The Year in Review: Hawk Host in 2017

Hello, 2018! As we ring in the new year we wanted to take a moment and look back at what happened here at Hawk Host in 2017. We announced new locations, introduced new features, and continued our never ending work to build out a reliable, secure, and high performing hosting infrastructure.

The Year In Review

It’s hard to believe 2017 has come to an end but here we are! It has been a very accomplished year at Hawk Host and everyone on our team is proud of the work we’ve put in over the last 12 months. We’re not about to slow down in 2018, but here’s a recap of our biggest public announcements from the last year:

New Locations and Expanded Services

We launched two brand new locations in 2017 and expanded our services in a third. We introduced shared hosting plans in Toronto CA (our hometown!), opened a brand new datacenter in New York City NY offering shared, reseller, semi-dedicated, and VPS plans, and lastly we expanded our Amsterdam datacenter to include VPS hosting. Our New York City datacenter is our most advanced yet and provides a hosting environment that is wholly redundant and fault tolerant to make sure your sites stay online.

Support and Tools for Memcached, Redis, Ruby, and Python

Our in house development team created an application manager which allows customers to easily launch Redis and Memcached instances to optimize their sites performance. We’re continuing our work on the manager to include support for tools like MongoDB, NoSQL, and other useful and commonly requested features by our customers. We’ve also introduced a tool to create a Ruby or Python application with a few clicks inside cPanel, including support for Django!

Improved Security Features

As many of you know for the last year we have offered free SSL certificates on all websites hosted from our network through Let’s Encrypt. Hawk Host is an official sponsor of Let’s Encrypt and we will be continuing our support and sponsorship through 2018. To date we have over 100,000 websites on our network using SSL as a result of our partnership, an accomplishment we’re extremely proud of. Not only does this help make our customers websites more secure but it also creates a more secure internet as a whole.

We also introduced Imunify360. Imunify360 is a suite of tools and utilities that offers enhanced security at both the server and network level for all websites hosted from our network. Imunify360 enhances your accounts security through an advanced firewall, an intrusion detection system, malware / virus detection, blocking known software exploits, and much more. We have seen a significant decrease in the number of sites being compromised on our network due to known exploits and vulnerable software because of the protection offered through Imunify360.

Software Upgrades and Behind the Scenes Changes

A lot of the work we do is never announced publicly. This isn’t because we’re shy and don’t like sharing, it’s that a lot of the changes are just too minor to announce or only impact a small subset of users. We’ve continued work closely with all of our vendors to not only fix bugs but implement features clients request, suggest performance improvements, and collaborate on how our experience with hosting and customers can benefit our vendors products. Most of our clients will never notice a lot of these changes but over time they do make a big difference on your sites performance, our systems uptime and reliability, and your overall hosting experience.

Thank You For Hosting With Us

It’s a worn out cliche but it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s true. We can’t do what we do without our loyal customers continued support. Year over year you all choose to continue hosting with us. We know there are thousands of hosts out there and of all those options you choose to continue putting your trust in us to keep your websites online. That means a lot, and I mean that sincerely.

Hawk Host started as a hobby back in 2004 and has grown into a company that allows us to do what we love on a daily basis. We get to do that work with colleagues who share our passion for hosting, colleagues that never forget we’d still be hosting websites as a hobby if it weren’t for our customers. We’re still a small company. Small enough in fact our co-founders still willingly handle even the most basic customer requests because they want to. No matter what 2018 brings we’re going to keep that small company mindset, we’re going to continue working to bring you the best hosting experience, and we will forever be thankful for helping make all of that possible.

On behalf of everyone at Hawk Host thank you for a successful 2017 and here’s to a better 2018!