Hawk Host Report: January 2011

Another year is behind us we’re already into January 2011 I cannot believe it.  The time sure does fly around here as we are always working on something.  Even when things seem silent as far as new features we’re constantly adding more hardware or making various tiny changes.  The year of 2010 was a great one for us including the month of December so now it’s time to summarize what happened last month.

New Litespeed Version

Litespeed 4.0.18 was released but more interesting is the 4.1RC4 release which reduces memory usage even more than previous versions.  We’ve been testing 4.1RC3 and most recently 4.1RC4 with great success on machines.  The memory reduction allows for many more restarts before issues could arise.  It also just leaves memory in general for caches and things of that nature.  Hopefully they release 4.1 in stable form which I’m sure they will based on our testing.

CloudLinux Migrations

We’ve migrated the majority of our servers to CloudLinux.  At first things did not go as well as planned on initial machines but once we had some fixes and optimizations in place everything started to look great.  We now have CPU limiting on the majority of our machines where no longer can a single user go on a rampage of CPU usage for any reason.  There is also now basic CPU usage to help give you an idea at a certain point of time what you’re using.  There are plans to expand this out to have actual history of usage over time.  So hopefully you should now see fewer slow downs thanks to abusive users and it also means our team are not spending as much time babysitting servers.

Software Upgrades

In December we pushed our some major and minor upgrades to the various software we use at both Hawk Host and Frog Host. At Frog Host we rolled out Kayako Fusion, which is their latest release for their support helpdesk software. We have been beyond impressed with what we’ve seen and look forward to implementing it at Hawk Host. Our billing software WHMCS also released some upgrades with a few added features and bug fixes.

Sales

We had yet another record month with sales, breaking all previous revenue and sales numbers. Our Boxing Day sale helped push this along but we still saw about a 15% increase in average daily order volume throughout the entire month. To accommodate the additional growth we brought yet another server online, this time it was Blackbird. We’ll be looking to bring even more servers online as we near capacity throughout January. Frog Host also saw strong growth numbers which prompted us to bring another server online at that division too.

Staff

In light of continued growth and expansion it was necessary for us to hire some new employees. You’ll be seeing a few new names around along with more regular responses from some other staff who have been promoted in their day to day responsibilities. The new hires and promotions are a direct result of our continued growth and the strong reputation all of our users are giving us (we appreciate it!). The new hires will also free up time to let our developers continue working on our VPS panel and other internal innovations and improvements. This should also enable us to extend our billing and sales operating hours significantly in the coming months.

Miscellaneous

Due to our rapid tweeting and impressive response time, we won a Softlayer swag contest and had some pretty cool items sent to us. We got a beach bag, few pins and lanyards, a hard cover appointment book and some other nifty gadgets (most of which slip my mind currently). We’re also in the final stages of offering Alipay as a payment processor which is big news for all current and potential clients in China, where Alipay is the most popular choice for online payments.

We also have word that our provider will be expanding to some new locations (both domestic and internationally) so once that’s official you can look for us to have even more locations available for you.