October Is Upon Us

I cannot believe it’s already October it seems like just a while ago I was talking about how it was January 2009.  There are a lot of exciting things going on in Hawk Host land some of it being related to our corporate identity Hawk Host Inc. as well as our hosting division Hawk Host.  Unfortunately some things I cannot talk about at this point we’re keeping those tight lip right now but it is exciting for us.  So I’ll just go through some of the things I can talk about:

PHP Upgrades

We’ve been running PHP 5.2.9 for what seems like ages.  Well we’ll finally be running a new version as 5.2.11 actually passed our tests of actually being stable unlike 5.2.10 which was proven to be a very buggy PHP release.  Our servers will be receiving upgrades next week and notices have already been posted for all the servers.  We’ve taken a new approach to upgrades this time around.  All servers have notices posted but we’re putting 3 hour windows in place and having each group all under the same time.  As our fleet of servers grows this is far easier trying to deal with doing upgrades within 30 minutes for each server.  The fact is some servers take us 15 minutes to do others take 45 minutes.  So with a big window it’s easier to say after 3 hours x, y and z servers have been upgraded with each of their notices be updated and they’re upgraded.

Zend Framework PHP Include Removed

Zend framework being located in /usr/lib/php will be gone on Tuesday October 6th.  It was a great idea at the time but it unfortunately has been breaking PHP scripts using their own Zend Framework installs.  So we figured it be better to have it removed than deal with assisting users in fixing their Magento installs or whatever seemed to break from it.  So if you currently rely on our uploaded version make sure to upload your own!  It takes just a few minutes and now you control the version rather than relying on us.  You can read more about the removal in the announcement: Zend Framework Removal [10/06/2009]

Server Hardware Upgrades

The skyline server was upgraded in September and Saturn is slated to be upgraded starting on October 8th.  We’re not stopping there however we have plans to do Mars, Mercury, Neptune and Jupiter with the same sort of upgrades.  So that will be servers with 12GB ram and at least 10K RPM SAS drives although most likely they’ll be 15K drives it’s just a matter of availability.  For our Pluto and Titan servers they’ll see upgrades to 12GB of ram but they will remain to use their 10K raptor drives as they’re not slouches by any means.  It would just not be worth upgrading them further besides the memory.  You can read more about it in the announcement: Web Server Hardware Refresh

Changes to our Site

We’ve made some changes to make it much easier in the future to have the ability to handle increased traffic.  Our support area is now at http://support.hawkhost.com/ the forums are at http://forums.hawkhost.com/ and our blog is at http://blog.hawkhost.com .  So with these changes if we wanted to move them to different servers we can now do that relatively easy.

Forum Changes

We’ve changed around our forum around to hopefully make people want to use it a little more.  We have more customers than most hosts out there yet our forum is pretty dead in comparison to most.  So we figured why not switch the forum up a bit maybe it’ll improve it’s activity a bit.  I guess the major changes would be the Customer Reviews forum which if you have not already please go post a review!  Then we also have the Self Promotion forum that people have been requesting.  So if you have your own web site go share it with us there.  There is also an off topic forum as well so maybe we’ll all be less serious.

Windows Hosting

We’re a long ways away from having it but I figured it’s worth noting that Enkompass panel is finally released.  It’s cPanel’s windows control panel so it has the same look and feel as the Linux variation.  I’m not sure if we’ll offer hosting on it or when or even the pricing as we have some other things in the works right now taking precedent.  I have posted a topic in our forum looking for everyones thoughts so check that out: Windows Hosting?

VezozVM

The thing I haven’t talked about in oh several months now is still being worked on.  We’re at the point where the majority of our slated features are there we’re just working on the UI design which is a very important piece.  Once the design is in place we’ll be working on some fancy AJAX features for it just to make it great.  Once everything is ready we’ll be sure to make a post and direct everyone to the software’s forum to assist us with the free beta test.

How are we doing?

Well I figured I’ll end on a good note we’re doing great.  The month of September saw record growth and revenue which seems to be almost standard procedure anytime I talk about how we’re doing.  We haven’t added a lot of new servers recently but that’s because of higher specification machines and continued upgrades to our current servers.  Servers twice as powerful tend to be able to handle more users so it means less servers being deployed.