News
eApps Hosting is Growing and Hiring!
In June, 2007 eApps signed up its 3750th VPS! We now have customers in over 125 countries! Our customers tell us that one of the key reasons they choose eApps Hosting is because of our outstanding Technical Support department. We believe strongly that our support function needs to be performed by our employees. We do not outsource technical support. Due to our world-wide growth, however, we are looking to expand our employee base to include residents of other countries.

If you are interested in joining the eApps Hosting team please send your qualifications to jobs@eapps.com and mention that you saw this article. If you know someone that you think is qualified, contact us regarding our employee referral bonus. We are looking for full time employees, to reside in their own country, that have the following skills. We will provide training in our USA headquarters. We have two positions open at this time.

Technical Support Representative - Requirements:
  • Excellent English language skills
  • Strong Linux skills
  • Experience with Internet services and applications
  • Effective diagnosis and troubleshooting skills
  • Live in a time zone from GMT +2 through GMT +12
Application Package Builder - Requirements:
Maintenance Report
Within the next week, we will be sending out announcements regarding updates to the specifications of the hosting plans. We are very excited about these changes because they are designed to provide you with more resources and a higher quality of service. Here is a summary of the changes. The announcements will tell you when the changes are going to be implemented for your plan and will also provide more details about the impact of the changes.

1) Simplified server resources allocations - We will be moving to the simple (SLM) method for server resources. Our virtualization vendor, SW Soft, now has an improved method for allocating server resources to the Virtual Private Servers. Under the old model, there were about a dozen parameters that controlled the size of your VPS partition. These included 5 memory components, and others to control the number of processes, TCP/IP connections, number of open files allowed, and so on. Any time a customer hit one of these limits, failures would occur inside the VPS. Under the new SLM model, the only limits are for memory and CPU consumption. Furthermore, if you issue standard Linux commands to see your memory and CPU usage, you will see accurate information consistent with what you would see on a dedicated server. Each VPS will be given an amount of memory equal to or greater than the allocation that they now receive. There will be no limits on the other resource parameters. Based on our testing, the vast majority of our customers will benefit from the new model for resources.

2) Changes in customer made "server side" backups - eApps Hosting makes daily operational backups of a complete image of your VPS and retains those backups for a minimum of seven days. In addition, customers can make "server side" backups of their entire VPS from the Control Panel. After a careful review of this supplemental backup feature, we have determined that it has not been configured effectively. We therefore are revamping how this service works. To achieve our goals of having a highly effective secondary backup feature, we will now be offering this service at an extra charge. More details will be forthcoming, but the approach will be to allow customers to pre-allocate additional backup space on a high capacity backup storage device at a monthly “per megabyte” fee. Customers may then make as many backups as needed on their allocated space.

3) More disk space and data transfer- As reported in the June newsletter, the disk space allowance has increased by 25% to 50%  for all plans, data transfer by 50%.

Feature
Meet eApps
We are starting a new feature this month called Meet eApps. Each month we will profile an employee. This month we are pleased to introduce Mohammed King, who functions in a dual role as a System Administrator and Technical Support Representative. 

Mohammed (Moo) was born in 1978 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He moved to the United States in 1991 and graduated from Franklin High School in New Jersey. Moo is the oldest of ten children, two of whom reside in his native country, Sierra Leone.

Here is what he says about his job at eApps Hosting . . .  “The role of a System Admin at eApps is very challenging because of the fact that you get to work with lots of different technologies. This challenge is a great opportunity to learn different things. That is what I like about my job. I can honestly say if I decide to be a DBA or a Developer today, my experience at eApps has put me in the right direction.”

When Moo is not solving customer's problems and taking on technical challenges he enjoys watching movies, playing soccer, and listening to Reggae music.

New Applications
Updates are now available for the Tomcat 6 and phpMyAdmin applications, for customers on the CentOS plans. Applications can be upgraded from the System tab of your Control Panel. Please read the Release Notes before you upgrade your application versions! See http://support.eapps.com/release/all.

phpMyAdmin 2.10.2 - This is an upgrade from the prior version, 2.9.0.2. A large list of security and bug fixes can be found here.