A year ago we offered a deal where a user could sign up for $5.95/yr on a plan that was actually being sold for $5.95/month.  At the time lots of users said it was an amazing deal and we had a few hundred sign ups as a result of this deal.  At the time we expected each user would stay at least two years.  The reason we did this was to have more people talking about Hawk Host.  It worked great I might add a year later our subscriber base as easily doubled and it’s for sure to double again within six months.

What I find interesting is a year later more and more of these accounts are being suspended for not paying.  These users were receiving a $59.50/yr package for just $5.95.  The package consisted of 6GB space and 60GB of bandwidth (our standard hosting plan).  You’d think they’d stick around and renew their accounts, but a year later the majority are not paying and their hosting is being terminated.  It’s interesting to see someone not take advantage of a deal a year later.  We send our 4 emails about their invoice being due so it’s not like they should not know it’s up for renewal.  I doubt reliability is the issue with them as they’ve all been put on some of our more reliable servers that are holding between 99.95% uptime and 99.99%.  So I imagine the user either has changed their email address and forgot to update their contact information with us.  The more likely reason is the fact the users site no longer is active.  To me this shows that most of these bottom feeder users are unlikely to create a successful site while not be willing to spend the sort of money successful sites do.  There are obviously a few exceptions but this appears to be the case.  It’s also interesting that with unlimited add-on domains they do not just put their new site if they have one on the hosting plan.

I am all for these users cancelling as they can be replaced by users paying much more.  So it’s a win for us, but it’s an interesting that’s so many of them do not renew their accounts.  It’s really interesting and as I look further very few made support tickets and some probably did not even put any content on their accounts.  They were almost like ghost accounts for $5.95/yr.  Even with this being the case I doubt we’ll ever do a promotion like that again.

Like every web host we have customers who do not cancel their hosting and simply do not pay.  In some cases they just forget about their site altogether and as a result their users see a suspended page.  For the longest time we just left up a generic cPanel suspension page for our shared hosting customers.  As time as past I thought to myself why don’t we take advantage of this.  The majority of the customers suspended will not be coming back.  We leave sites suspended for up to a month before we terminate them so we need to get something out of that.  So I figured it was time we do it and we threw up a suspended page that resembles our site and also links a support contact page.  Since we put it up it’s brought us numerous new visitors who would not have heard of us if it was not for that suspended page.  The suspended page has also probably resulted in some sign ups as well.  I now understand why lots of hosts are now putting ad’s on their suspended pages due to just the sheer amount of traffic it does generate.

So for any of our resellers or even competitor of ours make sure you have non generic suspended pages up!  It will increase your traffic and also in some rare cases result in the user paying their overdue invoice.

I ordered computers parts last week to upgrade from my aging dual core opteron 165 with 2gb ram to a quad core with 4gb ram.  Well after it taking me from Wednesday to Friday to build the machine it’s finally up and running and has all my programs once again installed.  I probably overspent or made really bad decisions on the best bang for the buck parts but this new machine was an out of the blue build out of necessity.  The week before my former computer’s raid array degraded and refused to rebuild.  It was also now blue screening frequently which made me not feel to confident in it long term.  The obvious solution was to format the machine but I figured it was an excellent excuse to build a new machine.  This now also gives me a machine that can be used to do a lot of testing.  So I’ll probably load my old opteron 165 up with windows server and have it handle a bunch of virtual machines for testing purposes.

So I imagine you’re curious what I built so here’s what I ended up with:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHZ Yorkfield 1333FSB 12MB
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
• Corsair XMS3 TW3X4G1333C9DHX 4GB DDR3 2X2GB DDR3
• EVGA Nforce 790I Ultra
• Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium FATAL1TY Champion
• My Old 8800 for now
• 2xSeagate Barracuda 7200.11 640GB
• Antec Truepower Trio 650W
• Coolermaster CM 690

I think it’s a pretty solid build overall.  I could have used cheaper parts at spots and not bought a sound card.  But I play quite a few games which make use of sound blaster x-fi only features.

As far as the video card I had an old 8800 which is not a bad card so I’m using it for the time being.  I plan on grabbing a newer card in a month or two.  But for now it’s fine for the games I’m playing.

This was the first machine I put together myself and it’ll probably be the last one I build.  It just took me way too long to do.  I prefer just giving a list of parts and have someone else put it all together for me.  The experience was worth it but I’d rather not doing it every time I need a new computer.

That’s all I have to talk about right now.  Maybe next week I’ll post about something more hosting related maybe a tutorial of some kind or something like that.

Recently its been brought to our attention that not everyone knows how we handle server updates (planned maintenance, emergencies, etc) and as a result they’re noticing brief chunks of downtime with no explanation.

We post every little thing that may affect your experience with us including things such as network maintenance, machine maintenance, hardware failure, essentially anything that might possibly affect someone. As a result sending an e-mail each time will get quite cumbersome and a lot of clients have expressed a dislike for so many e-mails - so we decided to use the forum as a sort of “opt-in” on status updates. You can either visit the forum and just browse, or you can subscribe to the status forum and receive e-mails when there’s a new post - or basically allowing you to keep up to date with everything we’re doing and keep tabs on all scheduled maintenance.

Granted this isn’t the “best” solution - it seems to be working out alright and the majority of the people who want receive e-mails have susbcribed - I just though I’d go ahead and make a fairly long-winded post regarding it.

Sorry for the excessive ranting with no real direction - its a wonder that Tony still lets me post on this thing ;)!

Until next time,
Cody

We’re happy to announce that we’ve purchased a machine in Texas for our Virtual Private Servers. This means you can now choose which location you would rather be in (the other being Washington DC).

The new “Raptor” machine is just about identical to Gizmo but here are the specs:

• Intel Xeon Harpertown 5430 (Quad Core) 2.66GHZ
• 8GB DDR2 RAM
• 4x 250GB SATA II Drives (RAID-10)

As usual the server has a RAID setup (RAID-10) for data redundancy and speed in addition to full backups provded by R1Soft.

We’re also having a two week promotion (expires 11/15/2008) which will give you 40% Off Recurring if you purchase a Texas VPS using the coupon code firstvpstexas

Until next time,
Cody

There has not been a new post in a bit so I figured I’d just write about some random things to keep things fresh.

It’s starting to get cold up in Canada once again so it’s that time of the year to put my winter tires on.  I’ve booked an appointment but it’s not for over a week!  Everyones putting on their winter tires and such so it was not unexpected.  It just sucks for me as driving my car with it’s summer tires on snow is not fun.  The car probably shouldn’t even be driven in the winter at all but I get by trying to not drive it when there is any reasonable amount of fresh snow.

I also just purchased parts for a new computer I’m building.  I’m pretty excited about this build as it’ll have a quad core cpu and also 4gb of ram.  It’s going to be a pretty big upgrade from my Opteron 165 @ 2.6ghz I’ve been using for the past 2 years or so.  The reason for this sudden purchase is due to my computer acting pretty strange lately and my raid-1 array going totally screwy.  Now it’s all working fine again to a degree (no raid now).  I just don’t trust it anymore plus It’s a solid excuse to build a new computer.  I’m going to be keeping my 8800 I purchased not to long ago as I did not wish to spend $500 for another high end video card.  I hope to be building the computer next weekend as it’ll probably take a week to have all the parts here.  As far as my old computer I plan on turning it into a storage system and maybe put some backup software on it so I can feel pretty safe about the data on my home computer.

The Phillies won the world series which sucks as I was rooting for the Rays.  I would have loved to see the Jays there but they just cannot seem to turn all that young talent they supposedly have into a team that can make the playoffs.  They do play in the tough AL East and nothing less than 90 wins will get you the division.

The NBA season has started and my raptors played last night and came out with a big win as the 76ers were suppose to be one of the better teams in the east.   So here’s hoping the raptors get a 1-4 seed in the regular season and actually win a playoff series!  Hopes for now I suppose

As far as Hawk Host related things well I’m just working on adding SSL to every machine and changing some small things around on various machines.  So nothing really special going on just adding new customers everyday and new machines as necessary.

We don’t normally post too many promotions on our blog, namely because we rather rant about things such as WoW, Cats, and Tony’s car. This is an exception because not only is it a stunning deal, but its the first of its kind with us at HawkHost.

What’s this stunning deal you speak of? Well with any shared web hosting order that uses the coupon cheapdomains2008 will receive a domain for $1. Yes, that’s $1 for a domain name!

What’s the catch? Well none really, hence why we’re excited to give it a whirl. The domain will renew at the normal $9.95 price we offer if you like, or you can transfer it to a different registrar if it pleases you. We’re really just interested in the response and to see how well it works out.

Beyond that there’s no new changes worth noting, though our billing system is still being worked on and hopefully will be released in the “nearish” future (maybe we’ll offer affiliate incentives upon release..).

Don’t forget the coupon is: cheapdomains2008

Until next time,
Cody

World of Warcraft is a pretty interesting game with so many people being addicted to it.  Today I came across an article that I just could not at least spread the word about.  There is a person who has 36 world of warcraft accounts which is costing him $5711 a year!  I played the game for a bit got to level 60 and just sort of stopped playing it.  The expansion came out and I bought that of course and I got sick of leveling after I reached about level 64.  The game was just to time consuming for me and I had better things to do with my time such as maybe running Hawk Host.

So you wish to know more about the ‘wow whore’ as he’s been dubbed well here’s a picture of his accounts

It must take some serious skill to play on the accounts so here’s a screenshot of his setup:

Well that’s about it with this post if you want to read more about this person check out the original article at ripten WoW Whore Has 36 Accounts, Raids by Himself

It was an interesting last week to say the bit and just my luck I was the one there to deal with them.  I figured I’d write about them and the solutions I came up with to solve them.

The first one I encountered was yet another customer being hit by a massive surge of traffic.  The coolest part of this was the customer was not on digg, reddit or anything like that.  They were actually mentioned on tv which resulted in a lot of traffic via google.  The customer unfortunately was not prepared for the surge of traffic as their site was entirely dynamic.  Unfortunately we had no choice but to suspend their site for the sake of the server as it was not able to keep up with serving the PHP pages which were probably inefficient as well.  The customer was notified and contacted us about it and I pointed them to the very useful article Cody posted earlier: Digg.. Reddit.. Stumbleupon .  The customer read the article switched their pages to html files and the traffic was no longer an issue at all.

The second one actually may be useful for those out there using mod_python and I learned some problems that come up with it.  I can only assume there is a rise in it’s use due to Rvskin now using it for their Subversion + Trac integration system.  The problem a lot of hosts deal with is unclean restarts of httpd due to various reasons (crashing, tons of requests ect. ect.).  Well over time there are semaphore arrays sitting which are not cleaned out.  This problem becomes more apparent when running mod_python and it hit a few of our machines knocking apache offline as there was no space to load up the modules again on restart.  I cleared out the semaphore arrays then I had to come up with a solution to this problem.  Our monitoring is great and all but without the cleaning out of the semaphore arrays we’d run into this problem again.  My solution was instead of calling the standard restart script when apache fails a request we’d call a script that cleans everything out then restarts apache.  Here it is:

#!/bin/bash

ipcs -s | grep nobody | perl -e ‘while (<STDIN>) {
@a=split(/\s+/); print `ipcrm sem $a[1]`}’

/scripts/restartsrv httpd

Yep it really was that simple the ipcs portion gets rid of them then apache is restarted.  This script obviously only would work on a cpanel server due to the call to the /scripts/restartsrv.  This could however be changed to call something else to restart apache.

Well I hope someone finds this useful :)  Otherwise it’s just another rant added to our blog.

What do all of these websites have in common? They bring ungodly amounts of traffic to the (un)lucky patron who reaches the frontpage - so much that it brings a good portion of hosts to their knee’s for the sudden surge in traffic. Namely shared hosting providers are affected the most by this since their are numerous websites on the same server - meaning that there is *typically* less room for excessive resource usage.

Well,  about a week ago one of our customers got on the frontpage of Digg, Reddit, and had a huge amount of popularity on other social networks such as Mixx and Stumbleupon (granted this isn’t the first time one of our customers has been “Dugg” - it was the first time we’ve seen such a large influx of traffic in such a short period of time). After seeing Apache get a little moody in the evening we took a peak to see why.. after a little bit of detective work we saw a huge amount of referrers from Digg, Reddit and crew.

After watching the server for a good 10-20~ minutes during the surge of traffic we were pleasantly greated with a < 1.00 load average through the whole debacle - the WordPress blog that was serving the content didn’t even hiccup (so for those of you who say 25 simeltaneous MySQL connections isn’t sufficient, well neener).

Even though in this instance no action was needed on anyones part - everything was being served properly, no slow downs, the server just burped and continues on spitting out webpages, we did prepare a simple static cache of the page that was receiving the most amount of traffic just in case the clients website was causing a issue / slowing down - it was a simple “.htaccess” rule that would see if the referrering URL was the Digg URL - if so it would just point to a static HTML file instead of making PHP/MySQL serve up the page over and over. Though we didn’t need to use it - it prompted me to post this blog post with some tips if you’re receiving a high amount of traffic on ANY shared provider .. there is a chance that you’ll use a sufficient amount of resources and be suspended for affecting other customers experience (better play it safe eh?).

• If the webpage that’s being pounded with requests is just a static file / content (in this case it was just a simple image) - simply save the HTML portion, pop it into a file and upload it to your root directory. Once you do that setup a simple .htaccess rule to point all traffic requesting that given page to the static file. Quick, yet fairly effective.
• If you’re using WordPress INSTALL A CACHING PLUGIN. Yes this will save you hours of grief if your website decides to get all popular in a hurry. Check out WordPress Super Cache or WP-Cache 2.0 (for HawkHost customers please feel free to send us a ticket and we’ll help you get this setup, we’re just cool like that).
• If you’re the monkey who decided it would be a good idea to submit your website (or article) to a gajillion social media websites and EXPECT it to be big - maybe think about linking to a Google Cache copy or use Coral Cache. This is a simple yet VERY effective way to prevent your website from getting a bit sluggish.
• Though these are just simple ways to prevent a huge amount of traffic - if you see your website is causing issues with any host you’re at on a steady basis - it may be time for you to check out a Virtual Private Server or a Dedicated Server .. this will allow you to have a guaranteed amount of resources to use and abuse to your liking - though keep in mind when going this route they’re *typically* not managed.. so you have to do the grunt work.

This was just touching the surface of simple ways to “cache” your website - look for a post in the near future explaining these methods further and some other ways to optimize your website.

Just for kicks here’s the bandwidth graph’s of when the clients side got bombarded from the numerous sites.. needless to say it kind of “stuck out” a bit more than normal ;).