Hawk Host Report - January 2012

Happy New Years! December was certainly a fitting way to cap off an adventurous 2011. Throughout the month we upgraded our VPS plans, had another massive sale, and bought some new toys, all the while finding time to celebrate the holidays.

VPS Upgrades

We must have been particularly swept up in the holiday spirit this year, as we gave all of our VPS customers a free upgrade on their accounts bandwidth and memory allocations. Each plan received about a 50% bump in memory and 100GB of bandwidth. Along with this upgrade, we’re now able to offer cPanel on our basic VPS. We couldn’t do this previously since the memory allocation was too low. You can now get an OpenVZ based VPS, with 768MB of burst memory, 10GB of space and 250GB of bandwidth, with cPanel, all for $30/mo. Paired with our custom built VPS control panel these new plans make us even more competitive in the VPS market. Check them out here.

Boxing Day

No more than a month after our Black Friday specials ended, which offered up to 80% off our shared hosting plans, we ran our annual Boxing Day sale which included the same promotions. Much to our surprise the sale took off and put up numbers that rivalled Black Friday in total orders. As a result just how well Boxing Day went, we’ll be lighting up a bunch of new hardware over the next 30 days.

The Toys

As a general rule, we like to do things securely. Even back in 2008, security was treated as a critical part of our operation. But no matter what you do to be secure, you can usually find ways to improve. For us, that next improvement is evaluating hardware based two factor authentication. We picked up a 10 pack of YubiKeys to test and evaluate adding into our existing operations. So far, so good. We have nothing but good things to say and while our testing is far from over I can see a place for YubiKeys, especially as we continue to grow.

Miscellaneous

We upgraded to the latest version of WHMCS, our billing and client management software, a move that delivered a brand new client area experience. There were a number of visual changes, like an admin dashboard full of widgets which can be customized unique to each admin. The “pretty” factor aside, there are about 101 new features and usability tweaks we’re finding remarkably handy.

From all of us at Hawk Host, thanks for a great 2011 and we wish everyone the best through 2012.