Now, to the point; we missed you in Miami! We need to grow our sales team in Sweden.
If you are a person with interests in sales and technology and have big ambitions, want to
join a young and expanding IT company with a super exciting product portfolio, contact us
immediately.

We have recently moved to a new, super awesome, office in central Västerås (just a 3-min
walk from the train station) and here you will work with some of the best in the business.

Don’t hesitate to send your resume to job@atomia.com or call us at 021-495 26 20.

Visit atomia.com/jobs for more information.

We have also moved our entire infrastructure to QuickNet’s data center, just a few minutes walking distance from the new office.

Light colors and a bright atmosphere makes the new office a pleasant work place! Having great colleagues helps as well.
New signs were put up this week.	Pink ones, of course!
The Melker House hosts many interesting companies, like our sister company Pingdom, for example.
The mandatory birds-eye view

The new address is:
Kopparbergsvägen 8, 722 13 Västers, SWEDEN

In this video we demonstrate how Atomia Cloud Hosting Platform can be installed on a server using Atomia Sky Manager. After the installation the complete platform will be set up with all the resources needed to start hosting both Linux and Windows websites.

The installation is performed on a single host with moderate specifications:

• 1 x Root Server EX 8
• Intel® Xeon® E3-1275 Quad-Core incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology
• 16 GB DDR3 RAM ECC
• 1 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s Hard Drive
• 2 x 120 GB SSD Hard DriveControl Panel

The full installation guide is available at: http://documentation.atomia.com/SkyManager/

Atomia and StackOps today announced a partnership agreement to integrate Atomia’s Platform and StackOps Distro, enabling hosters and ISVs to directly provide shared hosting and VPS over an OpenStack managed Infrastructure as a Service.

Atomia Platform utilizes OpenStack to create and manage shared hosting environment and to provision virtual server instances. The on-demand nature of the cloud is utilized by Atomia to enable web hosting clusters to scale-out and to be highly-available.

StackOps is one of the most recognized brand within the OpenStack ecosystem, providing an easy to deploy OpenStack distribution that bundles the best of breed components and has already been downloaded over 22.000 times, with more tan 15.000 deployments worldwide.

The size of the hosting market (according to the IDC in 2011) is estimated to $32 billion globally with the forecasted growth of 20% over the next 3 years. The estimate is that StackOps-Atomia solution will be operating in the market worth $1.5 billion.

Under the terms of the agreement, StackOps will be a key underlying technology to provide Atomia’s potential customers with the OpenStack deployment. The ease of use of StackOps will make Atomia an easier choice for hosting companies. StackOps will also distribute Atomia’s platform embedded in its successful distro, providing this specific segment of the market, hosters and ISVs with a fully operational end-to-end solution.

About ATOMIA

Atomia is a Sweden-based software company providing an automation platform for hosting companies. The products line of Atomia, including Billing, Control Panel and Automation Server, gives service providers a turn-key solution for managing shared hosting, domain names, DNS and VPS/IaaS. Atomia’s engineering is driven by three major forces – great user experience, perfect hosting architecture and product extensibility.

For more information, please visit www.atomia.com or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/atomia.

About STACKOPS

StackOps is a global company operating since 2011 providing commodity IaaS solutions, fully based on OpenStack, to service providers and IT departments. StackOps has wrapped OpenStack in its Distro to make it easy to deploy, following a flexible reference architecture, in a Datacenter and has recently released its Enterprise version, where added value components are provided to operate those deployments following the same easiness approach.

For more information, please visit www.stackops.com, www.stackops.org or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/stackops.

We love automation, programming and web hosting. But, we also love cakes, the geekier the better. Today, we had the privilege to enjoy a pink cake decorated with Beasty.

Check out our previous cakes here: http://www.atomia.com/blog/2011/11/15/cake

Campaign Manager

First, we have the all new Campaign Management tool that will allow administrators to easily create various campaigns. It is a very powerful, yet easy to use, tool thanks to the step-by-step campaign wizard.

The campaign functionality have been around for some time now, but an easy to use graphical interface have been missing. This is about to change!

The Campaign Manager is set to be released when it is done.

Cron Jobs

In Q2 all end-user will be able to create and manage their cron jobs (scheduled poking of URL:s) from inside the hosting control panel. We know that many end-users are looking forward to this small feature. You asked for it, we listened!

We are also working on several other interesting projects, some are super secret while some are accessible in our beta releases. Did you for example know that we currently are beta testing the first iteration of our reseller functionality?

Happy Easter to all of you!

Arival

Just after arriving to Hotel Colosseo, we organized a Cocktail party together with our friends from OpenSRS. Thirty minutes into the party – and the bar was stacked with people who arrived one day earlier to meet up with hosting people end reunite with old friends.

Atomia Everywhere

It was a nice feeling to see the Atomia logo everywhere, not just in the designated sponsors’ areas but also on all of the registration badges.

Trends

Regarding event sessions and exhibitions, it is always interesting to see what other companies are working with. Last year, it was all about introducing cloud as a marketing term. This year, we saw a lot of actual implementations that could bring a business value to their users.

Several companies have been offering solutions for distributed storage. We yet need to see how commercial products of this kind will match the open source, since GlusterFS has been around for some time. Assuming that compute nodes for the cloud will keep being shipped with a significant amount of local storage, the distributed storage idea might have a commercial sense. We hope that the true gain of the distributed storage solutions will be on the performance side of the cost-benefit stick.

Atomia on DNSSEC

Jimmy Bergman, CTO of Atomia, took the time to spread his wise words on DNSSEC deployment in the main forum.

Binero, who was the first Swedish ISP to do a large scale DNSSEC deployment, gave Atomia the chance to really battle-test our DNS management software in late 2011. We did mention our open source and free to use AtomiaDNS, but we tried to make this presentation really valuable tech talk, rather than self-promotion.

All in all

For Atomia, these kinds of events are all about meetings, and meetings we did. For four days, we had a stacked schedule and met some really great hosting companies and providers. We were very happy with the outcome of this year’s WHD and we are looking forward to meet the whole hosting community once again in Boston this summer!

When we released Atomia DNS playgound (AtomiaDNS.net) we needed a sign-up form. Since the Atomia DNS API exposes a method to create new accounts, Marko, one of our web gurus, could do this with a simple PHP script.

To talk to the API, we used PHP cURL and with just some small changes this script can be modified to call any method exposed by the API.

Now, let’s have a look at the code!

Since we perform an administrator task (add account) we must use the admin credentials. These were set in /etc/atomiadns.conf during the installation of Atomia DNS. When managing your zones you will replace these credentials with your own.

We also need to set the URL to the method we want to call, in this case http://api.atomiadns.net/pretty/atomiadns.json/AddAccount. The “pretty” part of the URL is optional; including it will return a nicely formatted Json result.

In CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS we will add the Json object with data to process by the API.

$ch = curl_init();

$ch_username = 'auth_admin_username';
$ch_password = 'auth_admin_password';

$header = array("X-Auth-Username: $ch_username","X-Auth-Password: $ch_password");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.atomiadns.net/pretty/atomiadns.json/AddAccount");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,"[\"$email\",\"$password\"]");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

There you have it! As simple as that.

Check out http://atomiadns.com for more information about Atomia DNS and try our fully functional DNS playground at http://atomiadns.net.

The interest for Atomia DNS (our open source DNS management system) has exceeded our expectations and last Friday we decided to give the community a chance to play around with it without actually installing it.

AtomiaDNS.net is a free to use DNS service, it is fully functional and you can use the Atomia DNS Web App to manage your domain names or connect to the API using CURL, the Atomia DNS command line client or your homebrewed application. I built one myself in C# this weekend and wrote a blog post with some tips on how to get started.

We have no intention of making profit on this service, therefor we cannot guarantee the perfect up-time or availability, we will, however, do our best to give you a great experience of our software.

It is really easy to get started with the service; head over to http://atomiadns.com/demo and sign up for an account. It takes less than 30 seconds to get started!

Also, check out our quick guide to AtomiaDNS.net at: http://atomiadns.com/quick-guide.

Atomia DNS is written in Perl and the control panel (Atomia DNS Web App) is written in Node.js, you can, however, use the programming language of your choice to talk to Atomia DNS.

This weekend I was playing around in Visual Studio and wrote a small application to manage my zones. I’d like to share a few tips on how to get started in C# and .Net.

In this blog post I will focus on the simple GetZone method, but consuming more complex methods is not harder than creating the suitable Json object and pass it to the API. For this purpose I found that James Newton-King’s Json.NET library was very helpful and I will give an example of using it.

Before we get started

First you will need an AtomiaDNS.net account, it can be created at http://atomiadns.com/demo, just enter name and e-mail and a password will be sent to you within a minute.

You will probably also want to add domain name to manage. Before adding your zone, you must first log in to the control panel of your domain name provider and set the name servers to ns1.atominadns.net and ns2.atomiadns.net. Once you are done with this, you can add it using either the AtomiaDNS.net control panel or do it using CURL from your command line. Or you can add it with the application you are about to write

The code

To connect to AtomiaDNS.net API I simply used the WebClient object. Make sure to set your username and password in the header:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
     client.Headers["X-Auth-Username"] = username;
     client.Headers["X-Auth-Password"] = password;
…

To execute an command I used the UploadString() method with the URL of the method and my Json object as a string:

var json = @"[""my-domain.com""]";
var response = client.UploadString("http://api.atomiadns.net/atomiadns.json/GetZone", json);

The response from this method will look something like this:

[
   {
      "records" : [
         {
            "ttl" : "3600",
            "label" : "@",
            "class" : "IN",
            "id" : "9",
            "type" : "A",
            "rdata" : "192.168.0.1"
         },
         {
            "ttl" : "3600",
            "label" : "@",
            "class" : "IN",
            "id" : "8",
            "type" : "NS",
            "rdata" : "ns1.atomiadns.net."
         }
      ]
   }
]

Since I was working in .Net for this specific project I wanted to deserialize the Json results into objects. For this purpose I used Json.Net. The installation was dead simple. I downloaded the files from http://json.codeplex.com/releases/view/82120, dropped them in my bin folder and added a reference to them.

Then I declared the classes I needed, in this case for the Zone object:

public class Zone
{
    public string name;
    public List<RecordList> recordList { set; get; }
}

// Each sub domain's DNS records will go in a separate record list
public class RecordList
{
    public List<Record> records { set; get; }
}

public class Record
{
    public string ttl { set; get; }
    public string label { set; get; }
    // I had to use upper-case 'C' for project to build  
    public string Class { set; get; }
    public string id { set; get; }
    public string type { set; get; }
    public string rdata { set; get; }
}

Now, to get the response from Atomia DNS neatly packaged into objects I just wrote the following:

zone.recordList = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<RecordList>>(response);

The “full” code:

var response = string.Empty;
Zone zone = new Zone();
zone.name = domainName;

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    // Set username and password
    client.Headers["X-Auth-Username"] = username;
    client.Headers["X-Auth-Password"] = password;
    try
    {
          // Create Json object to send to web service
          var json = String.Format(@"[""{0}""]", domainName);
          response = client.UploadString("http://api.atomiadns.net/pretty/atomiadns.json/GetZone", json));

     }
     catch(Exception e){ //Log error }
}
// Deserialize response
zone.recordList = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<RecordList>>(response);

And there you have it! All your zone data neatly packaged into an object ready to be played with in .Net.

Good luck! Join our Google group for the latest news, tips and discussions.