Hawk Host Report - February 2011

Month one of 2011 is behind us. I wouldn’t believe it if someone didn’t show me a calendar to prove it though. With how busy we’ve been all sense of time is warped, and I couldn’t tell you if it’s summer, winter, night time or day time. We’re changing things up this month and I’ll be writing this months report (I’m Brian, by the way) as Tony, our usual author, is incredibly busy doing…business things. I don’t really know what that means, but he’s the CEO and all, so I assume that means it’s important. Down to the good stuff!

Migrations

We brought up a new shared only hosting server in Washington DC named Panther, and we recently moved all of our shared customers off of Jupiter onto it. Why do we do this? Well, shared hosting machines are isolated from resellers and that’s how we’re doing things moving forward. Back in the day we did shared/reseller accounts on the same machine and we all decided that wasn’t the way to do it moving forward. Users will now get to take advantage of our awesome, custom designed in house cPanel skin. They’ll also be able to view their real time CPU usage and other cool stats right through their control panel. This worked out extremely well and we had very few issues, so sometime in the next month or two we’ll be starting the process of doing this work in Dallas. As a note to everyone reading this, please go to our forums at http://forums.hawkhost.com and subscribe to the thread related to the server you’re on. This is where any maintenance windows or work issues are posted so it’s important you know what is going on with your machine if it’s going to be service impacting.

Alipay

We’ve talked in previous months about supporting Alipay and in early January we sent in the paperwork for approval and we got accepted. We’re now working with them to bring everything together and make this an officially supported payment method. This is a big deal for us and for a large portion of our user base, so we’re extremely thrilled to finally be supporting this.

New locations

Our upstream provider recently said that they’ll be lighting up a new location shortly. As you all know we currently offer three locations (Dallas TX, Washington DC and Seattle WA) so adding a 4th is another big move here. The idea is to improve overall connectivity from every region of the world. We do a very good job of that right now but we realize we can always improve and that is exactly what we’re going to do. In addition to another location in the US, there will be availability in Europe *fingers crossed* by the end of 2011. We’ve had a whole lot of requests for this over the years so seeing it finally happen with a provider we trust is awesome. As soon as we can, rest assured we’ll be bringing this online and you guys can start ordering.

Growth growth growth!

We posted in previous months about order records and what not, but this month was truly something unique. Back in November and December we posted some crazy good deals (up to 80% off) which boosted our order numbers quite a bit. We all sat around and said to ourselves no way we’ll see these kinds of numbers without a massive promotion, at least not any time soon. You guessed it, we were wrong. We did more orders last month than we did in those two previous months and this time we didn’t need an 80% promotion to do it.

Being social

Warning: shameless plug. As we’ve announced before we did startup a Facebook page and as always we’re active on Twitter. We really like when people follow us and “like” us as they call it. It’s just another venue for us to really stay in touch and communicate with our users. So, shameless plug part. Follow us and like us! We can be found at http://twitter.com/hawkhost and http://facebook.com/hawkhost

CloudLinux

Over the past few months we were slowly working on moving all of our machines over to CloudLinux and January marks the completion of that goal. Short and sweet section but just worth noting.

Miscellaneous

Not much to note under this category but we’ll throw it in here anyway. Cody took a two week vacation, his first one in a few years. He went back to California which is where he was born, and from what we gather, he had a great time. We’re in the progress of getting  a custom skin / theme created for our VPS panel VezozVM which is still under development. That’s about it, not much else to report on that front.

All in all it’s been a wonderful start to the new year. There are a lot of changes and new offerings on the horizon and we hope you’re all just as excited for this as we are. Cheers for now :)