One of the first things we put on our list of “must haves” for Everleap was the ability for customers to earn commissions or credit for signing up new accounts. It was important for us, because one of the best ways to grow something like Everleap is to have you, the people who actually use it, share your experience with your friends and peers.
As you may or may not know, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) struck down the EU Safe Harbor framework back in October 2015. The Safe Harbor agreement was originally reached in 2000, and provided a framework to allow US-based companies to transfer EU citizens’ data to the USA if the company met EU standards for privacy protection.
Everleap has always taken the necessary steps to maintain US-EU Safe Harbor certification, working with our privacy management solutions partner, TRUSTe. We chose to invest in attaining Safe Harbor status because we host customers from all over the world and we wanted to make sure that our EU customers are confident that we are following EU privacy standards. We believe it’s a differentiator and shows our commitment to protecting your privacy.
We occasionally receive inquiries from potential customers who are concerned about the Microsoft license fees they may be responsible for paying when hosting on the Everleap infrastructure. So I thought I would talk about how Microsoft licensing works for hosts and hosting customers.
Typically when software is purchased, only the person or business that purchased the software is licensed to use the software. But what if a business wants to “rent out” the use of software to their customers? Enter the Service Provider Licensing Agreement, or SPLA for short.
The entire Q&A with Jeff – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
Jeff Ammons is the President of the Gwinnett, Georgia, Microsoft User Group (GGMUG). As the hosting sponsor of the GGMUG since 2010, we wanted to learn more about Jeff and his group and we talked with him recently to get the details about what he has going on and how it all came to be.
Thanks for talking with us Jeff. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background.
I’ve worked for a variety of companies over the past couple of decades ranging from very small to very large. My longest experience was with the Atlanta Journal Constitution where I spent ten years. I love the AJC, but newspapers are having a hard time in the 21st century.
I’m very happy to report that we’ve successfully renewed our Microsoft Gold Partner status for 2016, making this our 11th year in a row.
Every year we invest time and resources in meeting the high bar of requirements that Microsoft has set for the Microsoft Gold Partner status. We do this to demonstrate our commitment to staying on top of Microsoft technologies, and to maintain access to MSDN subscriptions, product licensing, Microsoft support and other pre-sales/advisory resources that are only available to Gold Partners.
I’ve been recapping our Top 10 accomplishments at DiscountASP.NET for many years over on the DiscountASP.NET blog, so I started the same tradition for Everleap last year. Here is my Top 10 list for 2015.
We offer a Shared SQL hosting solution with our cloud hosting plans but some of you told us you needed more – more SQL storage, or more customization, or you needed to manage a lot of smaller SQL databases for a growing SaaS application. So we launched a Managed SQL hosting solution where you get your own private VM with your own SQL installation. Since it’s a private VM that is not shared with any other customers, we can do some customization on the server. We can enable features like SQL CLR and SQL Jobs or install special software or set up custom configurations for transaction logs or backups.One of the cool things about Everleap is the ability to run your site from multiple servers and have those servers automatically load balanced. A lot of complicated things take place on the router to achieve load balancing, but in simple terms load balancing is just the equal distribution of the incoming requests across whatever number of servers the site is running on.
For example, if your site is running on two servers (something that’s available for every site on Everleap), and 100 requests come in for the site, 50 requests will go to each of the two servers. That way the incoming load is balanced between the available servers.
The entire Q&A with Jason – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
GoldenSlam.com was founded by developer Jason Mauss. Jason started programming as a teenager in the 1990s and he is currently a Lead Software Engineer for a data center company. GoldenSlam.com gives tennis fans the opportunity to play a fantasy tennis game and follow players, scores and stats from the pro tour, while also being part of a community of individuals passionate about the sport.
Everleap: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Jason. Tell us a little bit about your site and how it got started.
Jason Mauss: I had the idea for the site kicking around my head for a long time. When you look at other popular sports like hockey, baseball, soccer, and football, they all have data easily available on tons of sites, with all kinds of ways fans can invest themselves in the sport. It used to be that you would just watch your favorite team once a week and that would be about it. Millions of fans can now watch ALL of the games played each week, create their own fantasy rosters and really just live and breathe their sport.
What’s the difference between cloud hosting and traditional shared hosting? Ah, the eternal question! We provided an overview in a previous article, but now we are going to look into performance.
In a Code Project review, Microsoft MVP Kevin Griffin ran load tests on Everleap servers and reported impressive results. But he used a basic ASP.NET MVC test site, and we wondered how load tests on a more complex application would look. So we ran load tests against nopCommerce, an e-commerce storefront with a SQL database back end.
We’ve made some changes to the way Control Panel fetches and presents data. The changes will make some pages considerably faster than they have been in the past.
We spent some time carving up the out-of-the-box Windows Azure Pack control panel API, and we were able to make some pretty dramatic page loading time improvements. You’ll see a faster main page after login, and a faster site page. Those were the two slowest pages so they were the first ones we wanted to attack. We’re continuing work on improving speed elsewhere in Control Panel as well.
