February Is Over

I cannot believe it but the short month known as February is already over and we’re onto March already.  February was a very exciting month for us with lots going on so I’ll just go through it all really quickly in this blog post.

We talked about it forever but we finally did it on February 6th Frog Host was officially launched.  The second division of Hawk Host specializing in the unlimited hosting which every month we’d lose a customer here and there to.  We can finally say hey wait a minute check out Frog Host which we also own they offer unlimited and the quality you loved at Hawk Host!  We think the first month went pretty well with a limited amount of promotion we gained quite a few customers from various sources.  It’s seen a huge number of affiliates already which means lots of promotion from people trying to cash in on potentially large sums of money if users sign up long term (50% payout first payment of $100 is $50!)

It did not just stop at Frog Host though we added all kinds of new stuff to Hawk Host as well!  We added Softaculous as an alternative to Fantastico which has now 136 scripts and seems to grow every day.  They also actually keep their scripts up to date unlike Fantastico which mean no longer are we dealing with users installing scripts that are already out of date.  Unfortunately though we cannot remove Fantastico entirely as users still want it even though they’re using it based on hype from years ago.  We just cannot remove it though from a marketing stand point we can only point them in the right direction.

It did not end with just Softaculous though we also are now using KSplice to help us stay up to date with the latest kernel security fixes while not having to constantly post maintenance notices.  This will allow us to have to reboot machines less frequently so more like every 180 days or so while still being very much secure.  We’d still do reboots to get onto those newer kernels that contain other fixes as well as potentially performance improvements.  So like I said every 180 days or probably every major OS release so CentOS 5.5 for example would be the next logical one.

One last software change we cannot forget is all our servers are now running cPanel 11.25.  That means DNS editing within your cPanel is now possible among other things.  It includes various fixes and security changes and such.  We already talked about it in the blog post cPanel 11.25 – We’re stable baby

So with all these changes how did we do exactly?  Well it was our best month ever in revenue and total sales so we’re doing something very right it seems.  Although I think I’ve been saying we did better than the previous month every single month for over a year so I guess it’s getting old at this point and is just expected.  I suppose I could also talk about how we’ve now generated over 20,000 invoices to customers.  The next milestone there would probably be about 50,000 as the rate at which we generate them is going up so another 10,000 is just not that far away anymore.  Our hawkhost name servers are now showing over 10,000 domains pointed at them according to most domain sites that check the number of domains on name servers.  So that is pretty exciting considering how quickly that number as gone up.  That number also does not include resellers using their own name servers or using our anonymous name servers.

Now what’s in store for March exactly?  Well it’s already sort of started with Pluto having been migrated over to SAS drives after being on Raptor drives for the past year.  We’ve seen an increasing number of drives failures of them over the past few months so we decided enough was enough and switched over to SAS drives for Pluto.  We’ll also be doing the same for Titan this week and most likely Marlin VPS node at some point as well.  They served us well for a while for a boost in performance while still being cost effective but at this point we get similar pricing on 15K RPM drives.  So it makes far more sense for us to just spend a little more and get the better drives and know we’re not going to be repairing file systems at 5am very often hopefully.

Along with the few upgrades we’ve also added yet another server but there is a twist.  We’re growing at such a pace we thought it would be wise to start specializing our web hosting servers even more so.  When we were smaller we’d mix and match resellers and shared hosting users on the same servers.  With Mustang it’s our first of hopefully many shared hosting only servers.  We’ll also be doing reseller only as well once we need more servers.  It does not really mean a lot to either type of customers but it helps us easily separate the types of users.  In the future we might be able to add some features specific to one type of user but right now that is not the case.

Other than that really nothing else going on just some things in the background we’re working on that everyone might see eventually but not yet.