I mean we provide the preconfigured port bindings for Apache to talk to Tomcat and you run and manage the Tomcat server.

I am fully aware of the differing environments that people wish to employ with Tomcat and the global instance just doesn't satisfy those needs; thus I'd like to ask you directly: Are you a Tomcat user? Would you like to be able to handle Tomcat exclusively for your site? If so, let me know. So long as everyone can keep the heap sizes down to manageable figures, the idea should be fine. Originally Tomcat was kept as a global process running as a singleton for RAM considerations, but I believe personally it may be one of those value-added features to the Advanced and higher accounts.

esprit

If you glanced over the non-technical section, you probably saw the huge blurb about esprit. If you haven't read it yet, read it again. There is a lot more to esprit than just that. Those are some of the basic operations to help people out. Here's the part where it shines.

• Crontab interface, enable/disable Crontab support on the fly and add cronjobs (requires SSH; deprecates the ol' troubleticket method)
• DNS manager, add/remove A/AAAA/TXT/CNAME/MX/DNAME records for your account; also included is a SPF wizard.
• Ruby on Rails and a package manager (already mentioned)
• A brand-new MySQL user/database component that takes full advantage over MySQL 5.0's offerings (that's a standard feature too). Finally the ability to create new databases will be easily visible (instead of the "Change MySQL Password" -> "Create MySQL Database" [... blame that on the lack of a template engine]) and users can be added/removed on the fly with varying permissions including secure grant options.
• Everything in esprit has a SOAP equivalent. There are two layers to the design, the first is the actual control panel you visit and the second is the SOAP portion. The best part? Remote extendability. See the next section for a few applications of SOAP and really really cool things you can do with esprit. Yes each of those links takes you to a separate SOAP application with esprit.
• Built-in ACL manager ("Access Control Lists"). ACLs offer an entirely new extension of permissions; think of it as the standard owner, group, other model but instead of it being a one-to-one relationship, it's now a many-to-one. You can add rwx access to several users without compromising the integrity of the file by opening it up to rwx to other or creating a new group (which you can't do anyway, breaks quotas).

esprit's permanent location until it replaces apnscp is https://beta.cp.*servername*.apisnetworks.com/. If you don't quite know what to fill in for *servername* then check the non-technical section for an explanation of how to determine your server name.

SOAP

SOAP gives you a lightweight, language-independent method of extending esprit. You can pull data from your control panel on your Web site or even your desktop. Want to monitor your disk space usage in realtime? Do it with SOAP. Want to monitor bandwidth? The next billing date? Service status? Latest news item? You name it, if it's available in the control panel, then it's available in SOAP.

The best part is the simplicity of the system. Everything follows a similar structure such that you create the SOAP client, then call a function. All of the ugly logic is tucked away on the server and you're left with easy one-liner calls.

The control panel can also be brought to your desktop through an application such as Konfabulator or Serious Samurize. There's already an example up of using esprit with Samurize, including a complete ready-to-go application.

As time progresses and users let us know what types of information/statistics they would like to pull from the control panel, the better esprit should become. Feedback will determine how neat esprit is, so if you have an idea for a statistic to pull from the control panel, just let us know.

SOAP Contest

Finally no unique offering would be complete without a contest. We'll be running a contest after esprit is released showcasing customer ingenuity in using SOAP. There will be two contests, one for desktop widgets (a la Samurize and Konfabulator) and the other, a catch-all, for Web and standalone applications. More information, including the fabulous prizes, will be available once the contest is formally announced, but bear in mind, there's going to be a contest with cash prizes. Pop that IDE open and start thinking of new and exciting things.

2005 Year in Review, 2006 Outlook

Our direction right now is to continue to cater to the developer; to deliver the best environment imaginable. Slowly but surely we're getting there. It is taking a considerable amount of time to write all of the backend operations to accommodate for these changes, but so far it's looking great. We're also driven by feedback. It is the most invaluable asset that any business can possess. It lets us know what we're doing right... what we're doing wrong... and what we need to revamp. If you ever have any thoughts on your mind about how we can improve your experience, either let me know specifically or just toss the idea out on the forums.

Conclusion

That just about wraps this year's newsletter up. In case you missed it, it will also be available in a 519 page hardcover book titled, "I think I wrote too much." in stores on January 3rd, 2006. As much as I enjoy droning on about topics, I too must go engage in the holiday festivities, but just know that support will be available all through today via troubletickets in the control panel. If you break something, just let us know.

Have a great holiday, we look forward to serving you in 2006!

Matt Saladna

Chief Liaison/Head

Apis Networks