Hawk Host Report - September 2011

August was one of our busier months in recent memory. You’d have a hard time telling though, as just about all of our major improvements were done internally. Most of our updates and status reports are about features which immediately benefit our users. For better or worse, there isn’t much of that this month. Don’t panic though. We spent almost every single day in August laying the foundation for an even better, stronger Hawk Host for years to come.

VPS Panel

Even though Tony wrote about this back in July, we made some even more progress on our in house VPS control panel. We spent a whole lot of man hours in August debugging, testing, and generally beating the VPS panel to a pulp. We broke it down and built it back up again (proverbially speaking, of course) to ensure any show stopping bugs aren’t there. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still doing regular testing as the panel is still in development (dare I say it’s in beta?) but we’ve got a very solid product on our hands.

A few members of our team dedicated entire work days of their time last month to getting our environment production ready. Even though it’s not live yet, we now have an up to date copy of what exists in our old panel. This puts us in a position that when our devs say the word, we can pull the trigger and release this bad boy to the public.

As of right now, I’m guessing that will be sometime in the next 60 days. I could be wrong, but I’m also optimistic about the progress we’ve made.

Five years with Softlayer

As many of you know, we use Softlayer as a provider for our hosting machines. We’ve been with them for 5 years now and every single day I’m reminded why we use them for our most critical systems. They are the clear leader of the pack, the 800 pound gorilla of an industry full of worthy competitors. What sets them ahead, in my opinion, is their constant innovation, automation, and willingness to expand to meet their growing customer needs.

If you’re interested in reading more about what those 5 years have been like, check out this blog post where we cover our relationship with Softlayer in much greater detail.

That’s all I’ve got for you this month, going to keep this one short and sweet. Next month will be a different story :)