Hawk Host Report: December 2010

It’s that time already another month is behind us.  November seemed to fly by with how busy we were at Hawk Host.  We were doing all kinds of things keeping us busy it was not just servers but various other improvements as well.  Some of this being behind the scenes improvements others being things you may have already noticed.

New Servers

We added quite a few servers in the past month which these days seems like a normal thing.  We added Thunderbolt and Hornet for our shared web hosting side.  We added Hercules for our VPS side of things.  Each machine being either Dual 5520 or Dual 5620 with the usual memory and disk trimmings.  We also added an internal machine which should help improve redundancy of our systems in case of outages.

cPanel 11.28

The latest version of cPanel was released, which we had been testing before we started using it.  It has introduced some improvements to various aspects as well as UI improvements.  It hasn’t been as seamless as we would have hoped with various issues coming up.  So we have several bug reports open with them about issues which we encountered running it.  We’ve also bug fixed or created mitigation changes in order for bugs that were not being resolved in a reasonable time for us would not affect our users.  It is still progress though a new version being out and cPanel promising newer versions in the future being out in regular intervals which is exciting.

Softlayer & ThePlanet Merger

As most know we use Softlayer exclusively for our datacenters needs.  They’ve allowed us to expand to multiple locations while keeping costs down.  This is thanks to the use of the private network across locations allowing us to not be killed on bandwidth when doing backups across locations.  Softlayer was bought by the people who own ThePlanet which had many worried about what would happen.  Well ThePlanet was merged into the Softlayer operation not the other way around.  Nothing has changed for us the service is still the same just with an even more expanded network.  With ThePlanet having a presence in London we hope this will open up the opportunity for us to finally have a presence in Europe.  We will see though nothing is for sure they have not announced anything yet I’ve just heard rumblings the plan is in place to bring the Softlayer technology to Europe at some point.  So it’s actually pretty good news for us as it potentially opens up new opportunities for us.

New Internal DNS

We’ve been meaning to switch our internal DNS for some time as we felt the need to help make our systems more redundant.  We had decided to make use of dnsmadeeasy which would make so our internal DNS would now be anycasted.  This unfortunately did not go as planned as we underestimated just how busy our DNS can be.  We were doing almost 2 million queries a day, which just did not make it as cost effective as we wanted to run just our sites DNS.  We decided it was wise to switch over to our own DNS servers we also had setup but had no plans on using in this switch over unless we ran into problems. While not anycasted, it still will allow us much more flexibility than we previously had on our old DNS systems and allow us to easily anycast our DNS again in the future with minimal work.

Black Friday Deal

We ran a crazy deal on black Friday this year.  It resulted in our best order day ever which was awesome.  We were pretty busy for 24 hours straight as our order queue was just not shrinking as we setup new accounts.  We eventually caught up by the end of the day but it was pretty crazy.  We did close to a weeks worth of orders on a typical week in just one day!

Frog Host

Frog Host had an excellent month as we’ve come to expect.  It’s growing at a nice rate and we’re confident it’s a solid alternative to other unlimited providers out there.  The thanks goes to people who recommend Frog Host when their friends must have unlimited hosting even though they use 500mb space.  We appreciate that greatly and hope everyone continues to do that.  I’m sure December will be another excellent month for Frog Host.

Alipay

With the Alipay module completed on the software end of things we’re now just working through the paper work.  So we should hopefully have news by the end of the month that we’re accepting Alipay.  This is great news for all our users in China who have been asking for Alipay as a payment option for some time.

VPS Panel

Unfortunately on this front I think there are going to be some delays.  While I’m pretty confident on the backend side of things I don’t think we’re going to meet our goal on the user interface side.  It has been difficult to find someone reliable and good at user interfaces for web applications for us.  We think we may have that solved soon but it’s still a matter of designing the interface then skinning the application with the new interface.

Miscellaneous

November was our best month ever in part thanks to the Black Friday deal.  Although even without that day we were going to beat our sales and revenue records anyways.  It just helped us really crush the previous months totals.  We have some exciting things coming down the pipeline in January.  I hope to post about them at some point in December if I know for sure they’re happening.  As always we appreciate everyones continued support and if you ever have any comments stop by our forums or if you’d rather it be private just send an email to sales and it’ll find it’s way to the right people.