Hawk Host Report - March 2011

Month two of 2011 is officially behind us. As such, it’s once again time to let you all know what changed, what we improved, and what to look forward to. Despite it being a short month, it was just as busy as always. This post brings some exciting news and a lot of new features never before seen at Hawk Host :)

Expansions

This month we lit up three new machines, Cougar, Falcon, and Typhoon. This is a record for us as far as new machines provisioned in a month is concerned (woot). Cougar is for shared accounts in Dallas, Falcon is for shared accounts in Washington DC and Typhoon is for resellers in Seattle. The additional servers are a direct result of yet another record breaking month of orders and revenue. On the topic of new servers, throughout March we plan on continuing with our shared account migrations. Isolating resellers and shared users has been a great idea and fits what we want to offer moving forward, and from the feedback we’ve received shared users are extremely happy with the added benefits of shared only servers.

SSL Certificates

One of the most exciting things to come out of February is that (hopefully!) within the next 30 days, we will officially begin selling SSL certificates. While all of our services fully support the installation of SSL certificates, we’ve never directly sold them or offered them to customers. If all goes well that will be changing very shortly and you’ll be able to purchase an SSL certificate from us at the same time you order you hosting plan. Pretty awesome, right? As it stands we do not have any pricing lined up, but the cost will be competitive (possibly cheaper) than the industry average.

Reseller Plan Changes

This is the big one for the month and is taking up most of our time. Sometime in March we are planning on rolling out 4 brand new reseller packages. These plans will offer more space, more bandwidth, and more features / perks than our current reseller offerings. For the longest time we’ve focused on shared hosting, but it’s time to switch gears a bit and bring our reseller offerings up to standard with what our competitors bring to the table. Along with the additional space, we will most likely be including WHMCS + SSL certificates for the highest tier reseller. The option to purchase a WHMCS license + SSL certificate for the smaller plans will also be available. Any customers who currently have a reseller plan with us will be given the option to stay on their current plan or upgrade to one of the newer packages. A lot of the small details are still in the works, but we at least wanted to introduce this and let everyone know change is coming.

Alipay updates

We are now in the final stages of offering Alipay. Everything is setup with them and we’re authorized to offer it, we just need to do some internal testing with our billing and ordering system to ensure it is working properly. Once that is squared away we are beyond happy to say we’ll officially accept Alipay as a payment method :)

Website changes

A lot of staff time over the past month has been spent fixing some bugs, wording, and other various issues with our website. Our internal feature tracking system is full of brand new and innovative ideas for the site. Over the next 30-60 days we’ll be making minor adjustments, changing the wording, and adding additional pages / information based on some user feedback. We put a lot of time and research into what users are doing on our site. This includes improving the most frequently accessed pages, stripping and adding information as necessary, and providing visitors with the best overall browsing experience. Rarely does a week go by without us tweaking some aspect of the site, but recently we’ve been focusing on it so we’re excited to roll out some of these new ideas.

Random / Miscellaneous

Most importantly, our fearless leader Mr. Tony celebrated a birthday at the end of February. Anybody have any good gift ideas?

As many of you know, our offices are based out of Canada (Ontario, specifically). Cody and myself (Brian) work out of Buffalo, NY, which is just a few hours away from our office. Why is this important? Well March is here and around these parts that means it should start warming up. If we’re lucky we may also get to see the sun again! I don’t know how many of you live in a 4 season climate but there are few things worse than the last lingering days of a particularly cold and bitter Winter, especially when Spring is right around the corner. Outside of that really not much else to report on the random / non-hosting related front.

We’ve got out work cutout for us over the next 30 days, hopefully the next monthly summary includes more good news about the above items :)