Apis Networks
Preamble and History:
apnscp is to new customers as what a book of advanced Calculus is
to a child in sixth grade. Certainly, at first glace it looks
overwhelming and even the title might elude you, but rest assured,
once you have been accustomed to our system, it is easy to manage
and is incredibly powerful. apnscp is not only a control panel,
but it is a highly praised interface to managing your domain.
In fact, we receive more lauds for apnscp, than our services that
we offer.
apnscp was born on December 26, 2002 as our answer to differentiation
between the thousands of other hosting providers that we actively
compete with daily. Admittedly, apnscp was a proof of concept.
It arose as a need to further integrate billing information into the
control panel, but from there, we expanded its core to cover much
more than just billing. apnscp is built upon the Ensim WEBppliance™
core, a popular control panel for hosting service providers; however,
it lacks modularity and easy expandability in its native state.
That critical component of Ensim WEBppliance™ is the reason
that apnscp exists. We ripped apart the internal pieces of it,
just as a car mechanic would do to a car, to discover that not only
could we add a transparent PHP layer ontop of it, but we could achieve
our visions of a 'perfect' control panel.
Progression:
Progress has been steady and fueled by our wonderful customers. Without their constant suggestions, apnscp would not be as multi-faceted as it is today. Certainly, we put our own ideas into apnscp; yet, apnscp is the way it is today thanks to those that can envision the same way that we do — our talented customers. apnscp 1.0, the initial release, gave way to the subsequent minor revision levels and finally the interim skin which has become the standard skin for apnscp, which was integrated into the control panel on August 9, 2003. The longest hiatus for development has been between 1.0 and 1.5. Unfortunately, perfecting an already heavily lauded control panel is a difficult task; however, we continue to envision the growth of apnscp and merge the ideas into it. While apnscp 1.5's sluggish development growth appears on the outside to users, the inside will be an efficient, heavily-integrated, solution to our users.
Defining Characteristics:
After reading a few paragraphs about apnscp in general, it is time
to break it down to what you gain through using apnscp. 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. Additional benefits
are:
- Exclusive Interoperable Core
- apnscp utilizes a high-performance backend process to perform command-line level calls to Ensim WEBppliance™.
- Graphical Analyses
- 3D graphs of bandwidth and disk quota usage for easy viewing accompany apnscp. 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.
- Zope/PHP Authentication
- 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.
- Database Backups
- MySQL and PostgreSQL cronjob (automated backup) processes were added to the second revision of apnscp to grant users an automated way to protect their dynamic data on a revolving time frame.
- FrontPage Management
- Microsoft FrontPage™ may be installed/uninstalled at the user's discretion and in no such way affects performance other than the core FrontPage components, such as the customized .htaccess file and _vti_* directories.
- Historical Billing
- all transactions are recorded in the database and viewable by the customer. This allows for easy historical tracking of all prior payments.
- 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.
- Unbounded Possibilities
- as we are the developers of the transparent overlay to Ensim WEBppliance™, no new feature is daunting. We were once developers (and still are); thus, whatever new enhancement you may think of is feasible.