Hawk Host Report - November 2011

So Halloween has come and gone, and with it the month of October. Now that the candy is gone we figure it’s a good time to recap on the month. We’ve also brought two new, international locations online in the last 30 days so we’ll take a chance to discuss that a bit.

October

The month of October brought the launch of our first Asian location, Singapore. This was one of the most anticipated steps of the year for us as we’ve been looking forward to this since early Q1 of this year. We’ll get more into Singapore later though and how it’s performed since we’ve been online.

In addition to going online in Singapore, we also turned up new servers in our Dallas and Washington DC facilities. The new servers were brought up for a couple of purposes. A few were used for new orders (seems we get more each day!). Others were used to complete our reseller and shared services migration in an attempt to isolate the services.

Singapore

Early October brought the opening of Singapore, our first international location. We discussed the launch in this blog post but since it’s been about a month, we figured an update is in order.

Since we’ve been online in the Asia-Pacific region, the demand has been pretty much what we expected. There were a few network hiccups to start which made some local users weary, but as time has gone on and peering policies with local ISPs have improved we’re seeing even better connectivity. We’re also happy to report that the brand new CPUs we had installed, the Intel Xeon E5-2650s, have been performing wonderfully. Not that we had any doubts (they do pack 8 cores CPU!), but for us, we always seem to fall into a honeymoon phase with new hardware. Nerds at heart, I suppose.

Amsterdam

Our second international location and newest yet, ams001 has helped filled a gap in our service. For the longest time we’ve had users from Europe looking for hosting with us a little closer to home. Sure, our Washington DC facility provided a solid solution, but we can understand the need to have a site hosted on the same continent you live on.

There is a certain confidence that comes with having Amsterdam available, and the same could be said about Singapore. We’ve always felt that as far as a hosting experience goes, there are few providers who can match (and fewer that exceed) what we’re capable of providing. In my eyes we just took a large step forward in continuing to set ourselves apart. Few providers of our size who can offer the range of locations we do, with the number of services available, and all at a price that breaks down to being cheaper than your daily cup of coffee. And no, that doesn’t have much to do with Amsterdam necessarily, but the big picture should be considered when small victories are had. We’ll touch more on Amsterdam as time goes on and we get some more user feedback. That said, if you’re hosting with us (or plan on hosting with us) in ams001 please let us know how things are going for you!

Miscellaneous

Launching Singapore and Amsterdam took up a lot of our attention, so there wasn’t a lot of free time floating around to work on other projects. We did make some minor improvements to our website and pushed some internal workflow changes. One important thing to note is we’re putting the final touches on our VPS panel. I’ve been told the launch is quite literally around the corner so who knows, could be seeing another blog post shortly with some news :)