Hawk Host Report - December 2011

Now that we’re into the final month of the year, it’s easy to look back and reflect on all the movement we’ve made as a company in the past 11 months. Focusing specifically on November though, we opened a new location, broke sales records (with a large margin), and launched our own VPS panel. Not a bad month! :)

Our VPS Panel

I wanted to put a time frame on when we first started this project (I got all the way back to before November 2010), and then realized it wouldn’t be fair to do. While we’ve focused on this panel, it hasn’t been the star child for all that long. That changed in the past few months and with a lot of grit and determination we were finally able to launch the panel. In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a ‘VPS Panel 101’ type blog post with some of the features, screenshots, and some more information about what sets our panel apart from existing solutions. Since we’ve pushed customers over to our in house panel, we’ve had no complaints about issues and have continued implementing new features and upgrades.

Amsterdam went live

Back on November 8th, our sixth location (and first in Europe) went live in Amsterdam. In addition to the actual datacenter, network POPs were also opened in London and Frankfurt, which has helped reduce latency for our users visiting sites on our US servers from Europe. We’ve had a number of existing users who live in Europe move their sites to Amsterdam and have reported a near 100ms latency drop as opposed to hosting in our Washington DC location. That said, if you’re catering to a European based audience, you should consider looking at our Amsterdam location :)

Black Friday

As is becoming an annual event here at Hawk Host, we had yet another massive Black Friday sale.  As we did last year we’ll publish a full blog post on how this year went with some stats included sometime this month, however for a quick figure we did over 10x our daily order average. Needless to say it was a huge success and pushed us to our best order month to date. While I can’t disclose the margin of which we broke that record, suffice it to say despite all of us (and I mean all of us) being required to work a near 24 hour shift, we all went to bed with smiles on our faces. It was definitely an exciting day, but we’ll get into that more with the Black Friday stats post!

Miscellaneous

I (Brian) took a 5 day trip down to Orlando and visited Walt Disney World. I haven’t been there since I was 6 years old and surprisingly, it was still just as fun. My family and I stayed at one of the resorts (Pop Century) and hit up all the local attractions / theme parks. Perhaps the nicest part of the vacation was seeing the sun again and being able to go out for a run at night, as it was a cool 60 degrees the whole time (That’s 60 Fahrenheit, of course). After going through all the pictures we took, I figured I’d share the one of a Mickey Mouse statue that was nearly as tall as the buildings themselves:

That aside, December is always a busy month for us and it is truly hard to believe we’re already half way through the month. Another few weeks and we’ll be into 2012, can you believe that? Given how much we’ve done in 2011, who knows what another year will bring! :)