apnscp

The Predecessor, apnscp:

With time comes learning and of course, with learning comes experience. We first began developing our unique control panel, "apnscp" in 2002. On December 26th, 2002, after 5 months in existence as a company, apnscp was born and unleashed onto our diminutive customerbase.

apnscp proved to be an immensely popular control panel within the markets that we actively targeted, so much that we became the "go to company" for offering fast and stable Web hosting backed by superior and knowledgeable support at an affordable price. Say that five times fast. We knew our competitors couldn't and that is what gave us the jumpstart to become profitable within a year of operation.

Something was missing with apnscp though: heart. Sure it had style... it had aesthetics... it had neat pie charts to amuse our customers, but it lacked its own individual persona. apnscp epitomized the idiom of "form over functionality". Worth mentioning too, a disturbing trend appeared: as we added more functionality, the code became less and less manageable. Something needed to change and that change needed to be the model.

"Functionality with Form":

Flash-forward to a couple years later. We are painstakingly laboring over the drawing board attempting to come up with a perfect blend of functionality and form. It's a late night, as many of those nights were, drafting idea after idea of what apnscp's successor should look like and embody. The idea dawned on us, like a bright light that appears out of nowhere.

We can ditch our reliance upon Ensim WEBppliance ™ to handle apnscp and instead write our own engine. We can tie in hooks to Ensim calls where needed, but everything from the ground-up is to be designed as a standalone control panel. We can finally cut loose the shackles that made apnscp resemble a bastard child of Ensim. Finally a notion worth pursuing. This became our ultimate goal, to write a control panel that stands alone from Ensim. We went through several iterations before finally settling on the design and model seen today.

Defining Characteristics:

After reading a few paragraphs about esprit in general, it is time to break it down to what you gain through using apnscp esprit to assist in managing your hosting. One of the biggest gains that you get is our utmost familiarity with the system. We deconstructed it from the top, down to the bottom and rebuilt upon the internal structure. In other words, we wrote the control panel from top to bottom and know every little nook and cranny of why something works or doesn't.

Additional derived benefits include:

Exclusive Interoperable, Segregated Core: esprit, much like its predecessor, utilizes a high-performance backend process to perform elevated system calls. This ensures that trivial functions are performed with little to no overhead. Relevant functions are grouped into separate classes that are dynamically loaded upon request to further reduce overhead.

Graphical Analyses: 3D graphs of bandwidth and disk quota usage for easy viewing accompany esprit. The graph class, responsible for the image generation, also features a discrete and continuous bar graph for two-datum sets as well as a flat pie chart and anti-aliasing through the native PHP GD library.

Easy Expandability: the apnscp templating engine, responsible for content-generation, revolves around data objects that contain assertions among other provisions to easily deliver the proper links given the configuration of a site.

Dual-layer authentication system: as it was deconstructed, a passthru was created to authenticate a Zope session (Ensim WEBppliance's native Web-based language) from a PHP session, thus an easy call exists to verify that the user logged in is indeed the proper user. Primary authentication occurs within esprit with a secondary authentication verification that takes place in Ensim.

SOAP API: a fully exposed API exists in esprit over SOAP that permits any user with an account to remotely query the control panel. The net result of such a setup is integration within any application of any type of metric making it extremely useful.

One-Click Framework & API: effortlessly install various Web applications with one-click of the mouse and a few keystrokes. Applications install instantaneously and the status displays in your browser window via an AJAX callback. Average application installation time is in under 20 seconds. For the programmer out there, you can develop drivers that tie directly into the framework to publicize your application and get it known by advertising it to over 1,200 users.

Historical Billing: all transactions are recorded in the database and viewable by the customer. This allows for easy historical tracking of all prior payments. Payments are posted next business day along with a quick invoice template for formal expense statements.

Trouble Tickets: customer support is furnished through an integrated trouble ticket system. Should a problem ever arise, the occurrence is immediately dispatched to not only our main support department located at support@apisnetworks.com, but a brief copy of the problem is dispatched immediately as SMS text messages to our cell phones. This consideration ensures a prompt response time whenever a problem arises.

Common Site Tools: want to check the latency from one of our servers to a target? Want to see how many routers it passes through? Interested in the whois records of a particular domain? apnscp provides both traceroute and whois tools to the customer to easily find the answers to those issues.

Multiple Domain & Log Personalities: Setup individual logfiles for certain subdomain + domain or domain or subdomain matches. From there you can parse them through AWStats, Webalizer, Urchin, Analog, or your log parsing program of choice. Even better is that you point as many domains as you want to various locations within your hosting account with absolutely no limit.

Ruby on Rails Management: Quickly upgrade your existing Rails framework to the latest version posted on RubyForge with one click of the mouse button. Output is displayed in the browser as it occurs via an AJAX callback.

Server Statistics & Information: we emulated phpsysinfo's functionality in our control panel plus decided to throw in other information to whet the appetite of those who are interested in mail parsing performance. Want a quick overview of the average ratio of spam to ham? How about the top 10 rules triggered... breakdown per hour? How about the time spent on each message?

Constant Revolving Development: as esprit embodies an extremely flexible design, adding new features is quite literally a snap [in]. New releases tend to pop-up every other week replete with new features and even better functionality. apnscp esprit constantly evolves every day. No more waiting 8 months for an update to address a critical bug in some software that you use day-in and day-out to manage your Web site. Updates happen on the fly when necessary and it is always being updated.

Unbounded Possibilities: as we are the developers of apnscp esprit from the ground up, no new feature is daunting. We have addressed complex issues with relative ease and continue to do so with great regularity. No plateau is insurmountable in our world. In fact, in our dictionary "insurmountable" is a synonym for "easy". Once you use apnscp esprit, you too will realize "insurmountable" is a joke.

So now you have read about our unique control panel, why not test drive it today?

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