Winner Announced for December's Best Post in Customer Forum
In our October newsletter, we announced the launch of our new community forum, at http://community.eapps.com.
Our goal is to help this forum grow into a valuable resource
for customers. The intent is not to replace our support function, but
rather to provide a supplemental source of information from the
experiences of the users of our services. To further that goal we select outstanding posts each month and award a $50 credit to the selected person's account. The winner for December is . . .
- drig23 - jdbc connections to postgresql
Promotions
One Month Free Web Page Monitoring
Did you know that eApps Hosting offers an optional service that will send an alarm whenever your site is down? The way it works is that our monitoring system will read a page that contains static text, and if the page or the text are not found, the alarm is sounded. Our support staff will restart your service and you, of course, can take action as needed. You can even set it up so that the static text is retrieved from a database to ensure that all components of your site are operational.
We are offering one month free of Web Page Monitoring, a $10 value. Just send an email to sales@eapps.com with the subject "Free Web Page Monitor" and specify your domain so we can find your account. We will reply with instructions on setting it up.
One Month Free Customer Generated Backups
One of our themes for this newsletter is backups. So it makes sense to offer a special promotion on our optional Customer Generated Backup service. This service allows you to buy a block of disk space. From your control panel, you can save off copies of your entire VPS image to that block of space. The fee is $3 per GB per month.
Our promotion is one month free, for a block of up to 20 GB (a value of up to $60). Just send an email to sales@eapps.com with the subject "Free Customer Generated Backups" and specify your domain so we can find your account. We will reply with instructions on setting it up.
Feature
Marius was born and resides in Bucharest, Romania, but his family is from the Transylvania region. He discovered he had a knack for technology after making it to the national level in a high school contest. After high school, Marius attended Politechnic University of Bucharest to pursue a degree in Hydroelectric Power generation. He decided that the power industry did not energize him and started his own business assembling and selling PCs. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a politician, but instead Marius became a freelance programmer through http://www.rentacoder.com, where he ranked in the top 1% of over 100,000 programmers. Marius was an eApps Hosting customer and learned about a position with eApps through this newsletter, and decided to join the company full time.
Marius says he enjoys the professional environment at eApps Hosting, and finds being part of a team to be particularly rewarding. Marius is married to a doctor who works in a large hospital in Bucharest. In his free time, Marius listens to Balkan/Romanian music, goes to parties and explores new areas of programming and Linux. If you encounter Marius when working with eApps, say hello, and don't worry about needing a strand of garlic or wooden stake. Just because his family is from Transylvania doesn't mean he is a vampire.
New Application Versions
Coming Soon! CentOS 5 and More!
We hate to sound like that salesperson that tells you its coming, and how great its going to be when it gets here. But it really is coming, and it really is going to be great when it gets here! We are targeting the launch of our hosting plans using CentOS 5 in January of 2008. We will announce an exact launch date soon. Some of the key benefits of the new plans are:
Did you know that eApps Hosting offers an optional service that will send an alarm whenever your site is down? The way it works is that our monitoring system will read a page that contains static text, and if the page or the text are not found, the alarm is sounded. Our support staff will restart your service and you, of course, can take action as needed. You can even set it up so that the static text is retrieved from a database to ensure that all components of your site are operational.
We are offering one month free of Web Page Monitoring, a $10 value. Just send an email to sales@eapps.com with the subject "Free Web Page Monitor" and specify your domain so we can find your account. We will reply with instructions on setting it up.
One Month Free Customer Generated Backups
One of our themes for this newsletter is backups. So it makes sense to offer a special promotion on our optional Customer Generated Backup service. This service allows you to buy a block of disk space. From your control panel, you can save off copies of your entire VPS image to that block of space. The fee is $3 per GB per month.
Our promotion is one month free, for a block of up to 20 GB (a value of up to $60). Just send an email to sales@eapps.com with the subject "Free Customer Generated Backups" and specify your domain so we can find your account. We will reply with instructions on setting it up.
Feature
Meet
eApps
This month's featured
staff member is Marius Pop. Marius splits his time between Technical
Support and Research & Development. He is responsible for making
our application
services available to customers and solving problems for customers. Marius was born and resides in Bucharest, Romania, but his family is from the Transylvania region. He discovered he had a knack for technology after making it to the national level in a high school contest. After high school, Marius attended Politechnic University of Bucharest to pursue a degree in Hydroelectric Power generation. He decided that the power industry did not energize him and started his own business assembling and selling PCs. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a politician, but instead Marius became a freelance programmer through http://www.rentacoder.com, where he ranked in the top 1% of over 100,000 programmers. Marius was an eApps Hosting customer and learned about a position with eApps through this newsletter, and decided to join the company full time.
Marius says he enjoys the professional environment at eApps Hosting, and finds being part of a team to be particularly rewarding. Marius is married to a doctor who works in a large hospital in Bucharest. In his free time, Marius listens to Balkan/Romanian music, goes to parties and explores new areas of programming and Linux. If you encounter Marius when working with eApps, say hello, and don't worry about needing a strand of garlic or wooden stake. Just because his family is from Transylvania doesn't mean he is a vampire.
New Application Versions
Coming Soon! CentOS 5 and More!
We hate to sound like that salesperson that tells you its coming, and how great its going to be when it gets here. But it really is coming, and it really is going to be great when it gets here! We are targeting the launch of our hosting plans using CentOS 5 in January of 2008. We will announce an exact launch date soon. Some of the key benefits of the new plans are:
- Apache 2.2 - improvements for authentication, proxying, caching, Tomcat and MySQL integration and all the good stuff you need
- Up to date versions - the most current release of all applications, and a much improved scheme for future OS and application updates using an application repository
- PHP - optimized for power users
- Ruby on Rails - with Mongrel, for power and scalability
- Java - the same great Java service with more capabilities coming out soon after the plan launch, including a target date of March for Glassfish and Jetty
- More apps - several new applications, including X Windows and ImageMagick graphics libraries, will be available
- Even more apps later- after the plans launch we will be working immediately on new apps, including Drupal and Wordpress in February
- Reseller plans - using Plesk and possibly other control panels; target date is in late February or early March
email - How to Spend Less Time in Your Mailbox and Enjoy Life!
How much time do you spend in your mailbox? Most people spend far more time working with email than they want. The good news is that there is hope for mail users to become more efficient, according to "online writing" consultants Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O'Flahavan of ewriteonline.com.
In an article by the duo titled "Subject Matters" in the November/December issue of Executive Travel magazine, the authors explain how having meaningful subject lines can dramatically decrease the amount of time wasted dealing with emails. They found that people spend much of their time searching for emails and opening multiple emails to see which one contains the information they need. Here are excerpts of the subject line tips provided by the author.
1. Write specific, meaningful subject lines - The subject of your email should allow you to immediately perform one of the following actions:
Bad Example: Yesterday's conference call
2. Rewrite inadequate subject lines - When you forward, reply, or archive an email, the loss of productivity associated with a poor subject line is magnified. Always rewrite the subject line so that it properly reflects the content and action to be taken, as explained in tip #1.
3. Write subject lines that feature benefits - Don't assume that every email you send is so important that the recipient will surely read it. It simply is not so. This is especially true if the recipient does not know you or if it comes from a general corporate type email address. Write a subject that means something to the recipient, and if sales oriented include the benefit that they will get by opening the message
4. Change the subject line when the topic changes - People often reply to any email from a person as a convenience even thought the content of the message has nothing to do with the subject of the message they are replying to. These long chains of emails often contain a variety of topics, making it difficult and time consuming to use later. Always change the subject when you hit reply, but are onto another topic.
Following these tips will help you spend less time in your mailbox. If you can get the majority of the people that you correspond with to learn that "Subject Matters" you will see a dramatic increase in email productivity. Pass the word!
How much time do you spend in your mailbox? Most people spend far more time working with email than they want. The good news is that there is hope for mail users to become more efficient, according to "online writing" consultants Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O'Flahavan of ewriteonline.com.
In an article by the duo titled "Subject Matters" in the November/December issue of Executive Travel magazine, the authors explain how having meaningful subject lines can dramatically decrease the amount of time wasted dealing with emails. They found that people spend much of their time searching for emails and opening multiple emails to see which one contains the information they need. Here are excerpts of the subject line tips provided by the author.
1. Write specific, meaningful subject lines - The subject of your email should allow you to immediately perform one of the following actions:
- open immediately
- open later
- archive/file
- delete
Bad Example: Yesterday's conference call
2. Rewrite inadequate subject lines - When you forward, reply, or archive an email, the loss of productivity associated with a poor subject line is magnified. Always rewrite the subject line so that it properly reflects the content and action to be taken, as explained in tip #1.
3. Write subject lines that feature benefits - Don't assume that every email you send is so important that the recipient will surely read it. It simply is not so. This is especially true if the recipient does not know you or if it comes from a general corporate type email address. Write a subject that means something to the recipient, and if sales oriented include the benefit that they will get by opening the message
4. Change the subject line when the topic changes - People often reply to any email from a person as a convenience even thought the content of the message has nothing to do with the subject of the message they are replying to. These long chains of emails often contain a variety of topics, making it difficult and time consuming to use later. Always change the subject when you hit reply, but are onto another topic.
Following these tips will help you spend less time in your mailbox. If you can get the majority of the people that you correspond with to learn that "Subject Matters" you will see a dramatic increase in email productivity. Pass the word!
