Migrations Completed

For the past two weeks or so we’ve been upgrading all servers to Xeon 5000 series CPU’s, CentOS 5 and 64 bit.  This is finally completed and all our servers are up to the same hardware specifications.  One machine is not 64bit but it was already running high end hardware so we felt it wasn’t a necessary switch.  So this was all completed late last week which meant my 16 hour days were over and I had to no longer worry about migrating accounts.  Being the control freak that I am I made it my duty to complete this all as I had done this before.  Along with that our LiteSpeed setup has drastically improved in terms of compatibility and speed. We’ve worked with them to solve problems we encountered with compatibility.  We have also made tweaks to the setup to improve performance compared to the original deployment of LiteSpeed.  The improvements were nothing to major but in some odd cases it might improve things.  A real learning as you go situation which is always the case with software.  Even to this day every single cPanel trick isn’t known and once in a while a new thing is figured out.

I’m hoping that this will once again make Hawk Host more of a turnkey host where we’re not worrying about a ton of things.  For a while we were setting up accounts and answering a few tickets.  There was no need to worry about down time (we run solid machines) or serious migrations or a lot of work in general.  About the only thing that was changing was every few a month’s a new server was added.  Now with these upgrades I’m hoping we won’t need any new machines for a while unless we have a massive influx of orders.  The upgrade to the hardware was going to mean some extra capacity which we had plans of making use of.  It’s not going to change the quality of any servers though we will still monitor usage.  It is just these higher end machines from our experience can have more users as everyone we’ve deployed as shown that.

So what am I doing now that I don’t have 16 hour days?  Well obviously the site will be a big priority once we have the design.  I’ll be handling updating our custom CMS system we use to run the site.  We’re going to be adding a lot more interactivity to the site along with information in general.  So I hope it’ll mean better conversion rates and also just more general data to any user.  I’ll most likely talk about this in our blog once I start working on the coding side and can talk about all the cool features we’ll have.

Past the site I am also going to be working on our new billing / support / everything under the sun system.  Our goal is to help us make it easier to run Hawk Host.  The plan though is to also offer it as a competitor to all the systems out there.  I believe most hosts have the same problems as us so I think it’s worth selling and making another revenue stream for us.  I’ll be sure to talk about it in the upcoming months once I get back into things with it.  It was a project over a year ago which was stopped as there were more important things to be done.  So I will be evaluating the code and database structure and start working on having it fully up and running in some form.