Blog on Hawk Host

Softaculous Spotlight: Matomo - The Privacy-First Google Analytics Alternative

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Softaculous Spotlight #1: Matomo

Analytics you actually own, no Google required

Part of our ongoing series covering the best apps available through Softaculous.

When Google Analytics 4 launched a few years ago, it was pitched as the next big thing in digital measurement. For many site owners, the reality has been a bit of a headache. The interface was torn down and rebuilt into something far less intuitive, turning what used to be simple reporting tasks into a steep learning curve.

Beyond the usability issues, handing over every detail of your audience’s behavior to a massive third party is a tradeoff that feels increasingly hard to justify. People were looking for a low friction way to get back to a Universal Analytics style without the baggage. Enter Matomo.

Matomo is a full-featured web analytics platform that runs entirely on your own server. Everything your visitors do gets logged to your database, processed on your hardware, and displayed in your dashboard. No third party sees it. No algorithm samples it. No account suspension wipes it. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with your own data.

Introducing Hosting Performance Boost: Boost up to 8 CPUs, 10GB RAM, and more!

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We have a new feature to announce! It’s called Performance Boost, and, as you probably guessed, it’s a tool to boost the performance and resources of your hosting account! With the click of one button, you can add up to 8 CPUs, 10GB RAM, 300MB/sec IO, and 350 total processes to your hosting plan for 24 hours. We built the tool to help handle surges in traffic to your site, prepare for a new product launch, or maybe just see how your site would perform with more resources available. Whatever your case, when you need extra resources, Performance Boost is here to help!

Local Vietnamese Payment Methods: ZaloPay and VietQR Now Available

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past year, we’ve been steadily introducing new payment methods to better support our international customers. We recently added local payment methods for Malaysia (Touch ’n Go & DuitNow) and Philipines (GCash) and now we’re happy to announce we’ve added ZaloPay and VietQR for our users in Vietnam.

Easter Web Hosting Deals

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Easter is right around the corner, and here at Hawk Host, the Easter Bunny has come early with some excellent web hosting deals. You can get up to 75% off your first payment when you sign up for an annual hosting plan.

April 2026 Domain Promotions

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our website automatically displays promotions, all without the requirement of a coupon. However, with so many domain extensions these days, it’s not that easy to find all the great promotions. In April, there are promotions available for popular extensions like .com but also seasonal ones like .garden and .surf.

Now Accepting Payments through GCash, Touch 'n Go, and DuitNow!

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past year, we’ve been steadily introducing new payment methods to better support our international customers. We’re continuing this trend in 2026 by adding another three payment methods today, focused on our friends in Malaysia and the Philippines: GCash, Touch ’n Go’, and DuitNow.

St. Patrick's Day Hosting Deals

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We realize we’re a bit late, but it’s better to arrive late than never. Our team has finished celebrating, and it’s time to celebrate with some Hawk Host deals until March 27th. We’re offering some excellent deals on our web hosting and cloud VPS products. Of course, if you don’t need either of those, our domain promotions continue until the end of March.

Get to Know Our New Knowledge Base

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host, we understand that knowledge is power, and we’re happy to announce that we’ve officially launched our updated knowledge base.

March 2026 Domain Promotions

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our website automatically displays promotions, all without the requirement of a coupon. However, with so many domain extensions these days, it’s not that easy to find all the great promotions. March is exceptionally exciting as there are promotions available for popular extensions .com, .net .org and many more.

Valentine's Day 2026 Promotion

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and you may not be focused on that new website idea or adding that new domain to your portfolio, but if you have an opportunity, we’re offering several excellent deals. We have promotions on a variety of our web hosting plans, cloud VPS, and even a few themed domain extensions.

February 2026 Domain Promotions

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our website automatically displays promotions, all without the requirement of a coupon. However, with so many domain extensions these days, it’s not that easy to find all the great promotions. February is exceptionally exciting as we are extending our January “.com” extension promotion for new registrations into February.

Hawk Host Higher Resource Hosting Plans

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host, we’ve always tried to offer the best value in web hosting plans while keeping things as simple as possible. For the longest time, the biggest thing you needed to worry about on a website was running out of space. Our hosting plans reflected that worry, but web hosting has evolved, so our plans have evolved to meet today’s needs for additional performance resources.

mailcow Now Available for Cloud Computes

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Operating your own personal or business email can be expensive or daunting. You’re at the mercy of your email provider for not only prices that are exponentially going up, but also, there are concerns about the privacy of your email. We’ve offered a variety of control panels, such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, and Webuzo, that offer an email component. We are, however, happy to announce that we now offer easy one-click installation of the popular open-source mail server suite mailcow.

cPanel v132 Now Available on All Servers

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated servers are now running the latest version of cPanel v132. The cPanel v132 brings along a bunch of highly requested features, along with a variety of other improvements.

January 2026 Domain Extension Promotions

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our website automatically displays promotions, all without the requirement of a coupon. However, with so many domain extensions these days, it’s not that easy to find all the great promotions. January is exceptionally exciting as we’re offering discounts on new registrations of the most popular extension “.com”.

PHP 8.5 Now Available on All Hosting Plans

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 8.5 on all our cloud shared, reseller and semi-dedicated plans. PHP 8.5 is the latest 8.x series release with many outstanding improvements and new features.

Happy Hawk Holidays Sale - 70% Discounts For Your New Hosting!

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hawk Host’s annual holiday sale is back for another year! We’re again offering our industry-leading 70% discounts for new shared and semi-dedicated hosting orders! Whether you’re a new, existing, or returning customer, or anything in between, we’re happy to see you take advantage of this sale for your new hosting plan!

A New Home & New Services in Europe: London United Kingdom

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Say Hello to London hosting with Hawk Host! We’re happy to announce the launch of our brand new London England UK data center. London is a fully cloud-based and redundant infrastructure built to match the specs of all other existing hosting locations we offer. With the new infrastructure comes a launch of expanded European services as well, as we’re able to increase our hosting offerings to include semi-dedicated and cloud compute hosting in Europe!

CloudLinux 10 Now Available for Cloud Computes

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that CloudLinux 10.1 is now available for installation on our cloud compute platform. We made AlmaLinux 10 available in May 2025; however, CloudLinux 10 was only recently released. With the upcoming cPanel v132 release, which supports AlmaLinux 10, it now makes sense for us to offer CloudLinux 10 as well.

More New Payment Methods! PromptPay, TrueMoney, LINE Pay, UPI, Kakao Pay, Naver Pay and PAYCO

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last month we announced four new payment methods, including QRIS, VietQR, QRPH, and PayNow. As part of our continued efforts to expand our payment options, we’re very excited to announce today we have five additional payment methods to introduce: PromptPay, TrueMoney, LINE Pay, UPI, KakaoPay, Naver Pay, and PAYCO.

Cyber Week 2025 at Hawk Host - 70% Coupons Available NOW!

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our Cyber Week sales are live, and it’s your last chance to take advantage of the promotions we offer during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year’s sales bring both recurring and one time discounts of up to 70% off your new hosting order. It’s a great time to get a high-performance cloud-powered hosting plan. If you’re not looking for web hosting, we have you covered with discounts on our cloud virtual private servers and domain registrations as well.

Cyber Monday 2025 at Hawk Host - 70% Coupons Available NOW!

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Monday sales are here! This year’s sales bring both recurring and one time discounts of up to 70% off your new hosting order. Our annual Cyber Monday sales provide our lowest prices, and are a great opportunity to use our high-performance cloud powered hosting plans! If you’re not currently looking for web hosting, we also have you covered with a variety of significant discounts on domain registrations.

Happy Cyber Monday, friends! We’re equal parts thrilled and appreciative to have you with us this year!

Black Friday 2025 at Hawk Host - 70% Coupons Available NOW!

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Black Friday sales are here! This year’s sales bring both recurring and one time discounts of up to 70% off your new hosting order. Our annual Black Friday sales provide our lowest prices, and are a great opportunity to use our high-performance cloud powered hosting plans! If you’re not currently looking for web hosting, we also have you covered with a variety of significant discounts on domain registrations.

Happy Black Friday, friends! We’re equal parts thrilled and appreciative to have you with us this year!

Black Friday Week 2025 at Hawk Host - 70% Coupons Available NOW!

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Black Friday week sales are here! This year’s sales bring both recurring and one time discounts of up to 70% off your new hosting order. Our annual Black Friday week sales provide our lowest prices, and are a great opportunity to use our high-performance cloud powered hosting plans!

Happy Black Friday week, friends! We’re equal parts thrilled and appreciative to have you with us this year!

Webuzo Control Panel Now Available for Cloud Computes

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A cloud compute can be a challenging hosting environment if you’re not familiar with managing a Linux server with full root access. We understand most of our clients aren’t Linux experts, and even those who are might not want the extra work of manually configuring and managing their OS environment. With that in mind we make an effort to have a diverse range of web based control panels available, including popular options like cPanel/WHM and DirectAdmin. We have recently updated our control panel lineup to offer paid licenses for the Webuzo control panel!

Introducing New Payment Methods: QRIS, VietQR, QRPH, PayNow

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hawk Host has always made an effort to offer a diverse range of payment methods, as we know the standard credit/debit card or PayPal solutions are not always the best for our international customers. We are extremely happy to announce we now have four new payment methods available, with a primary focus on our customers from the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific regions: QRPH, PayNow, VietQR and QRIS

OpenLiteSpeed Now Available for Cloud Computes

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve discussed previously our ability to offer a variety of operating system templates quickly and efficiently. That ability also extends to not only the operating system but to having a variety of applications installed. We’re happy to announce we’ve made five OpenLiteSpeed template options available.

Hawk Host Hong Kong Sale up to 75% Off

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host, we started offering Hong Kong in August 2016, and not even four years later, in July 2020, we upgraded Hong Kong to be powered by our cloud. Our team recently completed various improvements to our Hong Kong location, and to celebrate, we’re offering discounts on a variety of products. If you were looking to diversify your accounts with us, now may just be the time to take advantage of this great deal.

100+ Trustpilot Reviews Thank You

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hawk Host has just passed one hundred reviews on Trustpilot, and we wanted to thank everyone for their continued support. We’ve seen overwhelmingly positive reviews, but we appreciate any feedback on various platforms.

Improved Domain Registration Pricing

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host, we may not be known for domain registration but instead for our high-quality shared hosting, reseller hosting, semi-dedicated hosting, and virtual private servers. We understand the desire to register your domain with a trusted provider. Hawk Host has been operating for over 20 years and has various partners to meet all your domain registration needs, regardless of the extension. We have completed significant work that allows us to provide substantial new domain registration discounts today and in the future.

CloudLinux and Imunify360 Bundle for Cloud Computes

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that we’re now offering exclusive discounts when you bundle CloudLinux and Imunify360. Our prices are significantly lower than retail, making both products exceptionally affordable and worth adding to your virtual private server or cloud compute. You can now get the power of CloudLinux and the security of Imunify360 without breaking the bank.

We're Adding More Semi-Dedicated Hosting Plans!

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When Hawk Host first launched our semi-dedicated hosting plans, the idea was to create an upgrade path for shared hosting customers who needed some extra resources but did not want to host in a VPS or cloud compute environment. However, our customers’ average hosting needs have changed, and with that, we’re expanding our semi-dedicated hosting packages to include more options and higher resources!

An Introduction to Sitejet: AI Site Builder with Hawk Host

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most common features of shared hosting is a site builder, and the market has stiff competition to offer the best builder possible. It used to be enough to provide a basic template, but that is no longer true. Modern site builders are fully featured and fully user-powered, enabling even the least technical users to create a unique and professional site. Sitejet has taken that a step further by introducing AI elements to help set up your site’s layout, craft your content, and perfect your site’s appearance!

End of Summer Sale Up to 70% Percent Off

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the Northern Hemisphere, the end of summer is September 22nd; however, for many, the last week of August is the last opportunity to enjoy summer. We’re giving everyone one last opportunity to enjoy summer by offering up to 70% off new hosting orders.

Debian 13 Trixie Now Available for Cloud Computes

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We previously discussed our ability to quickly add new operating systems and ensure they’re up to date. We’re happy to announce that we’ve added Debian 13 Trixie to our growing list of operating systems. Also, while unannounced, we recently added RockyLinux 10.

Why We're Upgrading All Servers to CloudLinux 8

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last two months, our team has been working on upgrading all of our shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated servers from CloudLinux 7 to CloudLinux 8. We wanted to provide more insight into why we did that and the benefits of the upgrade.

WordPress Tips For Beginners: Getting Started With Your New Site

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hawk Host Sponsors AlmaLinux Day: Vancouver

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AlmaLinux Day: Vancouver is coming, and Hawk Host is an official sponsor! The first sponsor, in fact! (Yes, we’re bragging a little bit there)

Re-Introducing CloudLinux, Imunify360, and KernelCare for Cloud Computes

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This might look like old news to some of you, and you’d be right. We have offered these products before! We recently updated our CloudLinux product lineup, and that seemed like a good opportunity to explain how you can use CloudLinux products and what benefits we’ve seen from them at Hawk Host!

AlmaLinux 10.0 Stable Now Available for Cloud Computes

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last month, we detailed our compute platform’s ability to easily add OS images, highlighted by our addition of FreeBSD as an OS to our cloud computes. Today, we’re announcing the addition of AlmaLinux 10, aka Purple Lion, the most recent stable release of the AlmaLinux OS!

Web Hosting Explained: A Simple Guide for Beginners

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hosting websites is second nature to us after doing it since 2004, but we know it’s brand new territory for a lot of people… and that’s totally okay. We’re putting together this guide to help cut through the jargon and explain the buzzwords that often make web hosting sound more complicated than it really is.

Lets get started.

Hawk Host Always Turbo Hosting

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We have inquiries from time to time about whether we offer turbo hosting or another similar nomenclature hosting. The active marketing of turbo hosting typically revolves around faster CPUs, NVMe’s, automatic caching installation, automatic plugin updates, and high uptime. We offer all the features at Hawk Host free of charge with all our hosting plans, no matter the price you pay.

FreeBSD Cloud Computes Now Available

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our updated cloud platform simplified and expanded our capability to introduce various new operating systems and control panels. We’re happy to announce that we’ve added FreeBSD to our operating system options. FreeBSD will be the first of many new options that you may not find available on all cloud platforms.

Safely Running End-of-Life PHP Versions in Production

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We believe in giving developers the flexibility they need, even when that means supporting legacy environments. While we don’t recommend running end-of-life (EOL) PHP versions in production, we’ve included HardenedPHP to help you do it as safely and securely as possible.

PHP 8.1 New Default PHP Version on New Accounts

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host, we choose the PHP version that is the most compatible with the current most popular PHP applications. Due to our use of HardenedPHP, which backports security fixes, we can even provide versions not necessarily supported by PHP directly. However, we have recently determined that all new shared, reseller and semi-dedicated accounts will use PHP 8.1 by default.

64GB Cloud Computes Now Available

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that we’re introducing 64GB cloud computes (virtual private servers) to all locations. Thanks to our cloud infrastructure, we’re offering the power of a dedicated server but with additional redundancy powered by our Storpool storage clusters.

Hawk Host Singapore Cloud Availability

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our team has worked hard in the background for several months, upgrading our cloud management panel and infrastructure in all locations, including Singapore. We’re happy to announce that you can now order cloud computes in our Singapore location again powered by our new cloud management panel.

Hawk Host Nominated Best of BitPay 2024

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host, we’ve been providing a cryptocurrency payment option since March 2014, and it’s not only exploded in popularity, but many of the original options have significantly increased in value. Our platform for accepting payments and the types of cryptocurrency we accept have evolved. BitPay has recognized our support for cryptocurrency, and we’d appreciate your vote

Hawk Host - Complete Canadian Web Hosting

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since our founding in 2004, Hawk Host has been proud to be a Canadian company, and we continue to call the Great White North our official home. With the recent launch of our cloud computing infrastructure in our Toronto data center, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on our history and what being Canadian means to Hawk Host.

Happy Hawk Holidays Sale - 70% Discounts For Your New Hosting!

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

PHP 8.4 Now Available on All Hosting Plans

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 8.4 on all our cloud shared, reseller and semi-dedicated plans. PHP 8.4 is the latest 8.x series release with many outstanding improvements and new features.

Black Friday 2024 at Hawk Host - 70% Coupons Available NOW!

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Black Friday, friends! We’re equal parts thrilled and appreciative to have you with us this year!

Cloud Hosting Now Available in Toronto!

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Oh Canada, our home and native land! As a proud Canadian company since 2004, we’re always excited to represent our home country, so today’s announcement is significant to Hawk Host. We have officially launched our cloud hosting services and infrastructure within our Toronto, Canada, data center! As part of this infrastructure upgrade, we can now offer a more diverse range of hosting services in Toronto, including semi-dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, our new Professional+ hosting, and, after much anticipation, cloud computes!

Introducing Elevate CentOS 6 to CentOS 7

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

AlmaLinux recently released tools and a guide for migrating from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7. We haven’t offered CentOS 6.9 in some time, but there was a time when we did offer CentOS 6 as an operating system option. We decided to take our last known CentOS 6 image and use the redhat-upgrade-tool to move to CentOS 7.

Happy Holidays From Hawk Host!

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Holidays everyone! We hope you all had a healthy and successful 2023, and on behalf of everyone at Hawk Host we appreciate everyone who chose to host with us this year! To wrap up the year we’re bringing back our Holiday & Boxing Day sale, giving you all one last chance to sign up for hosting at a highly discounted rate! This years sales offer a 70% discount on any new shared web hosting or semi-dedicated hosting purchase!

PHP 8.3 Now Available on All Hosting Plans

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 8.3 on all our cloud shared, reseller and semi-dedicated plans. PHP 8.3 is the latest 8.x series release with many outstanding improvements and new features.

Hawk Host 2023 Black Friday Sales are LIVE! Save up to 70%!

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back friends! We’re so happy to have you here again to take part in our 2023 Black Friday (well, Black Friday week?) sales! While it’s a brand new year we’re happy to offer the same great discounts you’ve enjoyed in previous years! That means up to 70% off your new order, or a 55% lifetime discount if you’re a fan of lifetime savings. Either way now is your best chance to enjoy our awesome web hosting at highly discounted rates!

Introducing The Professional+ Hosting Plan!

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We have a new addition to our cloud web hosting services! Say hi to the Professional+ package, a new cPanel-based hosting plan that offers a dedicated IP and increased resource limits compared to the existing Professional plan. For less than $10/mo, Professional+ offers unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth with a private IP and countless other benefits!

Introducing the new Hawk Host website!

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As some of you may have noticed, about one month ago, we launched a brand new, wholly refreshed look on our website and client area. This new site introduces a cleaner look, more straightforward navigation, improved mobile responsiveness, and more of the information you’re looking for about our hosting plans. We’re going to highlight a few of these new features below!

Hawk Host Cloudflare Railgun End of Life

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host, we’ve been supporting Cloudflare services on our network in various ways since our initial partnership in 2011, when we were among the first 25 hosting providers to partner with them. With the partnership, this meant using cPanel, any domain hosted on our servers could quickly sign up and integrate without ever interacting with Cloudflare directly. We followed this up in 2013 with support for the Cloudflare Railgun service free of charge for all users hosting websites on our networks.

PHP 8.2 Now Available on All Hosting Plans

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 8.2 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated and cloud web hosting services. PHP 8.2 is the latest 8.x series releases and comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

Readonly classes
Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) Types
New stand-alone types: null, false, and true
New “Random” extension
Constants in traits
Deprecate dynamic properties
And much much more…

PHP 8.2 also like all previous releases contains performance improvements which depending on your application may be noticeable. We however highly recommend checking your applications requirements and then testing using our PHP selector to make sure your application is PHP 8.2 compatible.

Happy Holidays from Hawk Host! Let's End the Year with a Sale!

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Holidays everyone! We hope you all had a healthy and successful 2022, and on behalf of everyone at Hawk Host we appreciate everyone who chose to host with us this year! To wrap up the year we’re bringing back our Holiday & Boxing Day sale, giving you all one last chance to sign up for hosting at a highly discounted rate! This years sales offer 55% recurring discount on any new cloud web hosting or semi-dedicated hosting purchase!

Hawk Host Now Accepts WeChat Pay Payments!

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are very happy to announce WeChat Pay as our newest accepted payment method! Available now to all customers, WeChat Pay is one of the most popular mobile apps in China and presents an easy to use payment option for your invoices with Hawk Host!

WeChat Pay joins Alipay as one of our Asia/Pacific focused payment methods, which is an effort by our team to provide familiar and easy to use payment methods for customers from that region. There are no additional fees and complicated steps required to use WeChat Pay, simply select it as an option from your invoice dropdown and follow the prompts to complete your payment!

Cyber Monday Sales are Here! Last Chance for a 65% Discount!

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you missed our Black Friday event don’t worry, you’ve got one last chance to take advantage of this fantastic sale! Just like Black Friday, our Cyber Monday deals offer up to a 65% discount on your new hosting purchase! Don’t wait though, as once this deal ends these discounts won’t be offered again any time soon!

Our 2022 Cyber Monday sales ARE LIVE! The coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST on Tuesday November 29th. There will be a limited quantity of one time discounts available so sign up now before they’re gone!

Hawk Host 2022 Black Friday Sales are LIVE! Save up to 65%!

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back friends! We’re so happy to have you here again to take part in our 2022 Black Friday (well, Black Friday week?) sales! While it’s a brand new year we’re happy to offer the same great discounts you’ve enjoyed in previous years! That means up to 65% off your new order, or a 55% lifetime discount if you’re a fan of lifetime savings. Either way now is your best chance to enjoy our awesome web hosting at highly discounted rates!

Recognizing an AlmaLinux Board Nomination

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’re very proud to announce that Hawk Host’s CTO and co-founder, Cody Robertson, has been nominated to the AlmaLinux board! We’re extremely happy to see him nominated to this position and also for the opportunity to deepen our support for AlmaLinux.

He joins the board with six other individuals representing a wide range of the hosting industry, bringing a depth of experience and insight to the organization. For those unfamiliar with AlmaLinux, the project was started to replace the once extremely popular CentOS Linux based operating system. With CentOS being absorbed into IBM/RedHat a new community driven Linux distribution was needed, and AlmaLinux stepped up to fill that void.

Upcoming cPanel 108 Deprecation Notices

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

cPanel recently reiterated several upcoming software deprecations in cPanel 108 with interface warnings. We understand how scary it can be to move away from software and interfaces you’re most familiar with. We wanted to provide additional insight as to why these choices, while not made by Hawk Host, are not without their reason or benefits.

Paper Lantern Theme

The cPanel Paper Lantern theme was released in in February 2014 as a replacement to the very popular X3 theme everyone was familiar with. At the time there was significant push back as the Paper Lantern theme was drastically redesigned. Paper Lantern was utilizing newer design principles and brought with it more possibilities. Eventually it became the standard cPanel theme the majority of users preferred and expected. The Paper Lantern theme is now over 8 years old and is showing it’s age. The interface is not particularly usable on phone or tablets which a growing number of users utilize to manage their website. It also does not provide any ability to provide guided solutions for beginner users.

Heads Up! Upcoming Removal of Cloudflare's cPanel Plugin

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’re coming to you today with some unfortunate news: Cloudflare is officially ending support for its cPanel plugin. The good news is the removal of this plugin should have no impact on your sites that are powered through Cloudflare, and you’ll still be able to use Cloudflare’s free services, but you’ll need to take a few minutes to verify your account access before plugin support officially ends.

Unfortunately Cloudflare has formally announced the deprecation of their cPanel plugin, as a result of this notice access to the Cloudflare cPanel plugin will be removed from Hawk Host’s cPanel as of June 15 2022. Cloudflare will continue to serve sites originally configured through the cPanel plugin however you will need access to your direct cloudflare.com account to continue managing and modifying your DNS zones.

Happy Holidays & Happy Boxing Day! Let's Celebrate with a Sale!

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re back again this year with our annual holiday and Boxing Day sale! For the last 10 years we’ve hosted this sale and we’re happy to continue the tradition this year. We know Boxing Day isn’t a holiday everywhere, but as a proud Canadian company we invite you all to celebrate today with us! This years sale brings a 55% recurring discount on any new order of a cloud web hosting or semi-dedicated hosting plan!

PHP 8.1 Now Available on All Hosting Plans

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 8.1 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated and cloud web hosting services. PHP 8.1 is the latest 8.x series releases and comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

Enumerations
Readonly properties
Fibers
Pure Intersection Types
never return type
First-class Callable Syntax
“final” modifier for class constants
New fsync and fdatasync functions
New array_is_list function
Explicit Octal numeral notation
And more

PHP 8.1 also like all previous releases contains performance improvements which depending on your application may be noticeable. We however highly recommend checking your applications requirements and then testing using our PHP selector to make sure your application is PHP 8.1 compatible.

Cyber Monday Sale! Save 65% On Your New Hosting Order!

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s time for our 2021 Cyber Monday sales! This years sales include up to a 65% discount on a new shared or semi-dedicated hosting order with recurring discounts for all other services! This is your last chance of the year to take advantage of these great deals!

This years Cyber Monday coupons are valid right now and will expire as of 11:59 PM CST on Monday November 29th. There will be a limited quantity of one time discounts available so sign up now before they’re gone! Below you can find some features of our hosting plans and also this years coupon codes and signup links. Thanks for hosting with us!

Ready, Set, Savings! Our 2021 Black Friday Sales Are Here!

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Our 2021 Black Friday sales are officially LIVE! Use the coupons below to save up to 65% on your new cloud web hosting or semi-dedicated hosting plan. There are also great savings available for reseller and cloud compute plans! Take advantage now before it’s too late!

Black Friday 2021 is here!

This years Black Friday coupons are valid right now and will expire as of 11:59 PM CST on Monday November 29th. There will be a limited quantity of one time discounts available so sign up now before they’re gone! Below you can find some features of our hosting plans and also this years coupon codes and signup links. Thanks for hosting with us!

Black Friday is BACK! Save Up To 65% On Your New Hosting!

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Another year brings us to another Black Friday sale here at Hawk Host. We’re happy to have you all back with us this year as we celebrate our biggest sale of the year. This year you can enjoy up to a 65% discount on a new shared or semi-dedicated hosting order, with discounts also available on our reseller and cloud compute plans as well! Don’t wait too long though as our one time 65% discounts will be available only for a limited quantity only during this sale!

Hawk Host Singapore Cloud Infrastructure Upgrades

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we’re always looking at opportunities to improve performance of our services while providing minimal to no impact on running services. This can mean performance improvements in software but also additional servers or entirely upgraded hardware. In Singapore we had an opportunity to do a major hardware upgrade.

When our Singapore location was initially deployed it was powered by Dual Intel Xeon E5-2620V4 (Broadwell) and saw some upgrades to Dual Intel Xeon Gold 5218 (Cascade Lake) processors. Our SSD redundant storage was powered by a large number of Samsung SM883’s. All of this hardware was providing a high performance redundant environment to both our Shared and Cloud compute customers alike. We however saw an opportunity to replace all our systems with AMD EPYC based systems which our team worked diligently on over the summer and this work has now been completed.

Introducing AlmaLinux ELevate

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

AlmaLinux today announced the introduction of their new feature ELevate which allows you to migrate between major versions of RHEL based distributions from 7.x to 8.x. This was previously not possible under CentOS and had came up during the CentOS 6.x end of life and in 2024 will come up again in the CentOS 7.x end of life. Until ELevate the only way to move to the latest version of RHEL based distributions was to deploy a new server with the desired version then configure and migrate everything to the new server.

PHP 7.4 New Default PHP Version

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we always value security and compatibility and with that we typically set the default PHP version to the oldest version that is still supported. PHP 7.3 is close to end of life status ( http://php.net/eol.php ) and many applications are now recommending users switch to PHP 7.4. ahead of this end of life. We thought this would be a great opportunity to move to PHP 7.4 before the holiday season starts.

Advanced DDOS Protection in Los Angeles CA and Dallas TX!

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you run a website long enough, eventually you’re going to face an issue related to a DDOS attack. DDOS attacks can be frustrating, financially impactful, and make inexperienced webmasters feel hopeless when trying to resolve the problem. Companies like Cloudflare and Sucuri have made it easier for the average user to protect their sites from attacks, and while we do recommend our clients utilize those services to help protect their sites, we also saw a need to introduce our own DDOS protection for clients. As a result we are pleased to announce advanced DDOS protection is now available for customers on our shared, semi-dedicated, and cloud compute plans in our Dallas TX USA and Los Angeles CA USA locations!

AlmaLinux Now Available on Cloud Computes!

Thu, 13 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that AlmaLinux is now available on all cloud compute plans! AlmaLinux is an open-source RHEL fork developed by the same team that brings us CloudLinux and is meant to be the community driven replacement to CentOS.

Not too long ago RedHat announced CentOS Stream, a new development approach which effectively removes CentOS as an available free OS as we’ve come to know it over the past decade+. With CentOS no longer an option as the default RHEL fork OS choice for common deployments it introduced an immediate market gap which needed filling. Enter AlmaLinux, the CloudLinux backed product aiming to not only fill that gap left by CentOS but improve on it and provide a free, trusted, and easy to use OS that’s driven by community development.

Free Bandwidth Upgrades on All Cloud Compute Plans!

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are very excited to announce we’ve provided a free bandwidth upgrade for all clients on our cloud compute plans! The new bandwidth values have been applied automatically and your compute is already enjoying the benefits of having free additional bandwidth in your quota each month.

Our cloud compute plans, the equivalent of a VPS, are your own private server environment will full root access. You have complete control over the server and can install any software or applications you’d like. With this free upgrade in bandwidth your compute should be able to handle more sites or higher resource applications without you needing to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

Read and Write at the Speed of Light! Free IO Upgrades!

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

You read that right, today we’re happy to announce we’re upgrading the IO limits for all shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated plans! In fact, we’re actually tripling your IO limits, effective immediately, and entirely for free!

Your accounts IO limit is responsible for the amount of disk activity (namely reads and writes) you’re allowed to perform before the activity is limited to prevent server abuse. Over the past few years disk IO has been less of a concern at the server level as the hosting industry has shifted from mechanical (and much slower) HDD based systems to SSD and NVMe powered systems. Here at Hawk Host we’ve taken the SSD and NVMe upgrades to another level by creating cluster/cloud based environments which not only improve data redundancy and integrity but provide a massive increase in the total IO capabilities of our infrastructure as a whole. Our investments in a higher performing backend infrastructure and hardware allow us to pass these improvements onto clients in the form of higher resource limits.

Be Our Valentine! 60% Discount Sale for Valentines Day!

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Won’t you be our Valentine❤? To celebrate this years lovers holiday we’re going to hook you up with a discount you’re sure to love! You can save up to 60% on a recurring discount for our cloud web hosting, semi-dedicated, reseller, or cloud compute plans. This deal is as sweet as the chocolate treats your secret admirer will be getting you to show they care!

As of this blog post being published our Valentines Day sales are LIVE! The coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST on Sunday February 14th. You can find full details of the sale and our plans below!

PHP 8.0 Now Available on All Hosting Plans

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 8.0 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated and cloud web hosting services. PHP 8.0 is the first release of the 8.0 series and it comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

PHP 8.0 also like all previous releases contains performance improvements which depending on your application may be noticeable. We however highly recommend checking your applications requirements and then testing using our PHP selector to make sure your application is PHP 8.0 compatible.

PHP 7.3 New Default PHP Version

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we always value security and compatibility and with that we typically set the default PHP version to the oldest version that is still supported. PHP 7.2 recently reached end of life status ( http://php.net/eol.php ) and with the holiday season over we thought it was finally time to change the default version to PHP 7.3 for all new accounts.

For the majority of users our change from PHP 7.2 to 7.3 will have absolutely no affect on your web site. If you’re already a customer and haven’t changed your PHP version you will remain on the current PHP version you have set. If you’re a new user then you will by default be on PHP 7.3 but you can still easily change your PHP version through our PHP selector.

Happy New Year! Ending 2020 With a Sale!

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year everyone! As we wrap up 2020 and head into 2021 we’ve decided to have one last sale to end the year. This sales includes 60% recurring discounts on all of our cloud web hosting, semi-dedicated, reseller, and cloud compute plans. We appreciate everyone who hosted with us in 2020 and we look forward to hosting with you in 2021!

As of this blog post being published our New Year sales are LIVE! The coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST on Saturday January 2nd. You can find full details of the sale and our plans below!

Happy Holidays! Let's Celebrate with a Sale!

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Holidays to all our Hawk Host friends! This year for our annual Christmas & Boxing Day sale we’re offering recurring discounts up to 60% on our hosting plans. We’ve got coupons available for our shared, semi-dedicated, reseller, and cloud compute hosting so no matter your hosting needs you can gift yourself some savings.

Happy Holidays from everyone at Hawk Host!

As of this blog post being published our Holiday Sales are LIVE! The coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST on Saturday December 26th. It’s our last big sale of the year so don’t miss this chance to save on your new hosting plan.

Five Years of Sponsoring Let's Encrypt!

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to believe its been five years since we started our Let’s Encrypt sponsorship, but here we are, and we’ve officially renewed our sponsorship with them for another year! Let’s Encrypt enables not only all of our customers to use free SSL certificates on their websites, but 225 million other websites across the web. What Let’s Encrypt has been able to accomplish is incredibly impressive and we’re extremely proud to be part of that work.

Cyber Monday is Here! Last Chance for 70% Savings!

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you missed our Black Friday sales don’t worry, Cyber Monday has savings for you! This will be your last chance to take advantage of discounts up to 70% off on your new cloud web hosting, semi-dedicated, reseller, or cloud compute plan!

Click the coupon code to the right of the listed service to go right to our order form!

Service	Discount	Promo Price	Coupon Code
Cloud Web Hosting	70% One Time	$0.90/mo	cmshared2020
Cloud Web Hosting	55% Recurring	$1.35/mo	cmshared2020r
Semi-Dedicated	70% One Time	$4.80/mo	cmsd2020
Semi-Dedicated	55% Recurring	$7.20/mo	cmsd2020r
Reseller	50% Recurring	$6.50/mo	cmreseller2020r
*Cloud Compute	30% Recurring	$23.33/mo	cmcompute2020r

*Requires 8GB or 16GB compute plan

Black Friday Discounts are LIVE! Discounts up to 70%!

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our 2020 Black Friday sales are officially LIVE! Use the coupons below to save up to 70% on your new cloud web hosting, semi-dedicated, reseller, or cloud compute plan. Take advantage now before it’s too late!

This years Black Friday coupons are valid right now and will expire as of 11:59PM CST Sunday November 29th. Below you can find some features of our hosting plans and also this years coupon codes and signup links. Thanks for hosting with us!

Here's our 2020 Black Friday Hosting Deals! Savings up to 70%!

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our 2020 Black Friday discounts are here! Each year we look forward to running this sale and this year is no different. We have savings for all of our hosting services with our largest discounts reaching up to 70%! The sales aren’t live just yet, but you can find full details of our upcoming promotions below!

Black Friday Fun!

This year our Black Friday sales will go live as of 12:01 AM CST on Thursday November 26th. The coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST on Sunday November 29th. That’s four full days to take advantage of these once per year discounts for your new hosting plan. We’ve been hard at work this past year expanding our services, improving our cloud infrastructure, and adding features to our plans to meet the needs of all our clients.

Cloud Computes Now Available in Hong Kong

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Following up on our announcement that all Hong Kong shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated services were moved to the cloud we are excited to announce the launch of cloud computes in Hong Kong! Cloud computes are your own private server environment with full root access, giving you the ability to install any software and configure the service at the OS level without restrictions.

A cloud compute is like a VPS in that it’s your own private server and not shared with any other users. You have full control over the environment enabling you to install software and enable features that may not otherwise be available in a traditional shared hosting environment. Cloud computes can be used for any applications ranging from hosting sites, creating a VPN, a development sandbox, or any software that requires root level access in a Linux environment to run properly.

Celebrating Our Los Angeles Anniversary with a 50% Sale!

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Six years ago this week we officially launched our Los Angeles datacenter! The years have flown by and we’ve continued to grow since our initial launch. We started offering shared hosting, then expanded those services to include semi-dedicated hosting, reseller, and VPS, leading up to today where Los Angeles is a fully cloud based location offering a full suite of services!

Los Angeles traffic may be congested, but not on our network!

Keeping Your Cloud Web Hosting Safe & Secure

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Customers often ask what steps we take as a host to keep your websites and files safe. We value security at Hawk Host and it’s important clients know the proactive measures we’ve taken to defend against exploits and attacks, but also provide recommendations on steps you can take to further secure your hosting.

Account security with shared hosting is a two way street. As a host it’s our responsibility to provide a safe and secure hosting environment at the server and network level. As a customer it’s important you follow best practices to make sure your individual sites, software, or applications aren’t vulnerable to remote exploits that may bypass the protections we have in place. Here’s a quick overview of some technologies we’ve implemented at the server level:

CloudLinux OS Now Available for Cloud Computes!

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our team is very excited to announce we now have CloudLinux available as an option for your cloud compute operating system! CloudLinux was built with shared hosts in mind and gives you the ability to limit the resources allocated to each hosting account under your compute.

CloudLinux helps you manage system resources and prevent a handful of abusive sites from impacting performance for the entire system. This is accomplished through a system called LVE (lightweight virtualized environment). LVE allows you to set CPU, RAM, disk IO, and process limits for each user on your compute. There is also a MySQL governor which prevents inefficient or high resource MySQL queries from completely locking up your MySQL server by throttling these queries. These limits can be adjusted per user or set globally so you have full control over the resource limits for each of your users. You will also be able to utilize mod_lsapi which is an extremely high performance and reliable method for serving PHP based requests.

Hong Kong has Upgraded to Cloud Hosting!

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s official, Hong Kong has joined our ever growing list of cloud powered locations! Hong Kong is now our fifth cloud hosting location worldwide and our second in Asia, joining Singapore in that region. Not only is Hong Kong now cloud powered, that means we’re now able to offer semi-dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, and cloud compute plans with full root access!

Hong Kong from the cloud!

Cloud hosting in Hong Kong was one of our most popular customer requests and we’ve been hard at work making this a reality for everyone. Moving to a cloud based infrastructure has a number of drastic improvements including performance, reliability, and scope of services we’re able to offer.

KernelCare Vulnerability Patching Now Available on Cloud Computes

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are happy to announce KernelCare live vulnerability patching is now available for all cloud compute plans! KernelCare allows you to patch your computes kernel on the fly without requiring a reboot, eliminating downtime and keeping your compute even more secure!

KernelCare is a CloudLinux product, the developers of the operating system we use on our shared and reseller hosting environments. By leveraging their advanced expertise from developing their Linux operating system they have created KernelCare to further improve the reliability and uptime of their OS. As a hosting provider managing an entire fleet of servers KernelCare has proven invaluable due to the amount of time, frustration, and potential outages we’ve saved not having to reboot every server to apply critical kernel level patches for vulnerabilities.

Summer Sales and Savings are Sweet! Save up to 55%!

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Summer is officially here and so is our annual Summer sale! This year you can take advantage of these discounts and receive a 55% recurring discount on any new shared, cloud web hosting, semi-dedicated, or reseller order!

Unlike Summer these sales won’t last for long. These coupons will expire as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday July 6th, so you’ll need to make sure you order before then to take advantage of these awesome savings. We’ve been hard at work this year introducing new features to all plans, including improved and more reliable (and free!) backups with Acronis, expanded PHP version support, a continued effort to provide free SSL to all clients, and much more! We’ve also been expanding our services including offering new reseller plans in Amsterdam and building out a cloud based infrastructure in Los Angeles!

DNSSEC Now Supported On Web Hosting Plans

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that on our shared, cloud web hosting, reseller and semi dedicated hosting plans we now support DNSSEC when using Hawk Host DNS/nameservers. cPanel has supported DNSSEC since cPanel 60 for individual server deployment but it was not supported until cPanel 80 on DNS clusters. Our team tested the implementation at the time and unfortunately found issues that required to be addressed before we could offer DNSSEC. We’re excited to say these issues were resolved with cPanel 88 which all our servers are now running.

Let's Celebrate Spring! Save 55% with our 2020 Spring Sale!

Tue, 26 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Spring! After what felt like an impossibly long winter the nice weather is here and we’re celebrating by offering 55% off your new hosting order! We’ve got discounts for shared, cloud web hosting, semi-dedicated, and reseller plans, so whatever your needs we’ll find a way to save you some money!

This sale will be active until midnight on Friday May 29th so you don’t need to rush inside and leave the nice weather just to place your order now. Don’t wait too long though as these great deals won’t be available after the sale expires! We’ve been hard at work over the past year upgrading our cloud hosting and introducing new features so this is a great chance to experience our hosting for the first time or setup those new sites you’ve been thinking about!

Now Offering Reseller Hosting in Amsterdam

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our first European reseller plans have arrived! We’re extremely pleased to announce our Amsterdam location now offers reseller hosting! Our reseller plans have been available in our other US and Asia based locations for years now but this is our first time offering the services in Europe!

For those unfamiliar with reseller plans they allow you to setup separate cPanel accounts, all owned by your reseller, for each site you’re hosting. This provides a unique ability to isolate and separate your sites from each other compared to shared hosting where all your domains are “under one roof”. Isolating sites has a number of benefits when it comes to performance, security, and management. These plans are often used by individuals or businesses looking to start their own hosting company using our platform (all our plans are whitelabel so nobody knows you’re using our hosting), and also commonly used by webmasters/developers to host their clients in one place while still being safely separated.

Introducing Acronis Backup Solution

Wed, 13 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you have logged into cPanel within the past several months you may have noticed a change in our backup solution. While R1Soft was a great product for us at the time it has shown it is not evolving in a manner appropriate for us as a provider or our end users. We had evaluated several solutions over the past year and had decided Acronis was the best solution going forward. We’ve been slowly building infrastructure and deploying it on servers and we can now say all our server are utilizing Acronis for their backup solution.

Hawk Host and Let's Encrypt: Four Years Strong

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’re incredibly happy to say we’ve continued our official sponsorship of Let’s Encrypt for another year! This is our fourth consecutive year sponsoring Let’s Encrypt, and for those of you not familiar with the name, Let’s Encrypt is the non-profit certificate authority that helps us secure all your websites for free. With over 200 million sites secured by Let’s Encrypt they’re making the internet a far safer place for all of us.

Cloud Computes now available in Los Angeles!

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Los Angeles is joining our Dallas, New York City, and Singapore locations in offering cloud computes! These computes are your own private server environment with full root access, giving you full control to configure the compute however you need and the resources to run a site or application of any size!

Full details of our compute plans can be found on our website. We have plans starting at just $5.00/mo for 1GB of RAM with 20GB of disk or you can scale all the way up to our 16GB RAM plan with 200GB of disk! With full root access the computes can be customized to your specific needs and there are no restrictions on what software you install or what modifications you make to get the best performance possible out of the compute. You’ll be able to choose your desired operating system, including popular choices such as CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian.

Hawk Host and COVID-19: A message to our clients

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and impacts all of our daily lives we wanted to send a quick message to our clients ensuring you of our continued operations here at Hawk Host. While it is impossible to fully prepare for a situation of this magnitude we have built our business over the years to prepare for emergency scenarios to ensure continuity of your services with us.

While we continue to adapt to the impacts COVID-19 is having on our operations, both internally and in working with partners and providers, we want to assure you we are taking all precautions possible to make sure your sites and services are not impacted. Our team is also working to ensure we can continue providing the 24/7/365 support you’ve come to expect from us over the years. Though there may be periods where our replies are slower than normal due to impacts to staffing, our team is still here and doing our best to assist you as quickly as possible. We kindly ask for your patience and understanding if you do experience slower than expected response/resolution times to your tickets. We care deeply about our clients and providing the service you deserve from Hawk Host, but the health and safety of our staff is our top priority in the climate created by the spread of COVID-19.

Welcome to the Cloud, Los Angeles!

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This announcement is a few months delayed as we’ve already been migrating customers to the new infrastructure, but we’re happy to officially say our Los Angeles location is now built on the cloud! Los Angeles joins our Dallas TX, New York City, and Singapore locations as part of our infrastructure wide upgrades to improve performance and reliability.

Similar to our existing cloud powered locations the Los Angeles build out was completed with the ultimate goal of achieving the best performance and reliability / redundancy a shared hosting environment can provide. By utilizing high performance distributed storage systems along with redundant CPU hypervisors and a network without a single point of failure we’re doing our best to provide 100% uptime 24/7/365 for all your sites and services.

Embracing the Blockchain! Now Accepting Ethereum!

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been accepting Bitcoin since 2014 and since then the cryptocurrency phenomenon has exploded. Cryptocurrencies as a whole have become mainstream and they are no longer the projects of a niche community like they used to be. While Bitcoin is still the biggest name in the game, Ethereum isn’t far behind and its benefits are endless. That’s why we’re extremely happy to announce we’re now accepting Ethereum as a payment method for all services!

PHP 7.2 New Default PHP Version

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we always value security and compatibility and with that we typically set the default PHP version to the oldest version that is still supported. PHP 7.1 recently reached end of life status ( http://php.net/eol.php ) and with the holiday season over we thought it was finally time to change the default version to PHP 7.2 for all new accounts.

For the majority of users our change from PHP 7.1 to 7.2 will have absolutely no affect on your web site. If you’re already a customer and haven’t changed your PHP version you will remain on the current PHP version you have set. If you’re a new user then you will by default be on PHP 7.2 but you can still easily change your PHP version through our PHP selector.

Introducing DirectAdmin Cloud Compute Licenses

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In July 2019 cPanel announced that they were increasing the license costs for all customers and at that time we talked about partnering with other control panel creators and we’re happy to announce you can now purchase DirectAdmin licenses for your servers at just $6/month

DirectAdmin is developed by JBMC Software and is one of the most popular paid alternatives to cPanel. Unlike cPanel however it supports not only CentOS/RedHat/CloudLinux but also Debian and FreeBSD. At this time however our installations default to CentOS 7 but our team can change your license to another operating system and you’re free to install DirectAdmin on the operating system you desire. DiectAdmin is very comparable to cPanel in terms of usability and features

Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day! It's Holiday Sale Time!

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We hope everyone is having a great holiday season so far! It’s the best time of year to relax with family, take some time off work, and reflect on the past year. And, let’s not forget, your last chance to take advantage of discounts up to 70% on your new hosting plan. Consider it your Christmas gift to yourself!

Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day!

As of this blog post being published our Holiday Sales are LIVE! The coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST on Friday December 27th.

PHP 7.4 Now Available on All Hosting Plans!

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 7.4 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated and cloud web hosting services. PHP 7.4 is the fourth point release in the 7.x series and it comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

PHP 7.4 also like all previous releases contains performance improvements which depending on your application may be noticeable. We however highly recommend checking your applications requirements and then testing using our PHP selector to make sure your application is PHP 7.4 compatible.

If you missed our Black Friday Sales don't worry, Cyber Monday is here!

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Black Friday may be finished, but we’re not done offering great discounts! Our sales are continuing through Cyber Monday and we’re still offering our huge 70% discounts on new orders! This may be your last chance to take advantage of these great deals for your new hosting plan, so don’t wait!

You survived Thanksgiving and Black Friday, so now it’s time to kick back and relax with your new hosting plan. Use the coupons below to save up to 70% on our hosting plans. We’ve got discounts for shared, cloud, semi-dedicated, reseller, and cloud computes, so whatever your needs are we’ve got you covered!

Time to Save! Our 2019 Black Friday Sales are LIVE!

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve made it folks, Black Friday 2019 is upon us! Your savings are here and we’re excited as ever to see you all take advantage of the largest discounts we offer all year! All the discounts we’re offering are below, and you can enjoy discounts of 70% on our most popular and most reliable hosting services!

Black Friday, 2019 Style!

As of this blog post being published our Black Friday sales are LIVE! The coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST on Sunday December 1st. We’re running the sale a bit longer this year as we want to make sure everyone has time to sign up with these great deals. Take your time, enjoy your holidays, find some other great savings for those toys and gadgets you’ve been looking at, but don’t forget to sign up with us before it’s too late!

Back in Black (Friday)! Save up to 70% on this years Black Friday Deals!

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hard to believe its already been a year since our last Black Friday sale, but here we are, ready to launch our 2019 edition of our Black Friday sales! Similar to years past we’ll have discounts for all our services, including savings up to 70% on our most popular hosting plans. We’ve been hard at work this past year improving our hosting plans reliability and performance, making this years Black Friday sales the best bargain to date!

Boo! Ghosts! Pumpkins! Time for a Halloween Sale!

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s spooky season everyone! And we’re here to help with our scary good savings! This year in between your Halloween celebrations, eating candy, and watching horror movies take the time to save up to 50% on your newest Hawk Host order!

Our Halloween sale brings discounts of up to 50%, along with some great recurring discounts if you prefer to keep those savings coming year after year. This isn’t a trick-or-treat attempt either, nothing but treats here!

Closer Look at the Hawk Host Cloud

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our team has been busy deploying our cloud offering and thus far we’ve deployed them in Dallas, New York and Singapore. Each time we’ve announced the launch of a new cloud location we’ve said it’s fast, reliable but have not provided many details. Now while we cannot reveal everything we think it’s time to at least discuss the portions we are able to.

Processors

The processors we use are going to continue to evolve but as of today we deploy Broadwell, Haswell and Skylake processors. Our choice of processor is currently dependent on availability within a location. Rest assured though regardless of the processor your cloud server is on you’ll experience excellent performance.

Goodbye Summer, Hello Flash Sale! 70% Discount on New Orders!

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Autumn is officially here, marking the end of summer 2019. Even if those sunny skies have come and gone we can still celebrate one last time with a surprise flash sale. This is our biggest sale of the year, offering discounts up to 70% off a new hosting order!

This end of Summer sale brings with it discounts up to 70% on your new hosting order so it’s a great opportunity to build that new site or start that new project you’ve been thinking of!

Introducing QUIC Support

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce all our shared hosting, cloud hosting, reseller hosting and semi dedicated hosting accounts now support QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections). We’ve supported SPDY and HTTP/2 for quite some time due to our use of Litespeed. Litespeed has also supported QUIC for some time but with the rapid development of the QUIC feature we have held off on supporting it. We believe it’s reached a point of stability where we’re comfortable offering it on all hosting plans.

Announced cPanel Price Increase

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We have been a long time cPanel supporter and partner and we prided ourselves on offering cPanel to our customer base. On June 27th along with all other cPanel partners we received notice by email of a drastic change on how cPanel intends on pricing their product. We reached out to our cPanel account representative on how this will affect not only our web hosting servers but many of our virtual private server and cloud server customers. Our displeasure with this new pricing has been given to the management team at cPanel. We hope the cPanel team re-evaluates their pricing changes decision but if they do not we have already completed an initial evaluation on how this will impact our services.

Introducing cPanel 80

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

cPanel 80 was pushed to the RELEASE branch on May 28th, 2019 and since then our team have been hard at work doing our own testing to confirm cPanel 80 is ready for Hawk Host customers. We’re happy to say it’s finally here and all our servers are now running cPanel 80.

cPanel 80 introduces many great improvements and features that benefit all our shared/reseller/semi dedicated customers as well as our VPS/cloud customers who currently have cPanel installed.

Hawk Host Spring Flash Sale! Discounts up to 60%!

Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Summer may be fast approaching but we’ve still got time for a Spring sale! While our local weather hasn’t felt very much like Spring we’re still going to celebrate in spirit and offer up to 60% off new hosting orders during the sale!

It’s time for another flash sale! This Spring sale brings with it discounts up to 60% on your new hosting order so it’s a great opportunity to build that new site or start that new project you’ve been thinking of!

PHP 7.1 New Default PHP Version

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we always value security and compatibility and with that for the past several years PHP 5.6 has been the default PHP version chosen for new accounts. PHP 5.6 recently reached end of life status ( http://php.net/eol.php ) and more and more applications are alerting users to the existence of PHP 7.1 or newer. We have now decided to continue to offer the best hosting experience the default version of PHP will now be 7.1 going forward.

Sponsoring Let's Encrypt for Another Year!

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s our pleasure to announce that for the third consecutive year we’ll be an official sponsor of Let’s Encrypt! As our customers continue to enjoy the benefits of free SSL certificates we feel it’s important to give back to the community and the people who make that possible.

Sponsoring for a third year!

For those unfamiliar, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a non-profit organization focused on making the Internet a safer place for everyone. The core concept of the project is to make it free and easy for anyone to install an SSL certificate on their websites, which then encrypts the traffic passed to the site which keeps your data (regardless of how sensitive) safe from those nefarious actors on the public web.

Our Annual Christmas and Boxing Day Sale is Here!

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Happy holidays everyone! While you’re celebrating and spending time with loved ones we’re getting ready to offer one last holiday surprise, a sale! This will be our last big sale of the year and you can save up to 70% on your new order using the coupons below!

Happy Holidays Friends!

Every year we like to celebrate both Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Years with a final end of year sale. This years coupons match our best sales of the year so this is your last chance to take advantage of the great offers. These coupons will expire Thursday December 27th at 11:59PM CST so make sure you hop on this before it’s too late!

PHP 7.3 Now Available on All Hosting Plans!

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 7.3 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated and cloud web hosting services. PHP 7.3 is the third point release in the 7.x series and it comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

PHP 7.3 also like all previous releases contains performance improvements which depending on your application may be noticable. We however highly recommend checking your applications requirements and then testing using our PHP selector to make sure your application is PHP 7.3 compatible.

Our Cloud Has Grown! Now Offering Cloud Plans in Dallas TX!

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had a busy year here at Hawk Host, but our biggest projects have been launching our cloud hosting in both New York City and Singapore. One of our goals was to expand the cloud to more locations and we’re extremely happy to say we’ve done just that, turning our Dallas TX location into a cloud based infrastructure!

Way back in 2012 we made Dallas our first “flagship” location, meaning we decided to take the step to run our own infrastructure, hardware, and network. This was our first full build out and it became the first location we had full control to grow and scale out as needed. It wasn’t long before we did the same in Los Angeles, but we never forgot about Dallas. Dallas is centrally located for all of North America, provides great network connectivity to Central/South America, and is resilient to most major natural disasters, making it a great location for a cloud based infrastructure. Fast forward to today…

Cyber Monday Sales! Last Chance For Your 70% Discount!

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You survived Thanksgiving and Black Friday, so now it’s time to kick back and relax with your new hosting plan. Use the coupons below to save up to 70% on our hosting plans. We’ve got discounts for shared, cloud, semi-dedicated, reseller, VPS, and cloud servers so whatever your needs are we’ve got you covered!

Here We Go! Our 2018 Black Friday Sale is LIVE!

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Ready, set, go! Our 2018 Black Friday sale is live! This is your chance to sign up for any new hosting plan with us and receive up to a 70% discount. We’ve got discounts for our shared hosting, cloud web hosting, semi-dedicated, reseller, VPS, and cloud servers (that’s a lot of services!) so whatever hosting you need, we’ve got it. These sales won’t last forever so don’t wait too long to sign up!

Here's Our 2018 Black Friday Hosting Discounts! Save up to 70%!

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s November, and you know what that means…Black Friday sales! With what has become a yearly tradition for us (and most companies around the globe) we’re extremely excited to once again offer some huge Black Friday discounts on our awesome web hosting! Similar to years past this years promotions offer discounts up to 70% off your new hosting order. That’s a deal you can’t pass up!

Black Friday Fun!

Creating a WordPress Staging Environment Through Softaculous

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of the more common requests we receive from customers, especially WordPress users, is how do they create a staging environment for their site. A proper staging environment has a number of uses but none more important than safely working on your site without risking your production website. Below is an easy to follow (and easier to setup) guide on how to create your own WordPress staging environment!

Stage, Staging…Close Enough!

Cloud Hosting and Cloud Servers Now Available in Singapore!

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A few months back we launched our cloud hosting services in our New York City datacenter. That launch was our most successful new product to date, but we kept seeing one question come up: when will you have the cloud in Singapore? After months of work we can proudly say you asked, so we listened, and now Singapore is our first international cloud datacenter!

Our Newest Cloud Home!

Introducing Node.js Applications

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last year we introduced the ability to quickly and easily deploy both Ruby and Python Applications. We have since seen numerous requests for the ability to deploy Node.js applications the same way. We’re happy to announce that the ability to easily deploy Node.js applications straight from your cPanel is now here.

As of this moment we currently support the following versions of Node.js:

To deploy your Node.JS application the first step is to login to your cPanel then under the software section you’ll see a “Setup Node.js App” option.

Hawk Host Now Accepts Apple Pay

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve got a new feature for all you Apple users out there! Starting today we’ve introduced support for Apple Pay! Apple Pay is easy to use, it’s secure, and it’s integrated right into your devices for one-click payments!

Apple Pay is an international payment method offered by Apple exclusively for users of their devices. The digital wallet allows users to make secure and simple payments to supported merchants, sites, apps, and more. With Hawk Hosts Apple Pay integration you’ll be able to use your existing wallet and stored payment methods to complete one-click invoice payments of both new orders and existing services. Apple Pay is supported on iPhone 6 and newer along with iPad Air and Pro series, as well as Apple Watch.

Introducing Git Version Control

Fri, 13 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We recently upgraded all our web hosting servers to cPanel 72 which has brought many improvements and new features. One of the more exciting and much requested features is Git support. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system that is used by commercial and open source projects. In the open source space you’ll find many of the most popular projects on Github and Gitlab. While a more advanced feature and concept it is now something you’ll be able to leverage in your cPanel.When you login to cPanel you’ll now find under the files option a new “Git™ Version Control” option that’ll bring you to the GIT management page

Chrome is Going to Flag HTTP Sites as 'Not Secure' - Is Your Site Ready?

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Starting in July 2018, Chrome is going to start marking sites that do not use SSL/HTTPS as ‘insecure’, which is not exactly a good look from your visitors point of view. Is your site ready? If not, don’t worry, this is easy to fix. It’s even easier considering we offer all customers free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt.

For those unfamiliar, SSL/HTTPS is a secure protocol which encrypts the traffic passed through your site to stop those nefarious onlookers from inspecting your data and information. It’s an established protocol and has been considered a best practice for years now, especially for sites processing sensitive information (customer data, payment information, etc.). Now that SSL is readily available and often times free through initiatives such as Let’s Encrypt, Chrome is taking this big step to further encrypt the web to make it a safer and more secure environment for all users. Here’s what your site will look like if SSL/HTTPS is not enabled by July:

Soaring to New Heights: Introducing Hawk Host Cloud Hosting

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’re moving into the cloud! Over the past year we’ve been hard at work on our most ambitious project yet, and as of today we’re officially launching the first ever cloud hosting product at Hawk Host! We’ve designed our cloud to be industry competitive, reliable, and user friendly.

Hawk Host in the Cloud!

Our cloud hosting product has been purpose built with quality from day one. The hardware, datacenter, network, and software powering our cloud were chosen exclusively on how beneficial it would be to creating a reliable and high performance environment. We’ve spent more time deploying and testing this service than any other product launch in our company history. The end result is a hosting service we’re confident will exceed all your expectations when it comes to performance, uptime, and usability.

Hawk Host and Let's Encrypt: Sponsor For Another Year!

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’re incredibly happy to announce that Hawk Host is going to be a silver level sponsor of the Let’s Encrypt project for another year! This will be our second consecutive year sponsoring Let’s Encrypt, a year which has shown SSL adoption for sites on our network increase by magnitudes even we did not expect!

For those unfamiliar, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a non-profit organization focused on making the Internet a safer place for everyone. The core concept of the project is to make it free and easy for anyone to install an SSL certificate on their websites, thereby encrypting the traffic passed to the site which keeps your data (regardless of how sensitive) safe from those nefarious actors on the public web.

How We're Handling the Meltdown / Spectre CPU Vulnerability

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A vulnerability has been announced that impacts nearly all modern CPU architectures which could allow an attacker to access raw data at the kernel level. We are taking the necessary steps to apply the available patches to our systems and will continue to apply any critical updates as they’re made available by our upstream vendors.

The vulnerabilities, named Meltdown and Spectre, expose flaws in the mechanisms meant to prevent access to this raw data, meaning sensitive and otherwise encrypted information can be accessed and read in plaintext. The architecture (when working properly) is supposed to create untouchable spaces which isolate any data passed at that level of the system from the rest of the OS / system. The Meltdown and Spectre exploits have found a way to bypass those protections and make it possible for an attacker on an unpatched system to access and read that data.

PHP 7.2 Now Available on All Hosting Plans!

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 7.2 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated hosting services. PHP 7.2 is the second point release in the 7.x series and it comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

To enable PHP 7.2 all you need to do is login to cPanel go to ‘Select PHP Version’:

The Year in Review: Hawk Host in 2017

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Happy Holidays Everyone! Let's Celebrate With A Sale!

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Holidays to all our Hawk Host friends! We hope everyone is having a great holiday season celebrating with family and loved ones, and staying safe of course! We’re going to close out the year on a great note and have a huge blowout sale to celebrate Christmas, Boxing Day (it’s a Canadian thing), and the upcoming New Years! You can save up to 70% on a new hosting order using the coupons below!

A Closer Look Into Our Washington DC to New York City Migrations

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a shared, reseller, or semi-dedicated customer hosted in our Washington DC datacenter you’ve probably received an email about an upcoming migration to our new New York City facility. If you haven’t yet received the email yet don’t worry, one will be coming soon enough, just in time for the holidays! This post will provide a bit more insight on what’s going on and what you need to do to keep your sites online through the migration.

2017 Cyber Monday Sales! Sign up and Save 70% on Your New Order!

Sun, 26 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you missed our Black Friday sales don’t worry, Cyber Monday is here for you! You can take advantage of the same discounts so it’s not too late to save up to 70% on your new hosting order!

This years Cyber Monday sales will be active from now through 11:59 PM CST Tuesday November 28th. The coupons are active so you can sign up right now and receive a huge discount on our awesome hosting services!

Our Black Friday Sale is Live! Sign Up and Save 70%!

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Our 2017 Black Friday sale is officially live! Sign up now for any new shared, reseller, semi-dedicated, or VPS hosting plan and receive up to a 70% discount when using our Black Friday coupons listed below

This years Black Friday event will be active from now through 11:59 PM CST Sunday November 26th. That’s four full days to sign up for a new hosting plan and take advantage of these great discounts! The coupons are active so you can sign up right now and receive a huge discount on our awesome hosting services!

2017 Black Friday Hosting Discounts! Save up to 70%!

Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back everyone! It’s what you’ve all been waiting for, the 2017 edition of Hawk Hosts Black Friday sales! Our Black Friday event is our biggest sale of the year and this years sale is no different, you can save up to 70% on your new hosting order!

We have some good news for all of you eager shoppers out there! This years sales will start a day early, meaning you can take advantage of these discounts as of 12:01 AM CST Thursday November 23rd. That’s one whole day before Black Friday! These coupons will be valid through 11:59 PM CST Sunday November 26th, giving you four full days to take advantage of these fantastic discounts. Please keep in mind that these coupons are not yet active so we’ll be posting another announcement next week once the discounts are active. Of course if you have any questions about these promotions you can always contact our sales team and we’ll be happy to help!

Introducing Updated Let's Encrypt / AutoSSL Feature

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We introduced the ability to issue Let’s Encrypt certificates in February 2016 and since then this feature has been heavily used. The idea though that you’d have to individually issue each certificate was not particularly user friendly. Fortunately cPanel introduced the ability to automatically issue certificates and upon announcing our Let’s Encrypt sponsorship we started automatically issuing Let’s Encrypt certificates. We kept both ways to handle Let’s Encrypt certificates available but finally we are saying good bye to our legacy interface.

MySQL Now Powered by MariaDB 10.1

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

cPanel has supported MariaDB 10.1 for some time making it possible for us to upgrade. We have many VPS users utilizing MariaDB 10.1 due to how easy it is to switch to it. For us however we attempt to maintain compatibility with a larger amount of software and deployments of customer sites that could be over 10 years old! I am happy to say though our team worked diligently and we’ve completed our upgrades from MariaDB 10.0 to 10.1.In the case of this upgrade you’ll see no new features that would affect you however there are numerous performance improvements that may speed up your website so MariaDB 10.1 is an improvement for everyone over the previous version.

Amsterdam Flash Sale! 50% Recurring Discount on All New Shared & VPS Orders!

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Surprise, it’s an Amsterdam flash sale! Sign up for any new shared or VPS hosting plan in our Amsterdam datacenter using coupon code “amsflash1017” and you’ll receive a 50% recurring lifetime discount. That discount is valid for the life of the service, and will also be applied to any future upgrades you perform, so this is a great chance to get an affordable hosting plan based in Amsterdam!

This flash sale is valid for our Amsterdam datacenter only. New orders placed with this coupon requesting a location other than Amsterdam will be left pending and you’ll be contacted by our sales team via support ticket.

Introducing cPanel Application Manager (Redis Support)

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On December 31st 2015 we introduced the ability to launch memcached servers from accounts. We had added this due to popular demand for the ability to easily start a memcached server. Since then we have seen inquiries to add the ability to launch Redis and we’ve seen other similar applications on accounts as well. This lead to us taking a step back and looking at a more complete solution and applying what we had learned about how our memcached feature was being used. I’m happy to introduce a much more complete solution our Application Manager (Server Application Manager in your cPanel).

Your Hosting Accounts Security at Hawk Host

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

People often question whether or not shared hosting can actually be secure. The concept of sharing a server with other users, while some of those users may be malicious, is a scary concept to people. Over the years we have continually taken steps to not only alleviate those concerns by talking to clients but we’ve also invested in security and technology upgrades that make our shared hosting as secure as it can be.

Introducing cPanel 66

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce the latest version of cPanel version 66 is now available on all our shared, semi dedicated and reseller hosting services. As always each version of cPanel brings with it numerous fixes, performance improvements and features and this version is no different.

Improved SSL/TLS Status Page

cPanel 66 introduces an improved SSL/TLS status page which gives you complete control over our AutoSSL feature that we launched when we became an official Let’s Encrypt sponsor. You can get to the SSL/TLS status page by searching for it under the security tab in cPanel:

Help! My WordPress Site is Slow! Can't You Fix It!?

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps the most dreaded discovery for any webmaster is finding out your website just isn’t as fast as it used to be, or in your eyes, as fast as it should be. All too often webmasters and site owners fall into the trap of thinking their software can scale indefinitely without any optimizations and without being mindful of the plugins, themes, or addons you’re installing. This is a particularly common problem with WordPress and as a result we’ve found a few basic debugging steps can go a long way in finding out where your sites bottlenecks are and how to fix them.

Quickly and Easily Deploy a Ruby or Python Application

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that we now support the ability to deploy applications using various versions of Ruby and Python. Our ability to support these new features is thanks to the recent introduction of mod_passenger support on Litespeed. Of course with Litespeed it always includes numerous performance improvements over other implementations so that your application can be just that much faster.

We currently support the following versions of Ruby and Python on all shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated hosting plans:

Hawk Host July 2017 Discounts

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We’re constantly running promotions on our site. We thought though it be a great time to highlight some of the great discounts we’re offering for the month of July. We’re currently offering anywhere between 25% and 30% depending on the hosting package. We also have many domain extensions for sale at as low as $1.50 for the first year.

Domain Discount Spotlight

For domains just click the coupon link and once you reach the checkout page the promotion price will be used.

Introducing Imunify360 - Enhanced Website & System Security

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we’ve just finished deployment of Imunify360 to all our shared, reseller and semi dedicated hosting servers. Imunify360 is the latest innovative software by CloudLinux that enhances security significantly for linux web servers. It brings many tools for our system administrators but also significant improvements to the potential security of all accounts on our servers. It introduces an advanced firewall, smart intrusion detection system, malware scanning and has many other great features planned.

VPS Hosting & Cloudflare Railgun Now Available in Amsterdam!

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s announcement brings two very exciting improvements to our Amsterdam datacenter. Not only are we now offering our VPS hosting plans in Amsterdam but we also enabled Cloudflares Railgun network optimizer! These changes are a direct result of customer requests and feedback from what you wanted to see us offer.

I Amsterdam Indeed

VPS Hosting Plans

As many of you are aware we’ve offered VPS hosting for quite some time. Up until now our VPS plans were only available in our Washington DC, Dallas TX, Los Angeles CA, and Singapore datacenters. Amsterdam is our first VPS location in Europe and one we couldn’t be more excited about. The VPS plans are OpenVZ based and start at just $18/mo, making it very affordable to get your own private hosting environment with full root access. With direct peering to the AMSIX and a blend of tier II network providers our Amsterdam facility is highly connected and should provide great speeds for visitors not only from Europe but all over the globe.

What's New at Hawk Host June 2017

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We’re been a bit quiet lately but we’re still working behind on the scenes on many great new features and improvements to our services here at Hawk Host. Here’s just a quick run down of a few features that have recently became available to everyone.

Web Server mod_geoip Support

All of our servers now support mod_geoip which can allow you to make changes to your web site depending on the location of your users. For example if you wanted to have all your users in the United States and Canada go to a different folder it be as easy as this:

Cloudflare Memory Leak Disclosure and Impact

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As many of you are aware a recent Cloudflare memory leak was reported. This exploit resulted in sensitive encrypted data being viewable in plaintext primarily through major search engine caches but potentially in realtime as well. As of this posting the exploit has been fixed and we’re told no further disclosures are occurring.

Hawk Host utilizes Cloudflare services for its own web properties. We have searched extensively for any indication that our customers data was disclosed and have so far found no sign that we were personally affected by this exploit. We have also been told by Cloudflare directly that there is no indication from their side that our websites or properties were involved in the leak. We will continue to ensure this is the case through both our own research and working with Cloudflare and any new information they can provide us.

Introducing cPanel 62

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the past 24 hours our team has been working diligently to deploy cPanel 62 to all our servers and we’re happy to announce this has now been completed. As always cPanel updates brings new features and various improvements.

Performance Improvements

In many cases email accounts could taken several seconds to load. This has been reduced to just milliseconds for each email account created. You can now create email accounts as quickly as you can type. Along with that many pages users frequently access now have been optimized even further to reduce load times and ensure the fastest possible experience.

O Canada! We've Opened Our First Canadian Hosting Datacenter in Toronto

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

O Canada, our home and native land. As many of you know we’re a Canadian based company and have been since we started hosting web sites over 10 years ago. While we’ve never offered hosting in Canada (strange, right?) that’s about to change. We’ve officially opened our first Canadian datacenter in Toronto, making it our 7th location for shared hosting. Starting today you and your new websites can call Toronto home too!

Happy Holidays! It's Time for Our Christmas & Boxing Day Sale!

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We’re here to make your holiday season a little bit better! The Christmas spirit is upon us and we’re going to spread that cheer your way by helping you sign up for our awesome hosting at a discount! This years holiday sales will feature one time discounts up to 50% and recurring discounts of up to 40%!

What a Gift!

Every year we have people who ask us “what exactly is Boxing Day?”. Well, for the uninformed, Boxing Day is a minor holiday celebrated the day after Christmas. It’s not a terribly popular holiday but our home country of Canada is one of the biggest celebrators! Here at Hawk Host we’ve had sales on Boxing Day for a few years now, in fact our first Boxing Day sale was in 2010. In recent years we’ve started to include Christmas as part of the promotion to celebrate the holiday spirit. Think of it as a small Christmas gift from your friends at Hawk Host :)

PHP 7.1 Now Available on All Hosting Plans!

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 7.1 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated hosting services. PHP 7.1 is the first point release in the 7.x series and it comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

To enable PHP 7.1 all you need to do is login to cPanel go to ‘Select PHP Version’:

2016 Black Friday Is Over But Cyber Weekend is Now Here

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Black Friday has come and gone but the fantastic deals at Hawk Host are not quite over. We’ll be running Cyber Weekend promotions all through the weekend including on Monday.

Every year we offer massive discounts on our already affordable hosting plans, giving both new and existing customers a chance to sign up for a new service at a fraction of our regular prices. This years specials are no different and you can save up to 70% on a new hosting plan. Whether you’re looking for shared, reseller, semi-dedicated, or VPS hosting our Cyber weekend discounts are certain to have something for you!

Our 2016 Black Friday Web Hosting Sale is Live! Sign up Now!

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We know you’ve all been waiting for this. It’s time for our Black Friday hosting specials! We’ve launched our sale a few hours early so you can start taking advantage of these great Black Friday coupons!

Every year we offer massive discounts on our already affordable hosting plans, giving both new and existing customers a chance to sign up for a new service at a fraction of our regular prices. This years specials are no different and you can save up to 70% on a new hosting plan. Whether you’re looking for shared, reseller, semi-dedicated, or VPS hosting our Black Friday discounts are certain to have something for you!

Hawk Hosts 2016 Black Friday Hosting Specials!

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As Black Friday approaches we wanted to provide you with a sneak peak of the discounts and savings we’ll be offering for this years sale. As always our Black Friday event offers the largest discounts of the year for new hosting orders. This years specials will feature discounts of up to 70% off your first payment along with recurring discounts up to 55%. By taking advantage of these discounts you can sign up for a new hosting plan for as little as $0.89/mo! That’s hard to beat!

Hawk Host Now Officially Sponsors Let's Encrypt!

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year we announced that we’d begun offering free SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt, an open source collaboration backed by some of the biggest names in the hosting and security industry. In the roughly 8 months that have passed we’ve found the program to be a huge success and the customer adoption rate has far exceeded what we initially expected. In light of that success, combined with our continuous effort to provide the most secure hosting platform possible, we’ve decided to become an official Let’s Encrypt sponsor! This is our first official sponsorship in our company history, and it’s one we couldn’t be both more proud of and excited about.

Hawk Host November Domain and Hosting Promotions

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to November! Hard to believe we’re almost through 2016 and already posting this months specials! We’re constantly running promotions on our site. We’re currently offering anywhere between 25% and 30% depending on the hosting package. We also have many domain extensions for sale at as low as $2.00 for the first year.

Domain Discount Spotlight

For domains just click the coupon link and once you reach the checkout page the promotion price will be used.

CVE-2016-5195 "Dirty COW" - You're Protected And Secured!

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As many of you have likely seen a serious Linux kernel vulnerability, aka Dirty COW, (CVE-2016-5195) was disclosed earlier this morning. This vulnerability impacts nearly every major Linux based OS, including RHEL and therefore our operating system CloudLinux. The vulnerability allows for an attacker to trigger a race condition in the memory management code which can then lead to a local privilege escalation.

Your websites, hosting accounts, and VPS plans are fully protected from this vulnerability. While most major vendors and systems are still being patched against Dirty COW we’ve already protected ourselves against this vulnerability thanks for our friends are KernelCare. Within hours of this vulnerability being disclosed we’ve applied a hotfix to protect our systems and your websites against this exploit. This patch was applied without requiring a system reboot, a unique feature that allows us to patch serious kernel level vulnerabilities without requiring downtime.

Client Area Two Factor Authentication Now Available

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We recently introduced two factor authentication to our cPanel and we’re now happy to announce you’ll be able to utilize two factor authentication in our client area as well. Two factor authentication (2FA) adds an additional level of security where in not only your password is required but an additional code typically retrieved from another device such as a phone.

The two factor authentication is completely optional, however it is highly recommended. If you have your phone with you at all times there are no negatives in taking a few moments to set it up. There are several apps available to handle time based on time passwords including but not limited to:

Hawk Host October Hosting and Domain Promotions

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Over at Hawk Host we can’t believe it’s already the month of October. We’re constantly running promotions on our site. We thought though it be a great time to highlight some of the great discounts we’re offering for the month of October. We’re currently offering anywhere between 25% and 30% depending on the hosting package. We also have many domain extensions for sale at as low as $1.50 for the first year.

Improve Performance with Litespeed Cache Wordpress Plugin

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post on our blog we discussed the idea of using the LiteSpeed page caching feature to improve performance of Wordpress. The caching drastically improved the performance of a Wordpress installation. You were able to go from just over 200 requests/sec to 1800 requests/sec with just a simple htaccess line. The LiteSpeed team have however worked on making it even easier to accomplish this with the introduction of their LiteSpeed Cache plugin for Wordpress. With this plugin you have further control over your caching policies and can utilize a simplified htaccess mod_rewrite rule. I’m going to quickly go through how you install and configure the Wordpress LiteSpeed cache plugin.

Surprise September Flash Sale! Save 40% on Your New Order!

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a mid-September surprise sale! As summer comes to a close and everyone returns to school we’re going to celebrate one last time in style. We’re offering a 40% recurring discount on any new order for any shared, reseller, semi-dedicated, or VPS plan! Check out the details below to get started!

Oh no! Not the school bus!

For the next 48 hours any order placed using the coupons below will receive a 40% recurring discount. That’s a lifetime discount so you can enjoy your world class hosting at an extremely affordable price!

cPanel Two Factor Authentication Now Available

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that all our servers now support the ability to utilize two-factor authentication within cPanel. Two factor authentication (2FA) adds an additional level of security where in not only your password is required but an additional code typically retrieved from another device such as a phone.

Two factor in your cPanel is completely optional and is by no means required. If you however have a phone with you at all times it can be quickly setup. This means if someone were to ever retrieve your password they would still be unable to login to your cPanel. To set it up all you need to do is login to cPanel go to the security category then Two-Factor Authentication:

Installing OctoberCMS at Hawk Host

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

OctoberCMS is an exciting new CMS software developed using the Laravel framework. It’s always been possible to run Laravel on our cPanel hosting and we’ve even written a post about how to install it on our shared web hosting. OctoberCMS however is not currently available in our auto installers but it’s still very easy to install.

Key Features of the OctoberCMS include:

Built on Laravel framework
Modern template engine. Web designer friendly
Extensible platform with full plugin support
Fully compatible with cPanel / shared hosting
AJAX friendly
CDN integration, multi-language support, and much more

Step 1

You’ll need to download OctoberCMS which you can do by going to https://github.com/octobercms/install/archive/master.zip

Shared Hosting Now Available in Hong Kong

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Our sixth hosting location is now officially online! Hong Kong is our newest datacenter for shared hosting plans and it’s our first location in China.

Welcome to Hong Kong!

Starting today customers can place orders for any shared hosting plan in our Hong Kong datacenter. Right now plans are limited to shared hosting but we’ll be exploring offering our reseller, semi-dedicated, and VPS plans in Hong Kong for the future. This new location offers the same level of quality and reliability as our other five existing locations and you can expect all the same features for the shared plans as well. All of our shared plans include a free memcached server, free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, direct Cloudflare integration, 24/7/365 support, and so much more! If you’re looking for a full breakdown of what our shared plans offer you can find more details on our site at https://www.hawkhost.com/shared-web-hosting

VPS Hosting Launched in Los Angeles!

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Our Los Angeles datacenter is now accepting VPS orders! This is our fourth location offering VPS hosting and our first US West coast datacenter with VPS plans. Not only does our Los Angeles location offer great connectivity for North American traffic, we also peer directly with major Asia/Pacific ISPs to provide a solid network for international customers.

Welcome to LA!

Our new Los Angeles VPS plans are the perfect choice for anyone looking to establish a West coast hosting presence. Whether your target audience is based in the United States, Canada, or even the Asia/Pacific region, our Los Angeles network is built to satisfy your needs. By peering with the likes of nLayer (GTT), PCCW, HiNet, China Unicom, and TeliaSonera we’ve established not only a legitimate domestic network but one of the best trans-Pacific networks available. You can find more information about our Los Angeles network right on our site along with speedtests, test IPs, and download files.

Low Budget Marketing For New Web Stores

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

So you just opened your shiny new Magento or Opencart store. It looks great, it’s fast and it’s on a great host (Hint #1 use Hawk Host). But where are all the sales?

Unfortunately your work isn’t done. Here are some things you can do to get over the hump and start getting your first few sales.

Let The Internet Know You Exist

Eventually Google and all of the other sites like that will find you but you can speed that up dramatically. First you should use these links (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to submit your site to the big 3 search engines. After that you should register an account for your site on all of the major Social Media platforms. I recommend at least Facebook and Twitter but you can do others such as Reddit, Pinterest, and Instagram if they fit your market.

Three Big Mistakes New Site Owners Make (And How To Avoid Them)

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t handicap your new website by falling into beginners traps. Here are some common pitfalls you should actively avoid.

Spamming Your Site

There are thousands of services offering to give you a “METRIC BUTTLOAD of BACKLINKS” for only $10! If it seems too good to be true then it almost always is and that’s no different here. If a single link costs you less than $10 or less than 5 minutes of work then it is probably not worth it, and doing it repeatedly will likely wind you up in the doghouse with Google.

4 Ways To Keep Your New Magento Shop Secure

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Below are some no-downside tips for securing your Magento store against most of the currently known attacks.

Oh No, He’s Pwned Our RAMs!

Move / Hide Important Folders

You should never rely on security by obscurity as your primary means of locking up your store, but hiding key folders can stop you from getting hit by automated attacks when security vulnerabilities pop up.

First change your admin location by opening /app/etc/local.xml. Change the code in red to something you can easily remember and save the file.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting Plans Now Available in Singapore!

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Due to popular demand we’re extremely pleased to announce our semi-dedicated hosting plans are now available in a new location: Singapore! We’ve previously offered these plans in our Los Angeles, Dallas, and Washington DC location with great success but customers kept asking about our Singapore location.

For those of you not familiar with our semi-dedicated plans, they’re just like shared hosting plans but with an added performance boost. There are a few other perks as well, making them a great hosting solution for those websites that need a little extra kick. Compared to shared hosting plans our semi-dedicated packages offer the following advantages:

Create a Better Site with Weebly: It's Free, It's Easy, It's Built for You

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Building a web site can be difficult. Very difficult. Creating an easy to use, well designed, practical, and affordable web site is seemingly impossible. One option is to spend thousands of dollars on a professionally designed site that is responsive, mobile friendly, modern, and easy on the eyes. For most of us it’s just not practical to spend that much on a website. That’s where Weebly comes in. Weebly gives you the power to create a professional looking and feature rich website for free.

An Introduction to cPanels New Site Publisher

Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

With the release of cPanel version 56 comes a new feature titled ‘Site Publisher’. While the name is a bit vague using the software is anything but that. In short, the site publisher is a remarkably easy to use “editor” that lets you get a quick website up in less than 5 minutes. Well, the first time may take you 5 minutes, but once you know what you’re doing it will take about 30 seconds to get the publisher working on any of your sites.

How To Improve Your Newsletter: Part 1

Tue, 17 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

While it is difficult to get users to agree to sign up for your mailing list it’s many times more difficult to keep them opening your email once they do sign up. Here are some good battle tested general tips to improve your newsletter.

It’s Mail Time!

Content First, Marketing Second

A lot of new email marketers fall into the trap of making their entire mailing a sales pitch. Unless your site is built around rapidly adding products and deep discounts then you’re going to need to include some good content as well, or you risk your audience growing bored and unsubscribing.

4 Easy & Extremely Effective Ways To Speed Up Your Magento Store

Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Running a high-performance Magento shop on shared hosting can be tricky, even for the most experienced webmasters. Magento is extremely resource hungry and will bring even dedicated servers to a crawl if you don’t take the right precautions. Here are 4 tips to speed up your store that are easy enough for just about anyone, and best of all won’t cost you anything.

Flash Sale in Los Angeles! Save 55% On All Hosting Plans!

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Surprise! For the next five days we’re hosting a flash sale for all new orders in our Los Angeles datacenter! You can order any new shared, reseller, or semi-dedicated hosting plan and receive either a 55% one time discount or a 40% recurring discount. Those are some pretty hefty savings, so don’t let this one pass you by.

What! A Flash Sale!?

Don’t forget that these specials are only valid for new orders in our Los Angeles datacenter. The specials will be valid through Sunday April 24th 11:59PM CST, at which point they’re going to expire. Make sure your new orders are placed before then to take advantage of these great hosting deals.

6 Ways To Increase Your Magento Store Revenue Without Spending A Dime

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Assuming you’re willing to invest some time, learn, and get your hands dirty then these tips will help you get your store’s revenue trending upwards. Let’s dive right in.

For the uninitiated these are the annoying banners that pop up (and sometimes shake) at you when you move your mouse off the top of the screen presumably to close the tab.

The technology that drives these now nearly ubiquitous pop-ups was once limited to companies with huge marketing budgets or large development teams, but now you’ll find them nearly everywhere. There are several free & open source options but for my money the best option is Oui Bounce. Even if you’re not graphically inclined a simple text based popup will give you one last shot at converting a customer before they walk out the door.

Free SSL Certificates - Let's Encrypt Now Supported

Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Encryption on the web has been a hot-button issue lately, one that deserves all the attention its received. Anyone even remotely tech savvy understands just how important and vital encryption is for the safety of not only individual web users but for the Internet ecoystem as a whole. It should come as no surprise that we’re huge proponents of encryption as part of our hosting environment/platform, and that’s why we’re now offering free SSL certificates as part of the Let’s Encrypt program. All customers are immediately eligible to install a free and trusted SSL certificate on their account.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting - Increased IO Speeds!

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that effective immediately all of our Semi-Dedicated web hosting plans will get a IO speed boost for free! Now every plan will have an IO limit of 10MB/s which means you shouldn’t ever be running into IO limitations!

Beep Beep!

This change should already be in effect so if you’re not seeing this change reflected in your control panel please contact our support department and we’ll get everything squared away in a jiffy!

Memcached Now Available on All Hosting Plans!

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Good news, everyone! We’re quite pleased to announce all of our hosting plans now offer memcached support. Even better, it’s 100% free! For those unfamiliar, memcached is a general purpose memory caching system. Its primary benefit is to cache your database requests and reduce (or eliminate) the need to hit your database for common queries. For a number of sites (especially those that run Wordpress), inefficient queries are one of the most common causes for site slowdowns. Caching those queries and serving them from memory will show some drastic performance improvements for even your busiest sites.

Happy Holidays! Here's Our 2015 Christmas & Boxing Day Specials!

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We’re really feeling the holiday spirit this year at Hawk Host! For the past week we’ve been running our first daily holiday special promotion where we posted a different special each day. Now that our specials week is coming to a close, it’s time to unveil our largest discount yet! For the next 48 hours you can save up to 75% on your new shared hosting order. It’s a Christmas miracle!

Seven Days of Christmas Sale - Holiday Web Hosting Specials and Coupons!

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time of the year where everyone is shopping and looking for a bargain! While not many people receive web hosting as a gift perhaps we can lighten your monetary burden and give you some amazing deals for this holiday season.

How old is this chocolate anyway?

You may be familiar with the ever so popular Twelve Days of Christmas song or those amazing chocolate advent calendars (the chocolate always tasted funny, didn’t it?). Well we’re going to do our own spin on this with the Twelve Seven Days of Web Hosting Specials!

Cyber Monday Web Hosting Specials - Up to 75% Off!

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone enjoyed our Black Friday specials so much we’ve decided to extend the sale through Cyber Monday! If you missed out on our Black Friday specials, don’t worry, it’s not too late to take advantage of these great discounts to sign up for our awesome web hosting! You can save up to 75% on our hosting plans and that includes our shared, reseller, semi-dedicated and VPS hosting plans. But don’t wait too long, these specials will only be valid through Monday!

Black Friday Web Hosting Deals 2015 - Up to 75% Off!

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the 2015 edition of our Black Friday hosting discounts and specials! We’re extremely happy to offer these fantastic discounts once again this year to celebrate our customers favorite shopping holiday, Black Friday! This year, just like years past, we’ll be offering large one time (up to 75% off!) and recurring discounts on our shared, reseller, semi-dedicated and VPS hosting plans.

2015 Black Friday Hosting Specials

New Client Area Theme and Layout!

Sat, 31 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Our client area just got a face lift! The new theme and layout is fully responsive, 100% mobile friendly, cleaner, and easier to navigate. You can now manage your billing, support, cPanel and more from right through the client area!

Hawk Host Client Area

You’ll notice the changes when you first login. Right from your dashboard you can view your services, pending invoices, account details, and more. In addition to the layout and navigation improvements you should see a noticeable increase in the speed and responsiveness to the new theme.

Hosting Package Changes: Unlimited Disk Space & Bandwidth

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For nearly two years now we’ve offered unlimited bandwidth on our shared and semi-dedicated hosting packages, and the customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The success of those plans, combined with recent network upgrades and expansions, has led to this exciting announcement: effective immediately, all new reseller hosting packages will also include unlimited bandwidth!

But that’s not all we’re changing! As part of our continued efforts to provide customers with the most competitive hosting available, we’ll be introducing new shared and semi-dedicated plans that include both unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space!

Wordpress Performance & Optimization Tips

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most common questions we get from our customers is “How do I speed up my website?”. A large majority of these customers rely on Wordpress to power their websites. As many of you are aware, Wordpress is an extremely flexible platform, able to power sites ranging from a personal blog to a high traffic e-commerce website. Whether you’re running a hobby site or a business it’s important to keep your site tuned up and performing as fast as possible.

PHP 7 Now Available on All Hosting Plans

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you have not been following PHP development recently PHP 7 is fast approaching with the first beta having been released just over a month ago. As is tradition here at Hawk Host we’re always pushing the envelope when it comes to shared web hosting. That is why as of today we officially support PHP 7 even though it’s currently beta.

The first thing you’re wondering is where is PHP 6? The answer is many of the great features we enjoy in PHP today were originally set to be part of PHP 6. Other features had subsequently not made it into any PHP version. To avoid confusion the PHP team have opted to move straight to 7.

Flash Sale! $5 Domain Names and 40% Recurring Hosting Discounts!

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s time for a flash sale! For the next 72 hours we’ll be offering discounts on all of our hosting services and domain registrations! Whether you need a new shared hosting plan or a new domain this sale has something for you.

Shared Special

40% recurring discount on any new shared hosting order in any location when using coupon code “julyflash2015”

Reseller Special

40% recurring discount on any new reseller hosting order in any location when using coupon code “rjulyflash2015”

Super Charge Wordpress With Litespeed Cache

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Update: We now have a guide for the LiteSpeed Cache Wordpress Plugin

We recently enabled the ability to utilize Litespeed’s caching functionality which some of our user base has already started taking advantage of. For the users who have not started utilizing it I’m going to quickly describe it and provide the benefits of it.

The Litespeed cache works similar to that of Apache’s mod_cache while providing the performance of the popular Varnish reverse proxy. Unlike Varnish however you do not need to deal with the complications of a reverse proxy. All you need to do in order to enable caching is just add a few mod_rewrite rules to your .htaccess file and you’ll be utilizing it.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting Plans Now Available in Washington DC

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to your feedback and requests we’ve officially launched our semi-dedicated hosting packages in Washington DC! Meant for higher resource and higher traffic sites, our semi-dedicated plans are built to perform. Compared to a normal shared hosting plan our semi-dedicated packages offer twice as much CPU, memory, and MySQL connections, along with a higher outbound email limit and daily off-site backups taken twice per day. Like all of our other plans these are SSD powered servers with the newest high performance processors and 32GB of memory. Needless to say if you need a high performance environment our semi-dedicated plans are right for you.

Network Upgrades in Los Angeles Datacenter

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For customers based in Asia and using our Los Angeles webhosting we have good news for you! We’re extremely happy to announce that our network provider in Los Angeles has reached an agreement with China Telecom to begin providing direct connectivity from their customers to our Los Angeles datacenter. As China’s largest ISP, this is a massive improvement in terms of both capacity and routing for all users on our network. This is a significant upgrade to our already robust trans-Pacific network and customers should begin seeing optimized routing, reduced latency, and fewer issues related to congestion at peak traffic hours. What this ultimately means is faster connectivity to your web sites, not only for you but for all your visitors and traffic from Asia, specifically mainland China.

HTTP/2 & More Now Available at Hawk Host via Litespeed 5.0

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We’re proud to announce it is now official we’re running Litespeed 5 on all our servers and will not be going back to an older version of the software. We’ve been testing 5.0 before its release and upon its official stable release we had started our roll out to a larger amount of our users. We spent nearly a month working with the Litespeed team as we uncovered bugs in our environment and they quickly fixed them. We’re now confident that Litespeed 5 is here to stay at Hawk Host and it’s time for all our users to know so they can take advantage of the many new features.

Customer Service From a Customer Perspective

Tue, 26 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s no surprise that as a customer you rely on us to be the experts in the field of web hosting. That’s understandable for a number of reasons, primarily because you pay us good money to keep your site online and make sure we meet our end of the deal. That’s all good and well when things are working but what happens when they’re not? Lets say for the sake of example you get a message from one of your customers saying they can’t reach your site. You first think “well that’s not good.” Your second thought, like most customers, is “what did my host break now!?” And this is where the fun really begins. Whether it’s a server/network issue on our side, or a code/plugin issue with your software, your site is offline and you’re about to open a ticket with someone on our team. How you proceed from here can dictate just how fast we’re able to help you and figure out your problem.

Now Offering Reseller Hosting in Singapore

Mon, 11 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We’re very happy to announce we finally have our first international reseller location! You can now place an order for any of our reseller hosting plans in Singapore. You can find more details about our Singapore network, along with speedtests and test IPs, right on our site at https://www.hawkhost.com/our-hosting-network/singapore

To celebrate this announcement we’re offering a 5 day sale on any new reseller plan in our Singapore location! This offer will expire on Friday May 15th at 11:59PM CST:

We're Bad at Pranks - 60% Flash Sale - Happy April Fools!

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Admittedly we’ve never been very good at pranks. Sometimes it’s just more fun to watch everyone around you suffer from good-natured ploys at making the victim seem foolish. In light of our not-so April Fools celebration, we’ve decided to launch our brand new website! What better time to make a major overhaul to your site and brand than on a day notorious for jokes. In addition to our new site, we’re having a 24 hour flash sale where you can save up to 60% on any hosting plan.

New Website, New Adventures - Starting a Site 101

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Anyone who has ever setup a website remembers how daunting their first experience was. Terms like ‘shared hosting’, ‘register a domain’, ’nameservers’, and ‘cPanel’, which may now be in your regular vernacular, were once a foreign language you’d someday hope to understand. You were confused about what company you should host with, or how you’d even build a website, or whether or not you could fix a problem with the site once it was online. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business, an individual, a hobbyist, or anything in between, todays culture expects you to have a web presence. So where does the first time site builder get started?

New Feature! cPanel Integration For Your Client Area!

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Up until today, any time you wanted to make a change to your hosting account (domains, databases, emails, etc) it had to be done directly through cPanel. This meant you needed to remember multiple usernames and passwords (Note: If you’re not already, you should be using LastPass for secure password management) depending on whether you wanted to access your client area, helpdesk account, or cPanel. We’re very happy to say we’ve found a way to integrate your cPanel control right into your client area, meaning fewer logins and a more unified hosting experience. Hooray!

Hawk Host in 2014 - The Year In Review

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As improbable as it seems, 2014 is coming to a close and 2015 is upon us. It’s hard to believe we’ve seen another 365 days come and go but here we are, and at least for us at Hawk Host it’s safe to say this year wasn’t a waste. We’ve made new partnerships, launched new services, and even brought a brand new flagship datacenter online. We were certainly busy, never bored, and as always we’re looking ahead to the next year for what’s to come.

Boxing Day is Back! Close Out 2014 with Savings -- Up to 80% Off!

Tue, 23 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The often overlooked but never forgotten Canadian holiday of Boxing day is back! Every year, Canada (well, not just Canada, but we’re Canadian so we’ll focus on us) has a big sale the day after Christmas. Similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s a great chance to catch some one time savings on products you were already going to buy. Hope you had a relaxing Christmas, because it’s time to wake up and order some awesome hosting!

Black Friday Web Hosting Deals 2014 - Same Great Hosting, Now With 80% Discounts!

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back, friends! It’s once again that wonderful time of year where you get to sign up for our world class hosting at a fraction of the cost! Not only do this years Black Friday promotions bring larger discounts (both one time and recurring), but we’re also going to extend the sale because we can. A one day sale is fun, but a five day sale is so much better.

SpamExperts By The Numbers

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We partnered with SpamExperts in March to bring end users enterprise level spam filtering at a cost effective level. We currently include SpamExperts free of charge for all users. It’s just a matter of utilizing the SpamExperts link in your cPanel to activate it. Then going forward you’ll be utilizing our filtering cluster to filter all your incoming email. We’ve had skeptical users as it just seemed way too easy of a system surely it cannot be that effective. As we just finished deploying additional hardware for our cluster located in our Los Angeles datacenter I thought it was time to take a closer look at the numbers.

Bash Shell Shock (CVE-2014-6271 and CVE-2014-7169)

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On Wednesday September 24th 2014 a vulnerability was revealed in the Bash shell interpreter which we run just like nearly every linux system online. Due to the news coverage this exploit ( CVE-2014-6271 ) has gotten our loyal customers have been asking if we have patched our systems as well as anything else we may have done. The short answer is we put in steps to mitigate the risk and once patches were available we patched our systems. At this time none of our systems are vulnerable to this exploit. I thought though it would be good to address some questions and give a bit of background information regarding the exploit.

Get to Know Hawk Host - A Quick Q&A

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lately, a lot of folks have been asking questions along the lines of “What makes you different?” or “Why should I host with you?”. This made me think, maybe a quick Q&A of some basic facts about our company would help clear up just what it is we’re all about.

Awesome web hosting ;)

Q: What is the history of Hawk Host?

We were founded in 2004, initially as a company named Devoted Host. Our founders, Tony and Cody, initially started hosting websites for friends as a hobby and quickly realized there may be a way to make some money from this. In 2006 we re-branded as Hawk Host. We started with just shared hosting and have expanded our services over the years to include reseller plans, VPS, domain registrations, and much more.

Introducing our Los Angeles Facility! And a Back-To-School Sale!

Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We’re quite happy to announce that our newest datacenter is now online and accepting orders! Right smack in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, this highly connected and extremely reliable facility will improve on our already expansive global presence. Our Los Angeles datacenter was opened with the focus of catering to users from the Asia/Pacific region and we believe our network will be top notch!

Hawk Host in LA? Yes!

Happy Canada Day! Happy 4th of July! Save 60% On Your Hosting!

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a week full of holidays and celebrations here at Hawk Host. Last week we celebrated our 10 year anniversary, and this week we’re celebrating two holidays! As we’re a Canadian company we spent Tuesday honoring Canada Day, and now that the 4th of July is fast approaching it’s time to acknowledge the day for our American coworkers, friends, and customers. As part of our continued celebrations we’re holding a 4th of July sale which will save you up to 60% on your new hosting order!

10 Year Anniversary Sale - Up to 70% Off Shared Hosting Plans!

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Hawk Host has officially hit double digits, and we’re now 10 years old. What started as a hobby way back in 2004 has now become a full time passion for our team across the world. We’ve grown from a single dedicated server hosting websites for friends to operating our own network while providing services out of 6 locations worldwide. It’s been a long, stressful, but ultimately rewarding journey. Truth be told, sometimes we feel like we’re just getting started! To celebrate our 10 year anniversary, we’re offering up to 70% off on our shared hosting plans. You can also save up to 60% on our reseller and VPS packages, grab a $7.95 domain, or a $10 SSL certificate.

What The New gTLDs Mean To You

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

If you were to ask a random person on the street for their favorite website, odds are the overwhelming majority would say something that ends in .com. Facebook.com, google.com, twitter.com, reddit.com…you get the idea. For what feels like forever, .com has been the standard for all premier websites throughout the world. It didn’t matter if you were based in the USA, China, India, Ireland, or even the Isle of Man. If you wanted to find a website, you looked for the .com. For better or worse, we may see a major shift in how exactly people look for their favorite websites over the next few years.

Bitcoin Web Hosting Promo! -- $5 Domains and 30% Off Your Hosting

Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We’re extremely happy to announce this is our first ever Bitcoin hosting sale! For a limited time, any customers (new or existing) who sign up and pay with Bitcoin will be eligible for a $5 domain name registration/transfer and a 30% recurring discount on their hosting plan.

We first started accepting Bitcoin just about 2 months ago, and since day 1 we’ve seen a constant stream of inquiries and interest towards our hosting from the Bitcoin community. We’re very appreciative of that, and as a result we want to try and give back with some discounted hosting offers. For a limited time, sign up for any of the plans listed below using coupon code “btc30” and you’ll receive not only a $5 domain name registration for the year, but also a 30% recurring discount on your hosting plan. Check out the details below:

Hawk Host and Bitcoin - Our cryptocurrency experiences

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

About a month ago we decided to start accepting Bitcoin for our services - this blog post will be outlining our experiences thus far and our initial thoughts.

We just recently hit a total of 1 BTC ($450~) worth of transactions for our services paid with Bitcoin exclusively. So far the ride has been smooth minus a few early hiccups including some of our WAF rules being hit from when Coinbase hit our callback URL’s. Luckily we resolved that and everything has been smooth sailing since.

Hawk Host Partners with SpamExperts

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve like everyone else been battling spam for our users utilizing tools like SpamAssassin, custom filtering rules as well as the use of real time blocking lists. This however was never the most effective solution nor did it give end users the type of control we wanted. We went to HostingCon last year as well as cPanel Conference with one of our main goals was to find a spam filtering solution that would improve the email service of all our users.

Welcome to the New Age -- Hawk Host Now Accepts Bitcoin

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Unless you’ve been avoiding main stream news/media for the past few years, you’ve probably heard of Bitcoin at this point. Bitcoin is a digital currency based around a P2P (peer to peer) system and relies on cryptography to bring the whole network together. Despite the folks at Berkshire-Hathaway and Goldman Sachs claiming it’s not an official currency, we don’t have public investors or financial gurus to worry about. What we have to worry about is our customers, and because of that we’re more than happy to start accepting bitcoins as payment for our hosting services.

It's Almost Spring Sale! -- Save up to 60% on any Shared Hosting Plan!

Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We’re halfway through February which of course means Spring is right around the corner. For those of us based in winter climates, this year has been a rough one. Even here at our office in Buffalo we’ve gone (up until today) 17 days straight of sub-freezing temperatures and have received nearly 100 inches of snow. To celebrate the soon to be sunlight and warmer weather, we’re offering a 48 hour “It’s Almost Spring” sale! You can save up to 60% on any shared hosting plan!

2013 Holiday and Boxing Day Web Hosting Specials and Coupons — Save up to 65%!

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the 2013 edition of Hawk Hosts holiday and Boxing Day sales! For those uninitiated, Boxing Day (link to Wikipedia) is a national holiday in a number of countries celebrated the day after Christmas. Since we’re based in Canada and we’re one of the few countries that celebrate, every year we have web hosting specials for this unique holiday.

Boxing Man!

These Boxing Day promotions are active starting now (December 26th, 10:00AM EST) and will expire as of 11:59PM EST December 27th. You’ve got a little under 2 days to save up to 65% on our hosting plans. Now for the promotions:

WHM 11.40.0 + EL6 + Issues installing Ruby

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is just a brief post that hopefully helps some people so they don’t start banging their head on their keyboard. As of recently a bunch of OpenSSL* package updates have been released for *EL6 (RHEL, CloudLinux, etc) which is fine and dandy. Unfortunately there is a slight issue that makes it conflict with Ruby without a minor patch.

Below are instructions to get Ruby to compile cleanly through cPanel / WHM (either through the GUI or using /scripts/installruby).

2013 Cyber Monday Web Hosting Specials and Coupons — Save up to 75%!

Sat, 30 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We decided our Black Friday deals weren’t enough, and wanted to give you an opportunity to continue the savings. Who doesn’t enjoy affordable but reliable web hosting? We’re already working overtime through the weekend, so we figured hey, whats another day. Below are all of our Cyber Monday promotions (Hint: they’re the same as Black Friday).

Need More Coffee!

These Cyber Monday promotions will be active as of 12:01 AM on December 1st and will expire as of 11:59PM that same day. Similar to Black Friday, you’ve got 24 hours to save up to 75% on our hosting plans. Now for the promotions:

Black Friday Roundup - What a Day!

Sat, 30 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Phew! I finally have a few free minutes to write this post. The last 24 hours have been incredibly hectic (we haven’t slept much!), and we’re all extremely appreciative so many people chose to sign up with us! We realize the big savings helps, but there are no shortage of hosting companies out there and you guys chose us. It sincerely means a lot to everyone on our team!

Sagan Says You’re Awesome

2013 Black Friday Web Hosting Specials and Coupons -- Save up to 75%!

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to another edition of Black Friday at Hawk Host! This is our third consecutive year of great savings on our already affordable hosting plans. This year we’ll be offering both one time and recurring coupons on all of our shared, reseller, VPS, and site builder hosting packages. You can also save 75% on the first payment of any shared super hosting plan!

Snowflake Loves Black Friday

Web Hosting Black Friday 2013 Specials and Black Friday Coupons

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to another Hawk Host edition of Black Friday! This year we’ve decided to do something different! We’ll be running specials leading up to Black Friday, and once Black Friday hits, we’ll be increasing our already impressive discounts! Last year was a great success (a lot of you received a great hosting deal) so we’re confident this year is just as good, if not better!

Gotta Get Down on Black Friday

Our VPS Hosting Is On The Move - Now Available in Singapore

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had VPS hosting plans available in our Dallas, TX and Washington DC locations for as long as I can remember. While we’ve always been happy with those two locations, we realize not everyone who wants a VPS from us wants one in the US. Ever since we launched our shared hosting in Amsterdam and Singapore, customers have been asking for a VPS option in those same locations. There were a number of factors at play, but after a lot of hard work we’re finally able to announce the availability of VPS plans in our Singapore facility.

48 Hour VPS Halloween Special - 40% Off Your VPS

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Halloween! To celebrate the scariest holiday of them all, we’re offering a 40% recurring discount on all VPS plans based in our Dallas TX or Singapore locations. Sign up using coupon code **"**spookyvps" to receive your discount.

Happy Halloween!

The details for this promotion are pretty simple. Sign up for any of our VPS plans using the coupon code spookyvps and you’ll get a recurring 40% discount for the life of your account. This applies to our Dallas and Singapore locations, Washington DC is excluded (for now). If you’re interested in testing the network speeds, you can find speedtests by clicking here.

Vroom! - Now offering CloudFlare Railgun!

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we’re now offering CloudFlare’s wonderful Railgun™ service to every user for free (shared web hosting only). You’ll simply need to go to the “CloudFlare” option within your control panel and enable it (more on that in a moment).

I wish customers would listen to this advice.

Many of you are likely wondering “What the heck is this?”. Well let’s find out!

What the heck is this?

Railgun™ is CloudFlares’ equivalent to the popular phrase “CACHE ALL THE THINGS”. The idea behind it is even dynamic content (which is usually not cached or partially cached) is actually cacheable with minimal impact to the website or visitors. This is because content on a website still doesn’t change that much in a short span of time:

A Fresh New Design - Introducing Our Site Builder

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For as long as I can remember, we’ve been using RVSiteBuilder as our integrated / free site builder. While serviceable, and definitely not behind the times a few years ago, there has been a push in the hosting market over the past few years to help SMBs create an online presence. With that push comes professional, easy to use, and affordable site builders. These mom and pop type shops don’t have the deep pockets like a Fortune 500 firm to hire professional designers, but they realize the lost opportunity of not having a web presence. We’re extremely excited to announce the release of our brand new, professional, and affordable site builder. The ability to create a professional looking website is now at the fingertips of every customer.

Web Hosting Affiliates - Become a Hawk Host affiliate (new payouts)!

Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had an affiliate program for some time now and most people don’t even know because we don’t actively promote it. Well today we’re happy to announce some changes that existing and new affiliates will like!

So much KFC!

Previously we offered 25% towards the commission per sale you got - today we’re excited to change that to 40%! What does this mean for existing affiliates? Well you’re going to be 40% wealthier, 40% closer to your payout and 40% more happy!

Unlimited Bandwidth For Everybody! - Shared Web Hosting & Semi-Dedicated Web Hosting

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As of this moment, all of our shared hosting and semi-dedicated hosting plans will now include UNLIMITED bandwidth! This upgrade comes free of cost, so there is nothing you as a current (or future) customer need to do to receive this upgrade.

It just never ends..

We’ll be upgrading all accounts over the next 24-72 hours, so by Monday morning you should see the new unlimited bandwidth upgrade in your cPanel account. If you don’t see your account upgraded just contact our support team and we’ll make sure your account is fixed.

Installing the Laravel PHP framework at Hawk Host

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Laravel is an increasingly popular PHP framework which means we have customers inquiring how do they go about installing it on their hosting. I’m going to go through how to install Laravel on our servers on the primary domain of the account. You could also using this tutorial install it within an add-on domain or sub domain with just a few modifications.

We’re going to do the entire installation from SSH which means you’ll need a SSH client. I would recommend using Putty if you’re running Windows you do not already have a SSH client. Once you have your SSH client ready it’s time to start the installation process.

48 Hour VPS Special - Save 48% On Any Plan!

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today is a big day for savings apparently. For those of you out there who are gamers, the Steam summer sale has started. Anyone who lives near a 7-Eleven can walk in a get a free small Slurpee. As we’re all fans of both cheap games and cherry Slurpeers here at Hawk Host, it motivated us to launch our own sale. For the next 48 hours, sign up for any VPS package with the coupon code vps48 and you’ll get a 48% recurring discount.

PHP 5.5 Stable Now Available

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We have been offering PHP 5.5 since April 12th in the form of Beta’s then release candidates but it’s time to say we now offer the stable PHP 5.5 release. For the vast majority of users PHP 5.5 most likely is not a good idea at this point in time. A lot of the most common applications have yet to be tested properly under PHP 5.5. I do know we have some brave users out there already running PHP 5.5 but most likely just for the bragging rights. He is a quick break down some of the additional features and improvements PHP 5.5 brings for those who have made the switch.

New TLDs Now Available + Free .net Registration Special

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Breaking news from your favorite hosting provider! We’ve just updated our TLD offerings to bring you some new and exciting domain registration options. You can also get a free .net domain with any hosting order over the next 48 hours. More details below :)

Read All About It!

As more and more folks decide registering a domain with us is a good idea (they’re right), we decided it’d be best to cater to even more markets and offer additional TLDs. Below is a list of our newest domain registration offers:

GEO-IP Databases - We're not in Kansas anymore

Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is going to be a brief post as to why (as some customers have aptly pointed out) some of our IP’s will show up in completely different locations than where your website was setup in.

The way most GEO-IP databases work is they’ll pull up the registrant information on an IP range and wherever the country & locality of the owner is (usually where the business is registered) it will default that range to that country / locality. As we operate on a global scale in many locations you can see how this can start to become faulty and inaccurate - if we own IP’s and have them allocated to Dallas, Singapore, Amsterdam but they all show as “Canada” in the database customers will get confused.

O Canada -- Our Home and Native Land

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’re celebrating a holiday today here in Canada, Victoria Day. The holiday is meant to honor the birthday of Queen Victoria, who by all accounts was a pretty unique lady. She had 9 kids, took over the throne at 18 years old, and had a reign that lasted just shy of 64 years. As a proud Canadian company (with a little bit of time on our hands today), I figured we’d make a blog post dedicated to the great white North.

cPanel Theme Changes and Free Semi-Dedicated Hosting Upgrades

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’re in a good mood this week it seems, as this is our second free upgrade for our customers in less than a week. Five days ago, we doubled the bandwidth limit for all reseller plans at no cost to you. Today, we’re giving our semi-dedicated customers free bandwidth and disk space upgrades. We’ve also made some slight changes to our custom cPanel theme.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting Upgrades

Out With the Old, In With the New: Moving to PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.5

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As of this announcement, all of our servers are now running PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 as the default versions. Up until this point (and for a number of years), we were running PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.1 as default, and they’ve served us well. There comes a point though where you need to say goodbye to old friends, and usher in the new generation.

Whats up with PHP?

Technically, PHP 5.3 isn’t exactly “new”. PHP 5.3 was first introduced back in 2009, and it was first made available for customer use in November of 2010. We even have PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 available on all servers, so why’d it take us so long to move to PHP 5.3 as the default version? Primarily, compatibility. We have a lot of customers running software that for the longest time wasn’t compatible with the newer branches of PHP. An unannounced, sudden switch would have broken a number of their sites. Obviously, as a webhost, our job is to avoid those situations. Crisis averted.

Resellers Rejoice: Free Bandwidth Upgrades On The House

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations, Hawk Host resellers. You’re getting a free upgrade on your bandwidth quota. We’re doubling the limits for each reseller plan, and it won’t cost you a dime.

Our Gift To You

This upgrade applies to any reseller customer on our bronze, silver, gold, or platinum hosting plan. You’ll see the new values reflected on your account within the next week, but if you’d like the upgrade applied sooner just send our billing department an email, or submit a ticket directly through https://support.hawkhost.com

Back To The Basics: Shared web hosting, Reseller web hosting, Semi-Dedicated web hosting and VPS Hosting

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes its easy to take for granted that every customer coming your way knows all about the Internet. In reality, this is hardly the case. Your average person doesn’t know what bandwidth is or why they need it, what cPanel is, or even how to compose an email. We’re going to take a step back here and approach our hosting plans like your first time user would.

Back To Basics

Introducing our PHP Selector and PHP 5.5: The Choice is Yours

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A long time ago, we realized that offering just one PHP version (at the time, 5.2.X) was not going to last forever. As the release of PHP 5.3.X quickly approached, we needed to find a solution to let our customers decide what they wanted to run. After all, everybody likes having options, and more importantly new customers don’t want to see you offering only legacy versions. So our sysadmins went to work and we figured out a solution that let us run multiple versions of PHP concurrently. Pretty cool, right? Now 3 years later we’ve implemented a better solution with more options and an easy to use interface. Oh, and we now support PHP 5.5. You ask, we deliver.

How to Have a Safe and Secure Hosting Experience

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

One of the growing trends (perhaps the largest) we’re seeing in the shared hosting industry is the number of account compromises as a result of lax security by website owners. As a host we implement a number of technologies to try and reduce these “automated” exploits, but it’s simply impossible for us to protect every website we host from every attack. As a website owner and operator, there are a number of basic and easy steps you can take to add additional security (and peace of mind) to your website. Trust me when I say an hour of your time now to prevent an exploit will save you days of work down the road if you’re compromised.

Introducing CageFS - A Quick Overview

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Being in a cage doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. In fact, we’re about to put all of our users in one. Figuratively, of course. We’re working on rolling out CageFS, a technology developed and created by the good folks over at CloudLinux. CageFS is an addition to the OS CloudLinux develops, which we use exclusively across all of our shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated servers. The goal of installing CageFS is both your account and our servers will be more secure, but that is an oversimplification of what is really an important upgrade for everyone involved.

Hawk Host and HostJury: A 72 Hour Shared Hosting Special

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Time to get excited folks, our first big promotion of 2013 is here. We’ve partnered up with HostJury (http://hostjury.com), one of the industries largest and most trusted review sites, to run a promotion for 72 hours starting Wednesday, February 27th through Friday, March 1st. We’ll be offering two separate discounts, the first being a one time 60% discount and the second being a recurring 35% discount. These promotions are valid for any of our shared hosting services on any billing term.

Lightning Fast SSD Caching & Web Hosting

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In the past 12 months we’ve started deploying forms of solid state disk caching to help improve disk i/o performance on our systems. It was first seen with the deployment of Facebook Flashcache on our virtual private servers and semi dedicated server offerings. In the past several months we’ve been utilizing CacheCade which is provided on LSI raid cards. These caching methods have resulted in near solid state drive performance while being able to continue to offer large disk allowances on our systems.

Web Hosting Boxing Day 2012 Specials and Coupons

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

For Boxing Day this year, we’ll be offering up to 80% off any super shared hosting plan, along with a number of other specials for shared, reseller, semi-dedicated, and VPS plans. This is our fourth year of Boxing Day specials, and as a proud Canadian company we’ll be continuing this tradition for years to come. For those who aren’t familiar, Boxing Day is a holiday in Canada and is celebrated in a number of other regions throughout the world. Even if you’re not from Canada, we’d still like you all to celebrate with us. Who doesn’t enjoy an extra holiday? For the curious, Wikipedia has more information on Boxing Day in this article.

End of November VPS Sale! Save up to 40% per month!

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Since we had such a good time with our Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales (seriously, it was a blast!) we’ve decided to do one final blowout promotion before we hit December. Starting now (Tuesday, November 27th) and running through midnight on Friday, November 30th we’re going to be offering a 40% Recurring Discount on all Dallas, TX VPS orders. You can order your VPS through our website and when you reach the checkout, use coupon code vpsdallas40 and your 40% discount will automatically be applied to the order cost.

Web Hosting Cyber Monday 2012 Specials and Coupons

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time of year again, the holidays are upon us and yes, the most popular online consumer day is here. Cyber Monday.

Shared Specials

80% off super shared hosting package in Dallas for the first year using the coupon bf2012super (Regular Price: $129.48, Cyber Monday Price: $25.90)

55% off the first payment on all Dallas shared hosting accounts using the coupon 55bf2012

Shared hosting deals are available in all locations. Order Here

Black Friday Hosting Specials Active Early!

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago we posted our Black Friday specials which were originally set to be active as of Midnight on Thursday night / Friday morning. We’ve decided to let you all get a head start on these great specials, so as of this moment (12:01PM CST on Thursday, November 22nd) all of our Black Friday promotions are live. That gives you an extra 12 hours to sign up for these incredible deals. These promotions are valid through 11:59pm CST (GMT-5) Friday. Keep reading for a list of all of our hosting specials!

Web Hosting Black Friday 2012 Specials and Coupons

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time of year again, the holidays are upon us and yes, the most popular consumer day is here. Black Friday.

For retail employees, it’s a day of misery. For consumers, it’s a day of bliss (mostly). For us at Hawk Host, we love this time of year. Everyone on our operations team actually revels in the challenge of an influx of new customers and a great deal on our awesome web hosting. This will be our third year of promotions and are expecting it to be our most exciting year yet.

Hawk Host and Cancer Awareness

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As many of you are probably aware, October is officially breast cancer awareness month. Companies, organizations, charities, and individuals alike all come together to raise awareness about this disease and how it impacts all of our daily lives. For the rest of the month, we’re going to be joining this cause and will be donating money to the American Cancer Society to help fund research, awareness, and countless other critical activities to help finally find a cure.

A Hawk Host Summer of Fun

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Summer is pretty neat. The weather is nice and warm, people are generally in better spirits, you can spend all day and night outside, and perhaps best of all, summer means baseball season. In these trying times it can be difficult to stay on task and focused, especially when just outside your window is a gorgeous August day without a cloud in the sky. While we’ve had an enjoyable past few months here at Hawk Host, we’ve also been quite productive. So, what in the world have we been up to?

cPanel with PowerDNS - Avoiding BIND CPU issues and woes

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The most popular name server is ISCs BIND. It’s been the market leader in name servers since the very beginning and has proven to be a reliable workhorse with robust features and reliable updates. It also has some issues that are affecting Hawk Host.

The Issue

We initially started using cPanel with a DNS cluster for our primary name servers. As we grew and we started hosting a large number of websites off this cluster we began to notice a trend - when reloading BIND (which includes updates, a rndc reload, transfers, etc) or anything of that nature it will use a large amount of CPU - to the point that it crippled most processors. Another fun gotcha is when reloading zones it does not respond to requests. The result being one of our name servers would be unresponsive until a full reload took place.

Hawk Host Semi-Dedicated Plans Now Available :)

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been in the hosting business a long time now (just over 8 years). In that time we’ve grown by offering features our competitors don’t, support few can match, and prices well below industry standard. Part of staying ahead of that curve is constantly innovating and releasing new products. We’ve developed our own software, customized our environments almost to the point of tedium, and have launched new products consistent with market trends. Our next move is perhaps our most exciting yet, and it comes in the way of semi-dedicated hosting plans.

Hawk Host at HostingCon 2012

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time in company history, some of our management team left their comfortable office chairs and went to a real life hosting convention. Not just any convention though, we went to “the big one”, that being HostingCon. This year it was in Boston, MA which is right around the corner (only 8 hours!) from our Buffalo office. We decided that driving would be the most opportune way to get there, because hey, we’ll probably need a car while we’re there. What a mistake that line of thought was, and I can safely say we’ll be flying down to next years convention in Austin, TX. Now as for this years convention…

A Drinking Town With a Hockey Problem

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We’re going a little ‘off the cuff’ today with this post, and it’ll have almost nothing to do with web hosting. About the only thing this post has to do with hosting, Hawk Host, or even the internet in general is that we have an office in Buffalo. Everybody here loves hockey, specifically Buffalo Sabres hockey. When you live in a city where the average temperature on any given winter day is around 20F and had it’s prime back in the late 1800s/early 1900s, you need to find something to do. That is why we’re known as a drinking town with a hockey problem. But I’ll be damned if you can find a group of people with more pride in their city, or sports teams, than us Buffalonians.

Wordpress 3.4 Released

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We don’t usually post about a WordPress updates but this is one I was excited about for awhile as there were promises of performance improvements. These improvements come in the form of WordPress MySQL Query improvements. When you have a lot of posts on your WordPress installation it starts creating large temporary tables. From what people have been posting in the initial tracker ticket about this it should significantly improve performance when a WordPress installation has a large number of posts. We hope this holds true for all our customers as we’re constantly seeing slow and intensive queries exactly like were described in the ticket issue from a lot of our users.

cPanel 11.32 Reaches STABLE

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you did not know yet cPanel 11.32 hit the RELEASE builds a little while ago and this week finally made it’s way to STABLE which is the most conservative version of cPanel. We run RELEASE but with every major version from cPanel we’re more cautious holding back upgrading our servers until it reaches STABLE builds. The reason being usually upon the initial release there are stability issues so we let others take the initial plunge. The great news is though we’re preparing to take that plunge on Monday with all our servers being upgraded to 11.32.

PHP 5.4 Now supported!

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce we officially support PHP 5.4 on all of our shared web hosting packages! You’ll be able to utilize it on your account by following these instructions in our knowledge base or contacting our support department.

Here are some neat new features in PHP 5.4

OO Traits
Short tags are enabled regardless of php.ini settings
Class::{expr}() syntax is now supported
The session extension now supports tracking of upload progress
A built in development web-server accessible via the CLI
And more

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need any assistance or run into any issues while running PHP 5.4 on your web hosting account.

Celebrate Leap Year with a Cheap Year

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Every 4 years, we’re lucky enough to be given an extra day in February. This is known as a leap year, or a bissextile year, or a intercalary year. Normally we treat this as just another day (like most people), but today we feel like celebrating. So effective 12:00 AM CST through 11:59 PM CST on February 29th, we’re offering a 60% discount on all shared hosting orders. This is a one time discount valid for your first payment only.

Google AdWords Credits Now Available

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve logged into our client area in the past 48 hours, you may have noticed a slight change in our quick navigation (click for a picture), with the addition of a Google AdWords link. That link is good for an AdWords credit, for you, for free. All you’re required to do is click a button to claim the code, head on over to Google Adwords homepage to create an account, setup a campaign and redeem your code which is worth $100 of AdWords credit. With an afternoons worth of work, you’ll be advertising your site to thousands of potential visitors for a total cost of $0.

Hawk Host Report - January 2012

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

'Tis the season for giving

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the holiday season, so we’re of course feeling generous. Then again who isn’t, with all the holiday cheer, festive music and decorations you can’t help but notice everywhere you go. Bringing that spirit to our hosting world, we’ve decided to provide free bandwidth and memory upgrades to all of our VPS customers.

A few months ago, all of our shared hosting plans received a free bandwidth upgrade – shortly before that, we re-did all of our reseller plans. With these VPS upgrades, that means throughout 2011 every one of our services received an upgrade. If you’re one of our shared or VPS customers, those upgrades came at absolutely no extra cost to you. In fact, you probably saved money if you were able to avoid upgrades on services as a result of the free bumps.

Web Hosting Boxing Day 2011 Deals

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The holidays are upon us and for people around the world that means family, friends, good food, and if you’re lucky a few gifts. Oh, and Boxing Day. While it’s a lesser known event compared to Black Friday, it’s still pretty popular in Canada. Luckily for you all, we’re based in Canada so we’re going to celebrate! For anyone who missed out on our Black Friday specials, here’s your chance to get the exact same savings for Boxing Day. That means up to 80% off a super hosting plan. So starting at 12:00am CST December 26th (GMT-6) and ending at 11:59pm CST (GMT-6), the following coupons and savings will be active:

Hawk Host Report - December 2011

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hawk Host Report - November 2011

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Web Hosting Black Friday 2011 Deals

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Time for our second annual Black Friday sale! This year we’ve got sales on both our shared and reseller hosting services. As always these promotions are valid on Black Friday only so 12:00am Friday November 25th CST (GMT-5) and will run until 11:59pm CST (GMT-5) Friday.

Shared Specials

80% off super shared hosting package for the first year using the coupon bf2011super (Regular Price: $129.48, Black Friday Price: $25.90)

Hawk Host Report - October 2011

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Already into October – it’s going to be 2012 in another 2.5 months. That’s a strange thought, as I can remember writing the first blog post for 2011 as if it were last week. The year has really moved (they always seem to) and September was no different. Another 30 days come and gone, and here’s what we did!

Migrations

Throughout the month of September and into early October, we worked on separating our shared and reseller services. A number of our legacy servers are still hosting shared and reseller accounts, while all of our new servers have services isolated. Though we’ve been busy we did find some time to get a number of servers done this past month. There are a number of advantages to separating the services so we’re going to continue working towards that goal. If I’m not mistaken we’ve only got a handful of mixed servers left (maybe 5?), so an optimistic me says we’ll have that all set by 2012. All depends on how busy our staff is on other projects :)

Singapore hosting is live!

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We’re officially online in Singapore and accepting shared hosting orders! Our hardware was setup and online Wednesday afternoon , and shortly after our sysadmins went to work getting the server production ready. They worked their magic and I am beyond proud to announce we’ve opened our first international location!

It seems as if been talking about this forever, as we first reported the opening of a Singapore facility back in April. This past month has been the most anxious by far, with frequent updates and previews coming down the pipe from our provider as progress was made on the facility. The results are well worth the wait.

Hawk Host Going International - Asia, Europe and beyond

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Got your attention with that title I hope. We’re not opening quite yet overseas, but we’re close. How close? Based on word from our provider and information on their website, pre-orders begin on September 23rd and servers go live on October 3rd in Singapore. In addition to the datacenter opening, the PoPs in Hong Kong and Tokyo will also be opening on the 3rd. As for Amsterdam, pre-orders begin on October 24th, with no official date on when those servers or additional European PoPs go live.

Hawk Host Report - September 2011

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Shared hosting: Free Bandwidth Upgrades!

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As of today, we’re going to be giving everyone on our shared plans (current and future) a bit of a free upgrade. We did this a few months ago with our reseller plans and it has worked out wonderfully so far. So we figure why not shared plans too?

So what exactly are we offering up? A 50% increase in bandwidth, for free, on all plans. Here’s a breakdown of the upgrades:

Five Years with Softlayer

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve now been with SoftLayer over five years and I figured it was time to talk about that as we received some goodies from them recently. When we started using SoftLayer they had just their Dallas location and a single server room. The huge draw for us at the time was the fact they were one of the few providers to actually offer things like the ability to reboot servers without a ticket. It meant we were less dependent on technicians on site to be restarting servers and investigating issues where we could not view the console until a kvm was hooked up. They were also actively developing and still are further features to their portal to give more power to us.

Hawk Host Report - August 2011

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

July, July! What a great month it was, even though it seemed to be gone in an instant. We’ve added some new services, there’s global network upgrades pending, and we’ve even optimized some existing services. It’s hard to say just exactly where those 31 days went, but everyone managed to accomplish a lot. I’m sure I’ve overlooked something but here’s the major changes for last month.

Partnership with CloudFlare

Last month we were selected by CloudFlare to be an official hosting provider for their services. CloudFlare is a free service for all of our users which, once enabled, acts as a reverse proxy for all of your websites traffic. Using the same technologies utilized by some of the largest companies in the world, CloudFlare inspects your traffic through their filtering system for known malicious traffic, bots, crawlers, and other traffic sources which have a negative impact on your site. In addition to their filtering, CloudFlare also provides a CDN style network which caches your static content, providing faster pageloads and an overall better response time for your site as your files are now globally distributed.

VPS Panel Update

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It has been quite a while since I’ve talked about the VPS panel but don’t worry we have not forgot about it. We have a lot of projects going on so some take a higher priority than others. Those projects have hit the point of maturity and now are just receiving bug fixes and minor feature requests rather than major code overhauls. That means we’ve now dedicated our resources on getting our VPS panel out and we’re finally getting to the point where it’ll be how our virtual private servers will be managed.

cPanel 11.30 Reaches Stable

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time again for a major update to cPanel which in this case is 11.30. It just reached their stable version which is the most conservative build they offer. Their stable build is also what we run when a new major release is pushed to our typical branch of release. We’ve been doing this due to bugs we had encountered in the past when major releases from cPanel reach their release builds. We’d rather let the more brave web hosts out there find all the bugs for each major release. Though now that it’s reached all their branches we’re now running 11.30 on all our servers under our typical branch of release.

Hawk Host and CloudFlare Partner Up

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We’re thrilled to announce that Hawk Host is now officially a CloudFlare hosting partner. As of this post that makes us one of 25 official hosting providers worldwide. While you’ve always been able to utilize their services with our hosting plans, you guys can now create an account and activate CloudFlare with the click of a button right through your control panel.

So what is CloudFlare?

The first question some of you are asking is what is this CloudFlare nonsense and why should you care. Not surprisingly, CloudFlare does a great job summarizing what it is they do in a 5 minute video (really, it’s worth the time) found right on their home page. Even though the video covers it, we’ll highlight a few of the biggest perks of using their free service:

Hawk Host Report - July 2011

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

June was an interesting month for us. The month started off with a meeting at our operations office here in Buffalo, NY with a number of our staff discussing the company, where we’re at and where we’re headed. The remaining 3 weeks were spent doing business as usual. We had a strong month, we ran into some issues, and we found some new cool ideas for the future.

User feedback and suggestions

Hawk Host Report - June 2011

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Despite some recent blog posts, we did do a lot more in the month of May besides looking for Easter eggs in the software we use. Now don’t get me wrong, we do love to have some fun and, you guessed it, our idea of a good time is looking for those Easter eggs and other hidden gems. But through all that fun we managed to accomplish quite a bit internally, along with some nice customer facing changes.

List of hidden HipChat smilies

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We recently started using HipChat internally to help improve communication within the company and to essentially have an intranet type of chat. After playing around with CampFire and toying around with our own XMPP server one of our colleagues mentioned hearing about a startup named HipChat. After a trial week period we were hooked, and highly recommend the application if you need a group chat / collaborative tool within your company.

Lucky number 4: San Jose

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Announced earlier today in this tweet, our infrastructure provider Softlayer has opened their San Jose facility. This is a long awaited announcement for us, as we’ve been extremely eager to open up our now fourth location.

From information posted on the Softlayer website, the San Jose facility (SJC01) has a total of 3 pods providing a 12,000+ server capacity. These numbers are right in line with other Softlayer facilities, again proving just how power efficient and economical Softlayer is from the ground up. This is the first of three new facilities Softlayer intends on opening in 2011. The second facility will be housed in Amsterdam, and the third will be in Singapore. Both facilities are projected to be ready for orders in Q3.

CentOS 5.6: 1TB to share

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, it was announced that CentOS 5.6 was released. Since some of our internal, development, and utility machines use CentOS this is obviously a relevant upgrade to us. We’ve always followed news releases for all software very closely, and usually just act accordingly. This time though, we decided we’d have a little fun with it and turn it into a blog post.

CentOS offers a few options for installation. For example, you can do a netinstall, or download a CentOS CD or DVD. A lot of users will choose to take the DVD route, often because they’re installing the operating system on systems that aren’t connected to the public internet and they don’t want to have to download and burn multiple iso images. One major downfall of this method is the DVD images are rather large. For this latest CentOS 5.6 release, the x86_64 DVD came in two images. One was 3.95GB and the other was 639MB. The i386 image was 3.96GB. As a result of this, public mirrors will only provide a torrent for the DVD. This is understandable however, as the mirrors are hosted as a donation to the CentOS project and no mirror is going to want to be responsible for all that bandwidth.

Hawk Host Report - April 2011

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This month, we’re going to do things a little bit differently with the monthly recap. We’ll still cover all the things we did the past 31 days. However, we’re also going to take the chance to introduce our new reseller plans and explain the differences from the old ones. We’ll also be mentioning our SSL certificates. First things first though, let’s discuss March!

IPv4 allocations and changes

As many of you know, the global availability of IPv4 addresses is rapidly decreasing. Not only is it decreasing, but they’re being scooped up at such a rate that experts predict we’ll have exhausted IPv4 allocations by the end of 2011. The immediate result of this exhaustion is all IP service providers (datacenters and carriers) are raising their rates for IPs. So, as a trickle down effect, we’re now paying more per IP to our provider. The end result of this is we’re forced to charge more for dedicated IP addresses, and we’re also required to become more critical of justification before assigning IPs. Moving forward, the charge for a dedicated IP is going from $2/mo to $3/mo. We may also contact you and request justification for the IP before setting up your order.

Now offering SSL certificates!

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

After what seems like years and years of discussion on the topic, we’ve finally completed our SSL lineup! From this day forward you can now purchase multiple tiers of SSL certificates directly from Hawk Host. These certificates, ranging from the most basic AlphaSSL all the way up to Extended Validation, are the same certificates you can purchase from any other trusted CA.

With the addition of SSL certificates to our products, we’re taking one more critical step to being a one stop web hosting solution. These certificates are fully compatible with all of our shared, reseller, and VPS services. Here’s a quick breakdown of each certificate we’re going to be selling:

Alipay and Hawk Host - A New Era

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Well folks, the time has arrived. We’ve been talking about it for what seems like forever, but as of today (March 10th), we are now officially accepting payments for all of our hosting services using Alipay. For those of you who know what Alipay is, you’re probably just as excited as we are. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Alipay, well, keep reading!

Introducing Alipay - What is it?

Hawk Host Report - March 2011

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Month two of 2011 is officially behind us. As such, it’s once again time to let you all know what changed, what we improved, and what to look forward to. Despite it being a short month, it was just as busy as always. This post brings some exciting news and a lot of new features never before seen at Hawk Host :)

Expansions

This month we lit up three new machines, Cougar, Falcon, and Typhoon. This is a record for us as far as new machines provisioned in a month is concerned (woot). Cougar is for shared accounts in Dallas, Falcon is for shared accounts in Washington DC and Typhoon is for resellers in Seattle. The additional servers are a direct result of yet another record breaking month of orders and revenue. On the topic of new servers, throughout March we plan on continuing with our shared account migrations. Isolating resellers and shared users has been a great idea and fits what we want to offer moving forward, and from the feedback we’ve received shared users are extremely happy with the added benefits of shared only servers.

Cloud Linux 101 - What is Cloud Linux?

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Anyone who keeps up with us socially (here at the blog, on Twitter, Facebook, or our forums) knows that we’ve moved all of our shared and reseller hosting servers over to Cloud Linux. We use those words a lot too, come to think of it. So as I sit here on a peaceful Sunday night at the local coffee shop, it occurred to me that we’ve never really covered what this Cloud Linux thing is. Instead of doing what I came here to do which is mostly browse reddit and look at funny pictures on the internet, I’m going to go over what exactly Cloud Linux is, what it brings to the table, and some of the more technical aspects of it.

Hawk Host Report - February 2011

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Month one of 2011 is behind us. I wouldn’t believe it if someone didn’t show me a calendar to prove it though. With how busy we’ve been all sense of time is warped, and I couldn’t tell you if it’s summer, winter, night time or day time. We’re changing things up this month and I’ll be writing this months report (I’m Brian, by the way) as Tony, our usual author, is incredibly busy doing…business things. I don’t really know what that means, but he’s the CEO and all, so I assume that means it’s important. Down to the good stuff!

Hawk Host Report: January 2011

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Another year is behind us we’re already into January 2011 I cannot believe it. The time sure does fly around here as we are always working on something. Even when things seem silent as far as new features we’re constantly adding more hardware or making various tiny changes. The year of 2010 was a great one for us including the month of December so now it’s time to summarize what happened last month.

Boxing Day Sale - Stats and Graphs

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Since we did this for our Black Friday sale, we figured why not throw some numbers at our avid readers about the results of our Boxing Day sale.

The sale was a resounding success and we saw a lot more sales than we anticipated. We knew Boxing Day was big with everyone in Canada, but we saw a huge turnout from people around the world who were anxious to take advantage of a great deal. Here’s a quick run down of what the day entailed:

Web Hosting Boxing Day 2010 Deals

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The holidays are upon us and for people around the world that means family, friends, good food, and if you’re lucky a few gifts. Oh, and Boxing Day. While it’s a lesser known event compared to Black Friday (which was awesome for us), it’s still pretty popular in Canada. Luckily for you all, we’re based in Canada so we’re going to celebrate! For anyone who missed out on our Black Friday specials, here’s your chance to get the exact same savings for Boxing Day. That means up to 80% off a super hosting plan. So starting at 12:00am CST December 26th (GMT-6) and ending at 11:59pm CST (GMT-6), the following coupons and savings will be active:

Big Softaculous Update

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There was a big Softaculous update released today which brings their total available scripts to 175! They are closing in on the 200 mark quickly and blowing all the other auto installers out of the water in terms of total scripts. They are also significantly faster in updating compared to others like Fantastico. Here is the list of new software that was made available today:

TomatoCart
TaskFreak
TCExam
PHP Point Of Sale
PHP QR Code
ATutor
cFTP
TheHostingTool
OpenNewsletter
CMS Made Simple
PaintbrushJS
The Bug Genie
AjaxAC
PRADO
yii
Symfony
xAjax
DIY
Kohana
Zend
PhpOpenBiz
Vanilla Forums
PHPDevShell
OrangeHRM
FrontAccounting
Mound

That is an impressive list and what is more impressive I haven’t heard most of them but hey the more available is great. It gives users far more options than the standard 20 applications most users install. There is other quality software out there that are just not as popular as the big ones.

Black Friday - Stats & Goodies

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As you’re probably already aware we ran a promotion on Black Friday. The response was more than we expected so we thought it may be interesting to see exactly what sort of volume we did that Friday. These statistics will be based on the 24 hour window the promotion was running.

The Promotions

We had several options people could choose from during the promotion. For shared web hosting we offered 80% off the first year of a Super package or 55% off the first payment for any shared package. There were also two options for reseller packages 35% off recurring any package or 55% off the first payment.

Wordpress Performance

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There was a time when we rarely saw problems with WordPress installations causing performance issues. That was years ago though, and now things sure have changed. Any issues were mostly a mix of forums with weird modifications, extremely high traffic web sites or poorly made custom coded web sites. It all changed when WordPress became more user-friendly for the average end user and allowed you to install plugins and themes in their WordPress control panel.

Hawk Host Report: December 2010

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time already another month is behind us. November seemed to fly by with how busy we were at Hawk Host. We were doing all kinds of things keeping us busy it was not just servers but various other improvements as well. Some of this being behind the scenes improvements others being things you may have already noticed.

New Servers

We added quite a few servers in the past month which these days seems like a normal thing. We added Thunderbolt and Hornet for our shared web hosting side. We added Hercules for our VPS side of things. Each machine being either Dual 5520 or Dual 5620 with the usual memory and disk trimmings. We also added an internal machine which should help improve redundancy of our systems in case of outages.

Web Hosting Black Friday 2010 Deals

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As some of you may know, its Black Friday tomorrow November 26th, which typically means lots of crazy deals. Web hosting should be no different based on all kinds of deals being posted for web hosting we were not going to be left out. So here are the deals that will go active at 12:00am Friday November 26th EST (GMT-5) and will run until 11:59pm EST (GMT-5) Friday.. So here we go with the deals for Hawk Host and Frog Host as well.

Hawk Host Report: November 2010

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

October is already behind us which I just cannot believe. The time just flies by for us it seems like I’m saying to myself wow it’s a new month and then the next thing I know the month is over. There isn’t a day when we’re not busy helping out our customers and making sure our servers continue to run great. That doesn’t mean we don’t have time to add new features and make improvements though. We’ve managed to make improvements and changes throughout October, just like any other month.

MySQL Performance Improvements

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One problem that never seems to go away is poorly constructed MySQL queries. Due to the nature of shared web hosting the workload is extremely varied. It does not just vary server to server, but on the same server within different time periods There are times we optimize certain aspects, only to have those same optimizations hurt performance at a later date. We realized that doing these tiny tweaks were getting us nowhere as the gains were minimal and at times they hurt performance more than they helped. In light of that, we started looking for ways to permanently improve performance, regardless of query type, size, or any other factors.

PHP 5.3 Support Status

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

PHP 5.3 has been out since June 29th 2009 and while buggy at the time has started to mature to be a much more stable PHP version. As a result users have been asking us when are we going to support it and the answer has always been incompatibilities are holding us back. Unfortunately a lot of popular PHP scripts still do not work properly with PHP 5.3. Then if it’s not the PHP scripts it’s modules we use or add-ons not working properly or providing problems. A great example of that is Zend Optimizer which requires I believe you to re-encode for PHP 5.3. It also is not considered stable either last I checked and isn’t even available to download although if you use Zend Server you do have early access to it.

Another Fiscal Year Behind Us

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot believe it but it’s been another fiscal year for Hawk Host Inc. already. Our Fiscal year end always falls on August 31st and that has already passed. It’s been an exciting year for us with lots going on in nearly every portion of Hawk Host.

Best Year Yet

It seems like I’m saying this every year or even every month but it was our best year ever. It took us just over 6 months to pass the previous year in revenue which is just awesome. We also doubled our client base over the year as well so we’re basically twice the size we were last year at this time. Just so no worries about it going to waste profits were up as well so we’re a healthy company. A lot of web hosting companies make more money but pay more so they never get ahead. We’re most definitely not one of those cases as we’re growing while maintaining our margins for the most part.

Droid2 - What can this sucker do?

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

After several instances where my old phone had proven inadequate for my job I finally decided to get a smartphone. I wasn’t sure what to go with so after careful deliberation I opted for the new Droid 2.

Coming from a old regular phone and a old Blackberry I was quite surprised how robust and fast these things are. It was also a nice to see the Android platform finally after hearing so much about it - it’s sleek, fast and has an intuitive interface.

Hawk Host August 2010 News

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot believe that it’s already August it felt like just yesterday I was talking about how 2010 was finally here. It’s about a good time to post about all the interesting things that have happened in July and what is coming in August.

New Servers

We’re constantly growing which means we’re always adding new servers and July and early August we added a bunch of machines compared to what we used to add a year ago. We added Mirage on July 5th which is our first reseller only server and it’s based in Dallas. We then added yet another reseller server this time Tornado which is in Seattle. Then finally we added Lightning to increase our shared only fleet in Dallas. We’ve been working towards having shared and reseller separated rather than being creative like we had in the past. Due to our increasing size it is now possible to do this as we fill our high end servers much faster than we used to. Along with these new servers to put customers on we’ve added a second development / test server. This will allow us to continue to test new features and not slow down development of other features. We now have a total of two servers for this function with one being for our VPS panel and another being for cPanel testing. Of course we can change their purposes very fast thanks to Softlayer so it’s quick for us to reload a system to test something else.

TMUX - The Terminal Multiplexer (Part 2)

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In part 1 I went over the basics of tmux and how to utilize its basic features. In this portion I’m going to dive a bit more into customizing tmux to make it easier and prettier to work with. I’ll also give some examples on how to utilize the client/server model.

Since this part is less of a tutorial and more of a tips / reference I decided a table of contents based layout would be a bit easier to use:

TMUX - The Terminal Multiplexer (Part 1)

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

tmux is similar to screen as it lets you run numerous TTY’s in the same terminal window. It supports some very cool and intuitive features natively as well as a much more readable configuration syntax (ever looked at a .screenrc file?).

Why TMUX over Screen?

Well according to the FAQ for tmux it has the following advantages over screen:

A clearly defined cilent/server model (windows are their own clients which allows flexibility on how you handle windows. You can attach and detach different windows in different sessions without any issues)
Consistent, well-documented command interface. (You can use the same commands interactively as in the .tmux.conf file, more on that later)
Easily scriptable
Multiple paste buffers
Vi & Emacs keybindings
A more usable status line syntax (which also allows you to embed the output of a shell command, handy indeed.

Default keybindings & Functionality

The default keybindings for tmux are actually pretty intuitive, though if you’re used to screen you’ll likely get a little peeved with the default action binding of C-b, though this is easily changed to mimic screens behavior:

Medal of Honor Beta

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a gamer and you haven’t been living under a rock you’d know the new Medal of Honor is coming out October 12th 2010. Something more right now is the fact the multiplayer beta has started and yours truly has the beta. I suppose a large majority of people have the beta as I believe you just need Battlefield Bad Company 2 as well as a pre-order of Medal of Honor. So I’m not really that special but I figured I’d talk about the game since I know what I’m talking about.

New Blog Theme Twenty Ten

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

You may have noticed if you visit our blog once in a while the theme has just changed. I noticed the release of wordpress 3.0 included a new theme so I wanted to check it out. To my surprise I actually like it for it’s simplicity plus supporting some of the new features. Like you may notice right now we have the “New” Hawk Host logo displayed on the header of the blog rather than some generic picture one. So right there it is more Hawk Host like then our previous theme. You can do a lot more than that apparently as well

It's been a while

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a while since we’ve had a blog post about anything so I thought it would be a good idea to just talk about what is going on. Obviously we’ve been very busy keeping up with our growth along with improving our internal tools and other backend systems.

I last talked about our servers at the start of March so I figured I’d update on what has happened. The first one being we do not use SATA disks for our web or VPS servers anymore as our Marlin server was upgraded some time ago. We’re 100% 300GB SAS 15K RPM drives which means improved reliability across the board. We have seen a big drop in the number of drive failures and when a drive does fail we’re no longer see raid array problems which we would see in 25% of cases previously. We added our first shared web hosting only server in February and since then we’ve added 2 additional servers to that fleet to cover all locations. We’ve also added our first of hopefully many 5600 series CPU’s to our server fleet. For web servers though CPU is generally not the issue so we may not use them depending on availability. We just like having the newest hardware so if it’s there we’re going to use it. I’d say the best news on the server front is the introduction of an upgraded Bosco server (Our backup server). This machine is a beast being a Dual Xeon 5520, 12GB ram and 24x1TB drives in a Raid-10 with a Adaptec 52445 raid card. Raid-10 may seem silly seeing as how we lose half the disks in the process but for us we need high performance writes which raid-5 would not be able to provide for us. Also even if we had used raid-5 and had more space we’d run out of I/O on the disks before we’d ever come close to filling the disks. So we have about 11TB of space at our disposal for our backup machine and it should handle 35-40 servers for us hopefully so it’s quite a lot.

Quick Softaculous Praise

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I talked about Softaculous before but I wanted to just praise them yet again and what an excellent choice we made adding them and promoting it over Fantastico whenever we can. Obviously we cannot remove Fantastico for marketing reasons but Softaculous is always what we recommend the users use.

So they released 2.8 recently which added a nice new backup utility as well as adding a search feature. Although that’s not all though:

How to Install and Configure Litespeed for cPanel

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know we run Litespeed and have so for a year now. I’ve noticed since we’ve been using Litespeed the installation information and tutorials as far as setting it up in a cPanel environment have become really out of date. This could be my fault with asking for fixes and features to be added to cater to cPanel and solve various problems. Obviously I don’t know if that’s correct it’s me causing it but since we started using it seems like we’ve found a lot of issues relating to cPanel integration with have been fixed. Unfortunately though the wiki entries Litespeed has on their site still reference things not necessary anymore. So I’m going to quickly run by how to install and setup Litespeed on a cPanel server.

cPanel Broken Bandwidth Tracking

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t noticed yet on a lot of our servers specific accounts on each server do not have any bandwidth tracking what so ever. If you’re on a shared hosting account you would only realize if your bandwidth usage has been zero. For a reseller it’s highly likely at least one of your accounts is not tracking any bandwidth. As it stands anyone affected by this is just being given a free ride as far as bandwidth and we’ll deal with any extra cost due to bandwidth usage not being available. If you’re curious about the bandwidth usage of a specific site you can still retrieve this via web statistics like awstats or webalizer. This post though is to actually talk about why it’s happening and what steps we’ve attempted to get it resolved.

Developers Out Of Reach

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Last week my Brother asked me if he could use my credit card to buy a new phone online since his no longer worked. I don’t like using my credit card anywhere but on my computer so he came over so we could do it on my computer. We started the process of taking advantage of a web only offer for the new phone he wanted. We got to the checkout and were surprised to find a strange repeating screen about being a foreign customer (we were not). So we tried a few browsers and both my ISP’s and same thing happened. Eventually though in Internet Explorer we received a javascript error then checking back in Firefox it was now just a javascript error as well. He called and they had no idea what we were talking about he was sent to various departments. Eventually he ended up in sales who could not offer the web only offer but wanted 3 times as much for the same phone. Told them no the issue is the order form is broken and then sent back around to technical support. They basically said we cannot help you we have no way of contacting the web development guys to confirm there is an issue or even fix the issue. So basically my brother was out of luck because of the fact no one at this company we could speak to could talk to anyone in charge of their actual web site. This was a big time company and it’s pretty bad their order forms were broken and the fact no one was aware on the phones or could even contact someone was pretty bad.

Suspension Pages - The Unforeseen Bane Of Web Hosting

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago we created a custom suspension page for shared accounts that are suspended. Now normally this is pretty straightforward task and you wouldn’t put much thought into it - we didn’t either. So we went ahead and setup a sub-domain, modified our layout accordingly setup cPanel. That’s it!

Well they say hindsight is 20/20 and we would tend to agree. Suddenly we got a huge surge of traffic from suspended accounts which was to be expected but due to a single oversight we had to skurry before the server decided to go kaput: PHP! We use PHP (Zend Framework, etc) for our website and portal so naturally we carried over some code from our website to our suspension page without thinking about the amount of traffic that would be hitting it. The result was a large amount of PHP processes bogging down the CPU causing our suspension page to almost become suspended itself. Obviously to fix it we simply put up a static page and called it a day.

Moderation Is Key

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I always believe in moderation when it comes to anything never do anything excessively. In this case I’m talking about working which is why over the past few weeks I’ve made a point to reduce my hours to more reasonable levels and just be less of a control freak. If you make tickets you may have noticed that I haven’t been responding to the tickets as much as I typically do and others have been picking up the slack. It’s not all that I haven’t been doing though as I usually do.

February Is Over

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot believe it but the short month known as February is already over and we’re onto March already. February was a very exciting month for us with lots going on so I’ll just go through it all really quickly in this blog post.

We talked about it forever but we finally did it on February 6th Frog Host was officially launched. The second division of Hawk Host specializing in the unlimited hosting which every month we’d lose a customer here and there to. We can finally say hey wait a minute check out Frog Host which we also own they offer unlimited and the quality you loved at Hawk Host! We think the first month went pretty well with a limited amount of promotion we gained quite a few customers from various sources. It’s seen a huge number of affiliates already which means lots of promotion from people trying to cash in on potentially large sums of money if users sign up long term (50% payout first payment of $100 is $50!)

Multivariate Testing - A Real Life Example

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago I posted a little tutorial / guide on how to get a simple A/B or Multivariate test running using Google Website Optimizer. Unfortunately I never made a follow-up post, though we still use this internally to help improve our conversions. I figure shedding some insight on why this is useful and how we utilize this internally may be of interest to some people, so here it is.

cPanel 11.25 - We're stable baby

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In case you missed our recent announcement in the forums we’re now upgrading all of our cPanel versions to 11.25 as it’s recently been moved out of testing phase into stable. This is highly anticipated release as it adds a few features, and more importantly fixes a lot of poorly implemented features. Here’s a quick laundry list of what’s changed in cPanel 11.25:

CSRF Protection - Security tokens! This protects you from those nasty CSRF attacks. They also are checking for blank referrals (not the best method, but added onto tokens and you’re golden)

Rebootless kernel updates ahoy! Initial thoughts on Uptrack (Ksplice)

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In case you missed it we recently have added Uptrack to all of our machines to take advantage of being able to update the kernels on our machines without having to reboot. This has several implications, though the primary one being security. A large amount of hacks take place on a day-to-day basis and a large portion of them are due to out-of-date software. When there is a security issue in a web application the repercussions are plenty, though when there is a security issue in the kernel the repercussions are simply scary.

Power of Unlimited

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of web hosts and people in general underestimated the power of unlimited hosting to users. Since we launched Frog Host on the weekend we’ve lost several customers some of which put right in their comment that someone recommended they switch to Frog Host instead. I am pretty sure a lot of them are not even aware Frog Host is ran by the same company which is all that surprising. The reason being we’ve seen an increase in affiliate users with Hawk Host and those same people are also promoting Frog Host on their websites and to their friends. So these users have chosen to pay Frog Host $80/yr rather than Hawk Host $40/yr when their space usage suggests they’d be fine with just 3GB of space.

Softaculous Doing Great

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We added Softaculous recently as we were becoming more frustrated by the lack of updates to Fantastico. To go along with Fantastico’s lack of scripts it was months behind in some cases on versions of scripts which is unacceptable when dealing with exploits. It appears the only thing Fantastico really has going for it these days is it’s name as we still have customers using it over Softaculous even though Fantastico might even be installing an older version of a script. So it’s definitely not something we’re removing as a feature as it stands on it’s brand and if we did remove it we’d be losing customers. So just how great has Softaculous been over the first week of us using it? Well here’s a summary of all the script updates we’ve seen:

Injury Bug

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The web hosting season is a long a hard one in fact the season really does not end we’re here 365 days a year. So there are bound to be some injuries some of which could put staff out 6-8 weeks others are just nagging injuries that can last weeks or months. We’ve been relatively healthy this year with nothing to take out anyone for any long amount of time. Recently we have been hit by the injury bug in the form of nagging injuries that we just play through.

It has started

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It has started we are once again having to actually add new machines. The last four months rather than adding new machines to deal with growing number of users we decided to do a mass hardware refresh. We went from four CPU systems with 4GB ram and slow 250GB 7.2K RPM SATA drives to eight CPU systems with 12GB ram and fast 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives. When we were doing this it obviously added capacity making it unnecessary to continue to add machines to deal with the growing number of users. Well that time has ended as Seattle needed a second machine to deal with the growing demand there. It’s the first of many of new machines at our new specifications.

Intel X25-M G2 160GB

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

For the past few months I’ve been going nuts every time my computer boots up or even at how slow loading programs and everything else were becoming. With the more developing I was doing it was becoming pretty frustrating dealing with this it was actually slowing down my productivity. I finally said enough is enough I’m going to purchase a SSD as I’ve heard nothing but great things for solving the exact issues I was having.

2010 Is Here

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot believe it but it’s 2010 already and I figured it was a good time to update our blog. The updates have been pretty scarce during the holiday season for obvious reasons. So I hope all our customers had a great holiday season like we did!

We accomplished a lot in 2009 it’s tough to pick out just one thing that we did so here’s just a quick refresher. We’ve seen expontential growth in 2009 as more and more customers recommend us. As a result of this we added quite a few new servers in 2009. It probably would have been even more servers but we also upgraded every single cPanel server to 12GB of ram. All machines also now run 10K RPM drives at a minimum with most of our machines running 15K RPM SAS drives. With the growth we also beefed up our backup server switching it from a tiny 4 drive system to a 12 drive system. It helped us deal with the growing space demands as well as improve performance of our CDP server with backing up servers as well as restoring files. Probably the most important thing during the year was our growth in the number of employees. We went from a tiny 3 person team up to 7 people due to the amount of growth we’ve had. Our support has not slowed down during our growth which is something a lot of providers struggle with. We saw it coming and were working towards a solution before things got to a point where it would be very difficult to fix it. I think that covers a lot of the key points during 2009 but if you look back at the blog posts in 2009 I’m sure you’ll find things I missed.

Using netcat as an intercepting proxy

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I needed a way to see how a particular client was interacting with a server. Obviously there are numerous ways to do this, but I was curious how easy it would be to implement something similar with a quick netcat command. Sure enough after a little bit of fiddling I was able to produce exactly what he needed.

nc -l -p 12345 < pipe | tee outgoing.log | nc server 12345 | tee pipe incoming.log

December 2009 News

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot believe it December is already upon us which means 2009 is almost over. Time sure does fly by when you’re really busy. December though is not going to fly by this has been historically our slowest month which it means it’s time to get a lot of the to-do list finished. First of all though this month we’re running a 50% off coupon which is pretty rare so tell your friends to sign up now using the coupons holidays2009 .

AJAX Zend Framework Tips

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing some work with Zend Framework in the javascript front and I figured I may as well post a bunch of the things I’ve noticed as of recently that might be useful for others.

Adding javascript files on a specific controller

What you want your layout to look like:

<?php echo $this->doctype(); ?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <?php echo $this->HeadMeta(); ?> <?php echo $this->headTitle(); ?> <?php echo $this->headScript() ?> </head> <body> <div id="content"> <h1><?php echo $this->escape($this->title); ?></h1> <?php echo $this->layout()->content; ?> </div> </body> </html>

DMCA Notices

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

DMCA notices as well as other legal documents has been something that has annoyed me for some time. We get them all the time due to our size and we’re expected to become the judge and jury involving content and other situations. In some cases they’ll be sent to us and we’ll work with the party on resolving it. Other times it’s sent to our provider Softlayer and we’ll be in an even tougher position. I see the DMCA especially being abused a heck of a lot to take down competitor web sites as well as just be a general nuisance. For example here are some recent examples:

It's Never Litespeed

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As Dr. House likes to say it’s never Lupus I like to say It’s never Litespeed. We get support tickets all the time about how it worked in Apache it must be a Litespeed issue but it never seems to be that case. Although users are convinced it always is until we take a quick look at the page or account and instantly know it had nothing to do with Litespeed.

Server Upgrades Continue

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a few weeks and the upgrades continue for all our servers with some surprises along the way. As of this post we’ve now upgraded 4 servers with 3 of them being cPanel servers as well as one VPS node. Here’s a quick break down of the big change after the upgrades for some of the machines after the upgrades pulled right from our Munin system:

Here’s Saturn after the upgrade:

Beefed Up Support

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The last week of September we noticed something strange that hasn’t been an issue in some time we were unable to keep up with the support demands. September was our best month ever in terms of growth and as a result we were seeing a lot of support inquiries from new users. We had a lot of questions just about various portions of our hosting but also had a lot of account restores from previous hosts. Restoring an account can be a time consuming thing to do depending on the size of the account and the speed of the other hosts. So our response times were becoming slower to general inquiries as well as our restores taking much longer than they had in the past during certain times of the day.

I don't know Everyone

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There was a time when at Hawk Host well I guess it was probably Devoted Host I knew exactly who every single one of our customers were. xyz.com oh that’s John from New York and abc.com that’s Jenny from California. As I was working on migrating Saturn to the new hardware I kept seeing all these accounts and I had no idea who they were. After a while I decided to look the sites up and sure enough they were customers of ours and were paying I simply never encountered them or I don’t remember. To be fair to myself a lot of these users have never made a single sales, billing or support ticket so I would have to remember them purely off if I set their account up or not.

October Is Upon Us

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot believe it’s already October it seems like just a while ago I was talking about how it was January 2009. There are a lot of exciting things going on in Hawk Host land some of it being related to our corporate identity Hawk Host Inc. as well as our hosting division Hawk Host. Unfortunately some things I cannot talk about at this point we’re keeping those tight lip right now but it is exciting for us. So I’ll just go through some of the things I can talk about:

Wordpress Theme Performance

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When people are looking for a wordpress theme they very rarely are looking at the performance of it. The person is looking at how pretty the design is and if it fits their site. There is however a lot more to it then simple the design of the wordpress. A wordpress theme can add a lot of extra CPU and memory usage depending on how it’s designed.

I’m seeing more and more where wordpress themes are not using style.css or at least .css for their style sheets. More and more they are using style.php which in turn simply outputs the style sheet. This sort of setup suddenly requires an extra PHP process every page load thus increased memory as well to compensate. The fact it’s just going to output CSS still does not matter it’s really bad to be doing. This is especially bad when a wordpress blog is running say wp-super-cache they’re probably trying to serve everything via html files. Well that purpose is defeated when every page load PHP is loading up to serve their style sheet. Now as to why more themes are doing this I’m not sure maybe it’s make them look more professional in the eyes of the users I have no idea.

Emergency maintenance and why it's necessary

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short rant regarding emergency maintenance. Typically the only time there is unscheduled downtime (or very abruptly scheduled downtime) is because the issue is urgent for one reason or another. For the most part there are only two to three reasons why we may pull a machine offline abruptly:

Network maintenance (usually out of our control)
Security updates (a recently released exploit, fix, etc)
Hardware issue

Now for the most part the last one tends to be our achilles heel. As most of you know we run a RAID-10 setup on all of our servers for redundancy purposes in case of a drive failure - normally this isn’t an issue as all of our drives are hot swappable so we can simply replace the drive on-the-fly and have the array rebuild. When it becomes an issue is when the RAID card itself is reporting degraded drives across the board or the recently replaced drive is still showing as degraded (or in some cases completely dead). Now this puts us in a pickle - typically if this happens we have the RAID card firmware upgraded, or replace the RAID card as a whole (both in which require about 10-15 minutes of downtime). We can either run with no redundancy and post proper maintenance schedules or simply provide a notice of 30-60 minutes and pull the machine offline for a very short period. We typically opt for the latter instance since any data loss will simply balloon the issue into something catastrophic - and when playing with faulty RAID cards we much rather not play a game of russian roulette with our customers data.

cPanel x86_64 Reseller unable to Add Packages

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Using 64bit is really common now in fact most hosts are using this on their newer systems due to using more than 4GB of memory. On cPanel there is a common problem that crops up with errors showing up after a while in WHM for resellers after there is quite a few accounts on the server. cPanel sets the memory limit relatively low and on 64bit systems int’s and such are using more memory due to the 64bit system. cPanel added a feature which allows you to set a maximum amount of memory used by a cPanel process before it is killed. As a result in 64bit systems they’re more frequently hitting the modest 256MB limit while 32bit systems do not run into this issue as often. The reseller user will receive the following error when adding a package:

Why You Should Use WP-Super-Cache

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we deal with CPU usage issues with accounts like every other host out there. I’ve noticed an ever growing pattern of the problems always coming from Wordpress blogs and almost always they have no caching what so ever. When a web page is served without any caching in wordpress it will load up PHP then grab the data via MySQL. These are both the slowest and most intensive portions of a web page. The images, css files ect. are all served nearly instantly by the web server and it can serve a lot more of these static files per second then PHP pages.

Why We Upgrade Servers

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sure lots of our customers wonder why do we do hardware upgrades once a year or at least every two years. With the migration of our Skyline server to new hardware I figured it was a good time to explain why we do it and also how we do it with minimal service impact.

History Lesson

We’ve done several upgrades over the years I’d like to quickly run through just how many specifications we’ve had:

Catch All Email

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The catch all email was a great thing back in the day it was neat you could retrieve mail for sales@domain.com billing@domain.com ect. ect. all through one simple email address. A lot of users used it without issue and it solved having to check various emails they could just tell users to email random addresses and it would arrive at it’s spot. Fast forward to now and the large amounts of mail received by pretty much any domain on the internet and this once cool feature is now a major headache for us as well as any other hosting provider.

The Maintenance Window

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The day started out like every other one with me waking up and starting my walk to the computer while half asleep. I used to go shower and such like I was going to an office but after a while I figured it be best if I walk to the home office in my boxers to see what happened while I was gone. I check out our support system just a few tickets but nothing that required my attention. I checked my email and not a whole lot of mail just a bunch of orders in and the usual log of all the credit cards charges from our batch run. It was looking like a great day not to busy some orders to check out but other than that great.

Foreign Transaction Fee

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The foreign transaction fee has come up a bit in the past year and I figured I’d rant about how ridiculous this fee is. We’re a Canadian corporation and as such we have a Canadian merchant account. For the most part we never run into issues with this and no extra fee’s for our users or anything of that nature. There is however a few select banks in the United States who have now decided to charge their customers a 3% fee and call it a foreign transaction fee. The best part about this fee is it shows up as if we charged it in a lot of cases when it has nothing to do with us. This makes us look pretty bad to the few customers we have who’s banks have decided to add fee’s other banks are not adding. Some users have suggested to us why not get a merchant account in the United States. There are several reasons the first being we’re not incorporated in the Unites States making such a task a very difficult and if we did it would become a very costly one for us. The second part is it’s not just the United States who get these fee’s we’ve heard users in the UK get charged a foreign transaction fee when purchasing items from Canada and the United States. So we’d probably need a merchant account in every single country for our customers to avoid such a fee being charged by a select few banks in each country.

New WordPress Release

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There is a new release of WordPress that fixes a issue that allows an attacker to reset the first account in the database (usually the admin account). It doesn’t allow remote access, though can be fairly obnoxious.

More Information:

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/08/2-8-4-security-release/ http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/11798

Zend Framework 1.9 Released

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you missed it on Friday Zend Framework 1.9 was released which as always contains new features and bug fixes. I’d say the biggest thing would be the support for PHP 5.3 which was released last month. We have no plans on supporting it any time soon on our servers but it’s nice to see support for it in Zend Framework which is a popular framework used on our servers. It also of course maintains compatibility with PHP 5.2.4 and up so you can use it at Hawk Host. We’ve already been working on upgrade all our PHP scripts that use ZF to 1.9 so we get all the fixes and new features.

OpenVZ Apache mpm_worker Memory Issues

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of users look to run Apache’s mpm_worker rather than the prefork mpm as it’s regarded to be much more efficient than the perfork mpm. Add in FastCGI rather than mod_php and it’s a great combination of stability as well as performance. Unfortunately there is one issue with running this on OpenVZ and that is the stack size. Even the modest VPS with very little traffic will end up using it’s allowed memory as well as it’s burst memory. Many suggest just not running mpm_worker with OpenVZ but this is not the best solution. The problem has to do with the default thread stack size of 8MB which with OpenVZ becomes real memory rather than simply virtual that will not actually be used by the system unless necessary. There are several easy fixes for this:

New CDP Server Soon

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Bosco our current CDP server has been a little slow as of late and we anticipated this day would come we’re just surprised we’re already there. We have an agreement in place to have it replaced with a new system within the next few weeks. At this time we’re currently awaiting the availability of a 2U chassis that can handle the twelve 1TB drives we will be putting into the machine. The current machine is a four 1TB drives in raid-5 which was great when we originally had it deployed but we’ve doubled the number of machines we have. The new system will be using the twelve 1TB drives in a raid-10 to provide the write and read performance. This upgrade should mean much quicker backups and restores as well as extra space to handle double the number of machines we currently have.

We want your feedback and suggestions!

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past six months we’ve grown quite a bit, and as a result we want feedback from current (and prospective) customers regarding our services. Since we’ve grown significantly we would like to hear from you guys to let us know if you think we’ve been able to maintain the quality service we strive for. It’s a slippery slope when a company grows quickly and as a result some companies let that get in the way of the service - we don’t want this to happen.

Wordpress 2.8.1 Released

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Wordpress 2.8.1 was released yesterday and looks like the major reason for upgrading in this case is a new exploit that from my quick reading could be potentially dangerous. You can find the exploit details here. Other than that just a standard set of fixes:

Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
Translation of role names fixed.
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
Switched back to curl as the default transport.
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
Stricter inline style sanitization.
Stricter menu security.
Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
RTL layout fixes.

Full Details at http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/wordpress-2-8-1/

SoftLayer Network Tips

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been a softlayer customer for a long time and we have quite a few machines with them at this point and we have people once in a while asking how in the world do we do what we do at softlayer. Some examples are routing our IP’s on a VLAN and having ranges on various machines and quickly routing them across different servers. Another common one is how do we route private network IP’s to our VPS plans giving a user the potential to use say NAS. I’m going to quickly go through them for anyone curious

Magento Woes (Zend Framework)

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As Magento software gets more popular, we’re increasingly running into people who are experiencing errors with our setup. A majority of these are addon issues from Magento Connect and have been addressed via their forums / knowledge base - though we’ve had one that took us a moment to figure out.

Fatal error: Function \_\_autoload(b514i6\_xp\_2pia3m5o191rxqn3) threw an exception of type 'Exception' in /home/<user>/public\_html/magento/lib/Zend/Validate/Hostname.php on line 420

Long story short - this is because we include the Zend Framework on our include path for everyone to utilize freely - the issue is Magento also bundles Zend Framework locally since they rely on it as well. They likely do this to maintain a stable version across all platforms - and possibly slightly modified it (not confirmed). As a result people trying to install Magento on our machines were getting that obscure error.

PHP 5.3

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

PHP 5.3 was released on June 30th and everything is already asking when is Hawk Host going to have it on our servers! Well this is unfortunately going to take some time until it shows up on our servers is it is a major release that does have some deprecated features users may be using. It also has some changes to functions and of the core of PHP itself and we just don’t know how well it’ll play with various open source, commercial and custom PHP scripts users make use of it. So as it stands I estimate at the earliest August it’ll be on our servers but it may actually be more like September. This comes down to knowing all PHP scripts work fine as well as cPanel having support for it and litespeed. Right now we’re actually waiting on cPanel to fully support 5.2.10 which we could install ourselves but best to let others deal with the issues and we’ll just run things when all the issues are figured out.

July Is Here

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot believe it but we’re now into July it feels like just yesterday June was starting time sure does fly by. Things have been great due to the fantastic growth we’ve seen over the month smashing our old record for number of new accounts in a month (old one was set in May 2009). As a result of this things have been busy as we work on adding capacity such as adding a new VPS node Marlin and most recently a new web server Venus (was an old server name but we want all planets used for names). We’ve done a lot more than just add capacity though we’ve been working on various things.

Outsourcing Some Support

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Update: This post is no longer accurate

This post previously discussed our evaluations of using out sourced support during high growth periods. We have since expanded significantly since then and utilize our own in house team. Anyone responding to tickets works exclusively with Hawk Host customers.

A lot of people see out sourcing in any service field as a big negative and this is especially true with web hosting. The fact is a large majority of web hosts out source their support in some way whether that be by using a company specializing in web hosting or by hiring people who do not work in their office. Most users though see the outsourcing of support as only when it’s located in a country such as India for example. Even with support in India I’ve always thought the issue was never the location but rather the training of the staff. You read about just as many poor support stories from company’s who’s staff are located right in the company’s office. I know of a lot of web hosting company’s who’s owners are located in the big oh no countries such as India and they are very knowledgeable. Most of them are praised for their great support so is the location of the support team really the issue? Probably not in most cases.

Development Update

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As you may have noticed there hasn’t been many posts as of recently and this is due to the fact things just are not progressing as planned. This does not have to do with development difficulties but the fact things here at Hawk Host have been extremely busy. In the past six months our subscriber base has doubled with each month us having more sign ups than the previous month. This has caused things to be a little hectic to say the least with constant expansion (many new servers added) and having to deal with the increased support load and having to come up with a solution to that. With myself handling the majority of the development of the panel having all these things going on has resulted in some days where unfortunately I’m busy making calls, dealing with suppliers or just working with customers. Obviously with myself being a huge part and with the rest of our team mostly assisting with testing this can slow down development a lot even in testing with such a huge amount of growth we’re seeing. My hopes are to have this all solved by the latest July as I’m in the last portion of getting it all straightened out. This means a much more focused development effort and less other things getting in the way.

Looking For A Designer

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The one thing we lack in our development effort is someone who can draw things. I personally am very good at drawing stick men but that is where my artistic skills end. The problem with finding someone is they are either just cookie cuter web site design or they want insane fee’s for something that is very simple. We’re looking for someone is reasonable priced and knows what they’re doing. So this means knowing html, css and being able to make a nice interface that is also intuitive. In the past when we tried to bring in someone to do some basic HTML, CSS and images for some applications we were building they wanted to charge $1000 per page which as much I’d love to believe we have that kind of money to spend we do not. I’m still going to give it a try before I produce one of my amazing interfaces with colors that do not match and images created in paint

Virtualization Platform Independent

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of the panels out there advertise support for a specific platform for example OpenVZ or Xen. We’re taking a different approach where in theory our system could handle any platform assuming there is a driver built for it on our system and all the relevant data in the database. This would mean the variables available to that platform are within the database and an actual entry for that platform exists so a machine can be set to that platform. So here’s how it all breaks down:

Slow Days Happen

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was not the success we were hoping for with development. Things were very hectic in Hawk Host last yesterday and with us not having a full team of developers this sort of thing causes delays in any development processes. What was completed yesterday was the operating system handling system which I had talked about yesterday. Besides that we were discussing the best options on how to approach the safety of the slave servers.

Learn Something New Everyday

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Every single day I learn something new and yesterday we no different with the development. It was pretty tiny though but it did provide some confusion for a little bit and it was with Zend Framework. The way we develop anything with the Vezoz in the front uses models obviously but also Zend_Db_Select to construct any query that needs to be created. So rather than doing something like this:

$sql = “SELECT * FROM users”;

Wordpress 2.8 Released

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time again a new version of wordpress is out as an official stable release which means time to upgrade. Of course as of recent versions you can upgrade with just a simple click within the wordpress admin making it a quick and easy upgrade. With that being said never risk having the upgrade not go right so make sure to backup your files and database before upgrading.

Here are some highlights of wordpress 2.8

Onto The Second Day

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The first day full day of development on the panel went quite well we got a lot accomplished in a short amount of time. Here’s what was accomplished yesterday:

Database Schema

The basics of the database have been designed to handle what we need from the start. This includes but is not limited to machines, ip pools, ip addresses, virtual machines, users, user sessions. This also of course includes relationship tables like how to relate an IP pool to a machine so that it can be used by that machine.

HyperVM Situation

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We run HyperVM as I assume most of our virtual private server customers know already and have seen all the posts all over the Internet warning about it being accessible as LxLabs the developers may not have patched all the holes. We’ve been running HyperVM for the past day with it only being accessible to our internal IP’s which we use to access all our servers thus it is not open to the Internet due to the firewall blocking it. This of course is not a permanent solution to the problem at hand and hopefully access will be restored at some point but the stigma from the whole situation is still there. There are posts all over the Internet saying we will no longer go with a provider using HyperVM. This puts us in a tough spot obviously where we could lose customers or lose potential customers. So I’d like to at least talk about what the long term plan is for us.

VezozVM Introduction

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

VezozVM is the name of our replacement software for HyperVM as well as a competitor to any other virtual machine management system currently available or being created. The goal of the project is to provide an effective and simple system to handle management of virtual machines and the physical machines that host them. Every day myself or someone else from development will be posting information about how things are going. This could also expose what we’re doing and our we’re creating the system so it should be interesting to say the least I am going to just answer the obvious questions now

PHP Method Chaining

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A post that came from my personal blog that now just points to the hawk host blog. I figured this was worth transporting so here it is. I have no idea how accurate it is or if the code 100% works but I believe it does. If you do find any mistakes just post about them in the comments and I’ll correct them.

I’ve been reading up on method chaining in PHP recently. You’d be surprised how useful it can actually be in some cases, so I figured I’d share. First of all method chaining is not for all circumstances by any means but it can make doing some code a lot easier and it can also be easier to understand.

Marlin VPS Node Live

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It is official our Marlin VPS node located in Dallas Texas is now live. We once again offer virtual private servers in Dallas as it’s been sold out for a few months now. I recommend if you’ve been waiting for a virtual private server in Dallas with us that you act fast otherwise they could be sold out again. The server is the following specification:

SuperMicro X7DBR-E Intel Xeon
Dual Intel Xeon-Harpertown 5430-Quadcore
12GB ECC FB-DIMM DDR2
4x Western Digital WD Raptor SE16 WD3000HLFS
3Ware 9550-SX Running Raid-10
1Gbit Port Speed

It’s a beast as are all of our virtual private servers so it’ll be fast. Right now to help get the orders started we’re offering 40% off recurring when using the coupon marlindeal . So take advantage of that deal while you can it’s being posted all over the internet.

May is Over

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s now June 1st which means May 2009 is over with and we’re on to the next month pushing forward here at Hawk Host. May was an exciting month for us for several reasons with some of them being great others being bad. I thought I’d go through what all has happened in May.

Record Month

We broke our previous monthly record in number of orders which is all thanks to our customers recommending us all over the Internet. Along with that we saw a record in revenue for the month. It was a great month for us in terms of growth which makes so we can improve our services.

Software Load Balancing & VPS (Part 1, Perlbal)

Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is just going to be a quick overview of some common methods of load balancing your web services via software load balancers. This post will have several parts, each covering different software load balancers. This particular part we will be covering Perlbal.

In this post I’ll be using two different VPS accounts as an example since we will need to spread the load across something. I’ll be referencing them as VPS1 and VPS2. In the examples they will be running Ubuntu, though most of the tutorial can be applied to any distribution. One thing to note is I’ll be using Aptitude for package management which is fairly specific to Debian based distributions. Usually Yum will be your alternative - and in the worse case scenario you will have to compile the packages manually.

How to Receive Better Support

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of people believe to receive good support all you need to do is make a ticket and it’ll all handle itself unfortunately this is not the case and I’d just like to outline how you can receive better support. So here’s some tips in no particular order

Create the ticket with the same name and email address you have on your client area account with us. If this is not an option provide the complete login details to your hosting account with us. Without any information we have almost no way of figuring out who you are so it’s very difficult to assist you.
If you’re receiving an error of some kind provide the error message. Making a ticket with the subject email error and the contents of “I received an email error” is not helpful and as a result a technician will have to ask for the error which can lead to delays in having the issue resolved. If the issue involves several steps include the steps to reproduce the problem rather than us guessing as to how to create the problem.
Create only one ticket for the issue. Creating a ticket and cc’ing it to sales, support, billing, abuse and any technician you know their email of will not get a response any faster. What it will create is confusion between technicians and confusion for you as we have to merge tickets together or close them so we only have one ticket open.
Use only one support medium. It is not necessary to make ticket, start up a live chat and call all at the same time. You’ll most likely end up with three different people all attempting to help you. You will need to tell three different technicians the same information and it could lead to issues as all three attempt to solve the same issue.
Bumping your ticket will not make the response any faster. We appreciate your issue is important but tickets are handled in the order that they’re received.
Do not mistreat the technicians. This is one that seems obvious but unfortunately some people think calling the technician a *explicative* will make them work faster. That’s not how it actually works though and human nature may result in the technician not seeing you as important of a person. They may not do this on purpose but subconsciously when they’re called names they may just not put in that extra effort without even knowing it.

I am sure there are others but these are ones that come to mind. The one that applies the most is probably the relevent information one. Every day we receive countless tickets with no information which means it could take hours to resolve depending on the users speed of replying back. For example a user could file a ticket about their site not having an error but not providing any location to the error. The user makes the ticket says to themselves it’ll be a bit I’m going to walk away from my computer for a few hours. The technician responds back in 15 minutes asking for more information and we do not hear anything back for 4 hours. The user checked their site the problem was still there so they reply to the email asking for more information in a rude manner while providing the information. The whole issue could have been solved just be providing the information from the start rather than assuming we knew they were talking about their add-on domain domain2.com’s folder domain2.com/subsection/script/script.php . The assumption should always be we have no idea about your sites or what is running.

Zend Framework 1.8

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished going through every single hosting machine we have making sure that the latest version of Zend Framework was part of the PHP include so it’s not necessary to upload it. It was released last week and we just got around to putting it on all our servers. As always if you need an older version or if our version is out of date you can always upload your own copy to your space. This version is really only meant for testing and development and should not be relied on in a production environment due to the fact we always try to have the latest version available.

Seattle Live

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Our Seattle location is now live and offering shared and reseller hosting services. Right now we have just one machine live called Titan but I’m sure if it’s popular we’ll be adding more servers. It of course offers all the same services shared and reseller services our other locations offer so no compromise there. Virtual private servers may or may not come that is undecided it’s a new location and we’re feeling it out first before going and offering a much more expensive service. You can check out the full announcement at http://www.hawkhost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=394

Hawk Host Reviews

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Once in a while people ask where are all the Hawk Host reviews or where can they post reviews so I’m just going to go through a few places I know of. The obvious one is WebHostingTalk which is actually a forum but there are reviews there and anyone is welcome to post their own of us or any other host. Now onto some of the web sites that are tracking reviews of us:

The Server is Overloaded

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This has got to be my favorite type of ticket we get because it never makes any sense. I don’t know if it’s all the “non overselling” hosts spewing servers are overloaded if you sell more than 250MB space on a $10/month hosting account or what. But we have had an increasing number of tickets titled this where it has nothing to do with a machine being overloaded at all. Apparently no matter what the problem is the server is overloaded is the cause. Here are some examples of recent tickets, chats and calls I’ve seen with regards to the servers being supposedly overloaded.

Jedi VPS Node Added Exclusive Blog Only Special

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We just finished deploying our latest VPS node located in Washington DC which goes by the name Jedi. It’s our highest end machine ever being deployed coming in with the following specifications:

Dual Quad Core Xeon E5430 12GB RAM 4x300GB 10,000 RPM Raid-10

It’s a large and expensive machine which means we need to start getting customers on it as soon as possible. As a result exclusively on our blog only we’re offering 45% off our standard VPS and above (excludes Basic) when using the coupon jediblogdeal.

The Few Cause Problems for the Majority

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The one thing with web hosting no matter who your market is there are a few users who cause problems for the majority of the user base. That’s whether you’re selling 10000GB of space or 1GB of space there will be users who do things that are not advised. We at Hawk Host deal with these and it’s growing on a daily basis how many warning emails we’re sending out or users with active tickets we’re working on resolving the problems they’re causing. These always revolve around poorly made PHP scripts, poor MySQL queries or large amounts of traffic that is not traffic worth having. I figured I’d share a few of the most recent ones I’ve personally had to deal with in hopes that other users will not go making the same mistakes.

Seattle And Nehalem Processor on the Horizon

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Seattle Washington has been an option for us to have a presence in for some time but we held off on it focusing on Dallas TX then to Washington DC. At the end of this month unless something unanticipated happens we’re going to finally offer the option of Seattle for our shared and reseller hosting servers. Seattle’s primary focus will be on serving markets that come to us via the west coast which means Asia. We’re not sure when we’ll have a VPS offering there as virtual private servers are not near as popular due to their price so we’d rather give the shared and reseller market a try in Seattle first. Seattle will of course have access to the features of all our other locations which means access to R1Soft backups and making use of our redundant DNS cluster.

PHP 5.3 RC1 Released

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

PHP released the first release candidate for PHP 5.3 which means it’s only a matter of time and that will be the latest release of PHP. It’s going to be interesting for us as PHP 5.3 adds features and could potentially break things. There are several extensions that have been moved to PECL which will mean potentially cPanel’s PHP compile system will be broken for a period of time. Some of them are replaced by others which are I assume more supported than their predecessors but it still could break things for users who are using the functions. Then there are changes of handling of deprecated functions which could mean errors for some users. I could see us being a month or two behind on this PHP release as there are just a lot of variables besides PHP itself. Like I said cPanel is one end but also LiteSpeed and it’s support for 5.3 with it’s specialized SAPI (how it communicates with PHP). We also have things like Ioncube and Zend optimizer which should work but you never know. So we’ll end up allowing others to be the guinea pigs on this one and we’ll wait until things seems to be all ironed out. Here’s a run down of the changes:

What I've learned from using Twitter

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a little over a month since we’ve actively been on Twitter (twitting, tweeting, and possibly twatting) and over that time period I’ve learned several things about how Twitter works and how people utilize it. Here are my observations:

These drive me nuts, it’s the companies who mass follow people and post solely advertisements about their company. In my opinion this is not what Twitter is for - it’s as if they’re trying to dupe people into following them back to get more exposure to their ads. Yes, I know this is obvious - but it irks me. What really gets me is when competitors add you and then post advertisements. Cmon guys!

Hawk Host & Git

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve added Git to all of our servers for people to use. Git is a VCS (version control system) that’s similar to Subversion but addresses several shortcomings of todays popular VCS’ (CVS, Subversion, etc). If you’re interested in utilizing Git you will need to request SSH access simply by submitting a ticket on our support center.

Here are a few quick how-to’s / tutorials on Git for those interested / migrating from Subversion:

http://git-scm.com/documentation http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html http://mjtsai.com/blog/2007/07/15/subversion-to-git/

Multivariate Testing

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

**WARNING** The formatting on this post is lackluster - once again who am I to fight against the ways of WordPress? Hopefully the point / useful information gets across. I haven’t checked the spelling in this post either - so don’t kill me if you find a typo.

I’ve recently been fiddling around with multivariate testing on several websites I run (including Hawk Host) and I though it may prove to be a useful blog post for our customers. Here I’ll explain how to setup multi-variant testing using Google Site Optimizer and a simple web page (though you can apply it to any page / website).

Phone Support

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

On our new site we have a phone number displayed on each page as well as on our contact pages we have the extension of each department listed. Even with this we have not seen much of an increase in the frequency of calls which is a good thing. It may just be our target market who do not feel comfortable calling or just people who buy web hosting find making a support ticket far easier.

New Monitor Viewsonic FuHzion VX2265WM

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a very slow week for me anyways with regards to exciting news that involves Hawk Host. I doubt anyone wants to hear about how I’ve spent the week going through our books and getting our accounting up to date. I sort of left it for several months which was a very bad idea so I got it up to date. So procrastination is bad remember that always best to keep ahead of things.

We're not going anywhere, really

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You would be surprised at how often this gets brought up to our pre-sales / general inquiries - people are very concerned whether our company (or other prospects) are “going anywhere”. By this I can only assume they mean financially / going poof overnight leaving them stranded while taking their money. While I don’t blame them for asking, it makes me wonder why they would take the words from our mouth at face value (see below for more clarification).

The Past Week

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been an exciting week here at Hawk Host with the launch of our new site, various new features coming around the corner, exciting new customers and other projects now coming into full swing.

New Site We launched our new site on Monday with very few problems if any. It was pretty exciting to see months of work finally go live. It was our biggest site endeavor ever with it involving a artist, web designer and our programming. With this many people part of the chain this is why it took as long as it did. It is finally live and for the most part all bugs are squashed at this point. We have plans of adding more features and adding more content as with the new design this is possible.

RAID !== Backups

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is just a quick rant regarding people who insist on relying on RAID as their sole backup solution.

Yes, RAID provides a certain amount of protection via redundancy, which may help save you from a drive failure, but does not constitute a backup solution. Usually the RAID setup you have isn’t fool proof - it may not be able to recover a damaged array and you’ll be mildly bitter that you have no real backups.

Deadline Scheduler

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Most modern Linux distributions have the default scheduler as CFG for all block devices but we’ve found for us and from our reading many other web hosts are finding this to not be the best scheduler. There are several schedulers available which you can read about here: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/schedulers/ . The one we’re using now and have for a little bit has been the deadline scheduler. It is also the choice of many web hosts trying to squeeze every little bit of performance out of their servers. It is actually very easy to determine the scheduler you’re running as well as change it on the fly to see if the changes make a difference.

We're cool too..

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve finally decided to break down and setup a Twitter account for Hawk Host. Why? Well actually for several reasons! Besides allowing us to integrate with the new website to add a splash of “freshness” - it will allow you to keep up-to-date with recent happenings here at Hawk Host. Like what you might ask?

Company updates
Maintenance Schedules
Live maintenance updates (as they’re happening)
Server emergencies (ongoing issues such as hardware failure)
Random ramblings from staff
Allows us to be hip and cool

Ultimately this allows us another form of communication to our customers; one in which we strive to improve. We believe communication is key to providing a quality service (that and, well quality). Hope to see you fellow nerds people following soon!

Wordpress 2.7.1 Released

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time again for another wordpress release which in this case is just a maintenance release. By the looks of things 2.7.1 does not include any major security fixes and primarly just for various bugs discovered in 2.7. The upgrade process is pretty easy it’ll say at the top of your blog there is a new version available. You click that then there is a 1 click upgrade script which means no dealing with uploading files and visiting pages. It can all be done through just the one click which to me is new I’ve never used it before so I’m not sure which version this showed up in. For more information check out their post about it: WordPress 2.7.1 . As for things on our end with this I’m sure Fantastico will be updated to upgrade to this version soon but it’s just as easy to upgrade yourself. Happy upgrading!

Zend Framework 1.7.4 Released

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Zend Framework 1.7.4 was released on Monday and all our servers have once again been updated to have the latest version included in the library folder for php. Not a whole lot to talk about here it’s a maintenance release to fix a few bugs. Here’s a list of what was fixed in this version:

Just the usual maintenance list I’m sure the next release with new features will be more exciting.

LiteSpeed 4.0 RC1

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The LiteSpeed 4.0 RC1 has been released which if things go as planned when we switched no one even noticed us switching to it. Since we’ve started using LiteSpeed we’ve been using the 4.0 Beta’s as it had support for SSI which meant no dealing with Apache at all. I personally reported numerous bugs to them and investigated all sorts of oddities with things so we could have a very stable web server with SSI support. So we’re to that point and I received a mention on their forum about the RC1 release: http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/showthread.php?t=2677 . I should not receive all the credit though it’s all our customers with their various usage patterns which helped find all these bugs. I thought it was worth posting about real quick but other than that no real news. The new site is being worked on and should be up in a few weeks hopefully.

eAccelerator

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For the past few days I’ve been playing around with eAccelerator on one of our hosting machines. Sounds pretty bad, but it’s completely controlled and I was quite confident it would run just fine. It is running just fine and has been for a few days and overall it’s made a tiny difference in overall load but not to much. The reason for this is the machine is not having issues with PHP serving but something else. But the caching of compiled PHP scripts still reduces CPU usage a bit and speeds up how quickly PHP pages load so it’s still worth it.

CentOS 5.3

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

With Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 released I figured it was time to talk about CentOS 5.3 which is an almost identical copy to RHEL. As always Hawk Host runs the latest and greatest so CentOS 5.3 will be showing up on our servers once it’s available. For the most part like any upgrade it’s seamless no one notices as package updates don’t mean any reboots or down time. This is one thing worth noting though and that’s a new kernel! So within the next month there are going to be maintenance notices for every machine to have a 5-10 minute down time in order to reboot the machine. So that’s means users making tickets during the reboots as they fail to keep up with maintenance notices. Even if we sent emails about this sort of maintenance notice we’d have complaints that this is unacceptable or they do not want maintenance notices at all. Those are the few that do read them as most do not after our experience with the reseller name server IP change where a large amount of resellers did not bother to change IP’s until their sites went down.

I'm Back!

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Albeit most people likely didn’t notice - I’ve been MIA for the past couple of months. The reason behind it is my fiance and I moved to New York (from California) - in a Jeep pulling a 12x6 trailer.

Needless to say - it was interesting (and mildly.. dangerous) along the way. Expect to see a little series (2-3 parts) with random rantings on how it went. I realize most people won’t care, but hey it’s part my blog too and I need some ego fluffing occasionally!

Migrations Completed

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For the past two weeks or so we’ve been upgrading all servers to Xeon 5000 series CPU’s, CentOS 5 and 64 bit. This is finally completed and all our servers are up to the same hardware specifications. One machine is not 64bit but it was already running high end hardware so we felt it wasn’t a necessary switch. So this was all completed late last week which meant my 16 hour days were over and I had to no longer worry about migrating accounts. Being the control freak that I am I made it my duty to complete this all as I had done this before. Along with that our LiteSpeed setup has drastically improved in terms of compatibility and speed. We’ve worked with them to solve problems we encountered with compatibility. We have also made tweaks to the setup to improve performance compared to the original deployment of LiteSpeed. The improvements were nothing to major but in some odd cases it might improve things. A real learning as you go situation which is always the case with software. Even to this day every single cPanel trick isn’t known and once in a while a new thing is figured out.

LiteSpeed Thoughts

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been running LiteSpeed on all our servers with Intel Xeon 5430’s for quite a few days now and I figured it was time to post my thoughts on this whole thing.

On all our servers we’re seeing a reduce load on the web server side of things with respect to serving web pages. More specifically there has been a reduction in CPU in a substantial manner and also a reduction in memory but not as much as CPU. The reason being the caching LiteSpeed does which is great we have tons of memory on our servers anyways so it’s going to great use. To my surprise anyways users have actually seen a reduction in response times from the server as well. Several users have seen us response time graphs from their monitoring showing a substantial reduction. The lowest response time by Apache was now the highest for LiteSpeed. Overall LiteSpeed has shown almost a 50% reduction in web page response time so rather than 500MS response users are seeing 250MS for example.

Our Mascot

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to talk about LiteSpeed today but since our Mascot is completed I thought it was worth sharing. We had originally planned on having our new site completed by now, but as always issues with designers and we fall behind on such a goal. We’re starting to move along now with that so hopefully it won’t be months down the line considering all the changes we’ve made lately that are not on our site. So here’s our Mascot he’s basically the Hawk Host super hero. I have no idea what we’re calling him.

LiteSpeed Here We Come

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow our first server will see it’s switch over to LiteSpeed. We choose Jupiter as it has the least users making it the most logical choice as the first server in production to be switched over. We do not anticipate any problems and expect to have it on other servers within no time (maintenance notices posted for the first three machines).

That’s about all I have to talk about right now. So a short and sweet blog post

Cleaning Up The CDP Server

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s another day another exciting task for me to do at Hawk Host ;) When we were investigating the corruption problem on the CDP server I noticed we did not really have backups spread out well or in some cases there would be 3 servers at one time and at other times none going on at all. So today I figured it was time to fix that and here’s our new schedule:

We're Switching to LiteSpeed

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s official after our internal testing of LiteSpeed for the past week or so we’ve decided we’re going to be switching all our servers to use the LiteSpeed web server. From our testing it is significantly faster and also uses a heck of a lot less resources than our current configuration. It’ll provide all the features of our current configuration and be much faster so it really has very few losing points to it. We’re going to start upgrading on December 29th and have all our 64bit systems switched before the end of that week assuming everything goes well. We’ll also migrate our one 32bit Harpertown based system to LiteSpeed the week after.

.BIZ Only $5

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Right now we’re offering the .BIZ TLD for only $5 for the first year. This is an excellent deal to get your hands on this quality gTLD domain. So if your site does not currently have the .biz TLD registered this is the time to act. Just use the coupon festivebiz08 to get the domain for just $5 for the first year.

That’s all I have to post about tonight. Just a quick promotion which will end on January 1st 2009

Wolverine Blades

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I was browsing the Internet today and I came across the most random post on a forum about wolverine blades. The person posted this picture:

So everyone is asking what is up with that foot? I am even sort of wondering why is there a foot under the bed. So can anyone explain this one to me? This could also be an old picture and I’ve just found it now who knows.

Interesting Week

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been an interesting week at Hawk Host to say the least. Even for me personally it’s been a tough week with various things going wrong. I’m going to quickly run through my week and all that has happened.

The first annoyance for me this week has been the lack of two monitors. One of my Viewsonic vx922’s stopped working to a point where it would not have anything on screen at all. It turned out to be a syncing issue which meant it was shipped out under warranty to be fixed. So I have been running with just one screen which has been tough especially when things are busy and I am trying to multi task.

Should We Switch To LiteSpeed?

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we’re always looking at using technology to have an advantages over our competitors. Over the past few years LiteSpeed has been gaining in popularity and has even been catching on with web hosts. It is fully compatible with cPanel which is a huge plus making it not to far out of the default configuration. It is significantly faster than apache in serving static content. It is also 50% faster than mod_php and numerous times faster than suPHP (we run this).

WordPress 2.7 "Coltrane"

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Wordpress 2.7 code named Coltrane has been released. We just upgraded our blog and I’m liking the new look in the admin area and also it seems to be taking fewer clicks to get things done. It’s really nice that you can now customize the look on the front page of the admin area. So I’ll be sure to put everything in just the right spot for me which will mean something as I plan to be more active on our blog.

Small Hawk Host Migration

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This afternoon I switched some things on the Hawk Host site mostly to do with non customer facing things. The big one was I switched the server the site runs on and the IP address as well. This was mostly due to our site requiring more and more resources due to the amount of traffic we now receive in a daily basis. It wasn’t too much of an issue, but our traffic has been going up for some time so I figured it was a good time to make that switch.

yum Frozen

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had a few users report that yum is frozen on their VPS’s. Usually ones running cPanel and I figured it was worth a quick post about how to solve it. The problem is usually the rpm database has become corrupt. It’s quite easy to fix all you need to do is run a few commands and it should hopefully fix everything up.

Kill off any processes currently using RPM. You most likely will have a few as yum is frozen and if you had anything else attempt to use yum or rpm it would be frozen as well. So run the following command:

Friday Update

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a few days since I last posted anything on the blog so I figured I’d just post what I’m up to today.

As I type this I am currently terminating more suspended accounts who never canceled and it’s simply not worth us sending collections over a $10 hosting account. As I discussed in our blog a while back it’s annoying that people simply do not pay and expect the hosting account to be canceled. They get away with it due to the low amount they’re paying.

Zend Framework 1.7

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick note on the blog I’ve went ahead and updated all our servers to have Zend Framework 1.7. It was released on the 17th but we let these things sit for at least a week in case of any unexpected bugs. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it myself but here’s some of the new features or major changes:

Zend_Amf with support for AMF0 and AMF3 protocols
Dojo Toolkit 1.2.1
Support for dijit editor available in the Dojo Toolkit
Zend_Service_Twitter
ZendX_JQuery in extras library
Metadata API in Zend_Cache
Google book search API in Zend_Gdata
Preliminary support for GData Protocol v2 in Zend_Gdata
Support for skip data processing in Zend_Search_Lucene
Support for Open Office XML documents in Zend_Search_Lucene indexer
Performance enhancements in Zend_Loader, Zend_Controller, and server components
Zend_Mail_Storage_Writable_Maildir enhancements for mail delivery
Zend_Tool in incubator
Zend_Text_Table for formatting table using characters
Zend_ProgressBar
Zend_Config_Writer
ZendX_Console_Unix_Process in the extras library
Zend_Db_Table_Select support for Zend_Paginator
Global parameters for routes
Using Chain-Routes for Hostname-Routes via Zend_Config
I18N improvements
- Application wide locale for all classes
- Data retrieving methods are now static
- Additional cache handling methods in all I18N classes
- Zend_Translate API simplified
File transfer enhancements
- Support for file elements in subforms
- Support for multifile elements
- Support for MAX_FILES_SIZE in form
- Support for breaking validation chain
- Support for translation of failure ,messages
- New IsCompressed, IsImage, ExcludeMimeType, ExcludeExtension validators
- Support for FileInfo extension in MimeType validator
Zend_Db_Table_Select adapater for Zend_Paginator
Support for custom adapters in Zend_Paginator
More flexible handling of complex types in Zend_Soap

Syncing The DNS Cluster

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned a month ago we were moving our DNS systems more in house as we now have the luxury of using multiple data centers where we host our web and VPS servers. It only made sense for us to bring for us to bring this in house to not use as much bandwidth in syncing zones and also speed everything up quite significantly. On Friday I had planned on migrating NS2 and syncing it up and having it become part of the cluster then announce this on the weekend. Well I got caught up in other things so I ended up starting the syncing just a few hours ago. I’ve now realized we’ve had a lot of domains go through our system and it’s a lot more than I had thought.

Cracking Down on Shout Boxes

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Shout boxes have been an increasing headache for us the past 6 months or so. As they continue to become more popular they continue to cause more and more problems for us. It has come to a point now where rather than dealing with them on a case by case basis we’re just flat out not allowing them. This situation is similar to when proxy’s were becoming popular. We just dealt with it as sites became a problem for us, however over time it became quite clear they were all eventually going to be problems.

Cheap Hosting Accounts Users Do Not Renew?

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago we offered a deal where a user could sign up for $5.95/yr on a plan that was actually being sold for $5.95/month. At the time lots of users said it was an amazing deal and we had a few hundred sign ups as a result of this deal. At the time we expected each user would stay at least two years. The reason we did this was to have more people talking about Hawk Host. It worked great I might add a year later our subscriber base as easily doubled and it’s for sure to double again within six months.

Making the Most out of Suspended Accounts

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Like every web host we have customers who do not cancel their hosting and simply do not pay. In some cases they just forget about their site altogether and as a result their users see a suspended page. For the longest time we just left up a generic cPanel suspension page for our shared hosting customers. As time as past I thought to myself why don’t we take advantage of this. The majority of the customers suspended will not be coming back. We leave sites suspended for up to a month before we terminate them so we need to get something out of that. So I figured it was time we do it and we threw up a suspended page that resembles our site and also links a support contact page. Since we put it up it’s brought us numerous new visitors who would not have heard of us if it was not for that suspended page. The suspended page has also probably resulted in some sign ups as well. I now understand why lots of hosts are now putting ad’s on their suspended pages due to just the sheer amount of traffic it does generate.

New Computer Built

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I ordered computers parts last week to upgrade from my aging dual core opteron 165 with 2gb ram to a quad core with 4gb ram. Well after it taking me from Wednesday to Friday to build the machine it’s finally up and running and has all my programs once again installed. I probably overspent or made really bad decisions on the best bang for the buck parts but this new machine was an out of the blue build out of necessity. The week before my former computer’s raid array degraded and refused to rebuild. It was also now blue screening frequently which made me not feel to confident in it long term. The obvious solution was to format the machine but I figured it was an excellent excuse to build a new machine. This now also gives me a machine that can be used to do a lot of testing. So I’ll probably load my old opteron 165 up with windows server and have it handle a bunch of virtual machines for testing purposes.

Server Status E-Mails

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Recently its been brought to our attention that not everyone knows how we handle server updates (planned maintenance, emergencies, etc) and as a result they’re noticing brief chunks of downtime with no explanation.

We post every little thing that may affect your experience with us including things such as network maintenance, machine maintenance, hardware failure, essentially anything that might possibly affect someone. As a result sending an e-mail each time will get quite cumbersome and a lot of clients have expressed a dislike for so many e-mails - so we decided to use the forum as a sort of “opt-in” on status updates. You can either visit the forum and just browse, or you can subscribe to the status forum and receive e-mails when there’s a new post - or basically allowing you to keep up to date with everything we’re doing and keep tabs on all scheduled maintenance.

New VPS machine in Texas!

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to announce that we’ve purchased a machine in Texas for our Virtual Private Servers. This means you can now choose which location you would rather be in (the other being Washington DC).

The new “Raptor” machine is just about identical to Gizmo but here are the specs:

Intel Xeon Harpertown 5430 (Quad Core) 2.66GHZ
8GB DDR2 RAM
4x 250GB SATA II Drives (RAID-10)

As usual the server has a RAID setup (RAID-10) for data redundancy and speed in addition to full backups provded by R1Soft.

Random Writings

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There has not been a new post in a bit so I figured I’d just write about some random things to keep things fresh.

It’s starting to get cold up in Canada once again so it’s that time of the year to put my winter tires on. I’ve booked an appointment but it’s not for over a week! Everyones putting on their winter tires and such so it was not unexpected. It just sucks for me as driving my car with it’s summer tires on snow is not fun. The car probably shouldn’t even be driven in the winter at all but I get by trying to not drive it when there is any reasonable amount of fresh snow.

New HawkHost Coupon / Promotion

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We don’t normally post too many promotions on our blog, namely because we rather rant about things such as WoW, Cats, and Tony’s car. This is an exception because not only is it a stunning deal, but its the first of its kind with us at HawkHost.

What’s this stunning deal you speak of? Well with any shared web hosting order that uses the coupon cheapdomains2008 will receive a domain for $1. Yes, that’s $1 for a domain name!

Wow Addiction

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

World of Warcraft is a pretty interesting game with so many people being addicted to it. Today I came across an article that I just could not at least spread the word about. There is a person who has 36 world of warcraft accounts which is costing him $5711 a year! I played the game for a bit got to level 60 and just sort of stopped playing it. The expansion came out and I bought that of course and I got sick of leveling after I reached about level 64. The game was just to time consuming for me and I had better things to do with my time such as maybe running Hawk Host.

Interesting things from last week

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It was an interesting last week to say the bit and just my luck I was the one there to deal with them. I figured I’d write about them and the solutions I came up with to solve them.

The first one I encountered was yet another customer being hit by a massive surge of traffic. The coolest part of this was the customer was not on digg, reddit or anything like that. They were actually mentioned on tv which resulted in a lot of traffic via google. The customer unfortunately was not prepared for the surge of traffic as their site was entirely dynamic. Unfortunately we had no choice but to suspend their site for the sake of the server as it was not able to keep up with serving the PHP pages which were probably inefficient as well. The customer was notified and contacted us about it and I pointed them to the very useful article Cody posted earlier: Digg.. Reddit.. Stumbleupon . The customer read the article switched their pages to html files and the traffic was no longer an issue at all.

Digg.. Reddit.. Stumbleupon

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

What do all of these websites have in common? They bring ungodly amounts of traffic to the (un)lucky patron who reaches the frontpage - so much that it brings a good portion of hosts to their knee’s for the sudden surge in traffic. Namely shared hosting providers are affected the most by this since their are numerous websites on the same server - meaning that there is *typically* less room for excessive resource usage.

Subversion + Trac Now Live

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick update our Subversion + Trac features are now live on all servers. You can find the announcement at http://www.hawkhost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=180 . You can also find it as an official feature on our shared and reseller comparison pages. Here’s a quick link to the shared page: http://www.hawkhost.com/Shared/compare

I hope everyone enjoys this new feature :)

Small Update

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Things have been quiet the past week or so with nothing to really report. So I figured I’d post what little information I have about things as they stand.

The subversion and trac integration is on the majority of our 32bit machines now running without issue. Unfortunately we do not have it on 64bit machines yet so we cannot officially announce it. We hope that the developers have 64bit issues worked out soon.

Subversion and Trac Manager Limited Release

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Subversion and Trac Manager I was talking about ages ago and recently a few months ago is finally on some of our servers and working! I would like to thank the good people over at RV Global Soft for creating this module and taking the time to read all my feedback. It was originally going to be a different add-on however it is now part of Rvskin so a lot of hosts may end up using it eventually. I’ve been working with Rvskin working out all the bugs for some time and last night they were able to fix the last remaining issues I encountered. I was really committed to solving all the problems which meant I was actually using gdb to debug crashes in the patched subversion as well as determining issues with their installer. I believe all the issues are worked out and 2 of our machines now have it fully working. Those machines are Venus and Skyline and you can find the subversion and trac manager if you’re using the rvskin. All our 32bit machines should have it showing up once the next release is made with all the latest fixes. As far as our 64bit systems they’ll see it on their systems once RV Global Soft patches things up for 64bit system.

Zend Framework 1.6 Released

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Zend Framework 1.6 was just released and we already have it on all our servers. I can honestly say I did not have time to play around with the release candidate versions so my knowledge of it is not great. I am however as I write this working on porting our website to use Zend Framework 1.6. This basically means I need to drop in the new folder and confirm the smarty view system works fine which it does! I’ve actually already found one use for it which is the Zend_Service_ReCaptcha functionality as it is the quickest solution. Our site currently makes use of it using an outside library I’m assuming (Cody setup the captcha). Here’s a quick run down of how easy this is to implement:

Productivity...

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It appears our blog has been neglected for a few days so I decided to write a brief blog about some tools I use on a daily basis that increase my producitivty and can’t imagine living without. I’ll break the list down into two legacyPost: 1 type: blog categories: programs and FireFox Extensions (yes, I’m a junkie). Programs

Launchy - Launchy allows you to index your start menu, program files, and other common places programs / files reside and run them with a quick hotkey. For example the default settings have it set to where you hit “space + alt” and a little search comes up. Type in a common program such as “firefox” and hit enter - tada FireFox launches. My description doesn’t give it justice - this program is an absolute must.

Announcements Via RSS

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We recently had a couple of clients ask about announcements via RSS feed. Well if you weren’t aware we post all of our announcements through our forums - which has RSS feeds enabled as an ouput type!

So if you would like to get the latest announcements from our forum you will use the following URL:

http://www.hawkhost.com/forums/external.php?type=xml&forumids=5

.. and if you would like the last five posts from the announcement forum use this URL:

Always Have an Order By

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday there was a report of a strange bug by a user on a system I’m currently working with. I was told a specific row was not showing up in the data set. The system was using PostgreSQL for the database and used ExtJS grid component to render the data set so my first instinct was the user was not paging to the next set of data. To my surprise even when paging I was unable to find the data as well. I was really confused on this one so I decided to throw the query into my trusty SQL editor and see what is going on. The first thing I did was remove the limit and offset portions of the query as I had no interest in paging. To my surprise the entry did in fact show up when I ran it without the limit and offset. When I ran the query with a limit and a offset and paged through each page I could not find this row.

Hawk Host Site Road to Zend Framework

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Hawk Host site currently uses a semi framework I built several years ago to do MVC. It was great at the time was very light weight and did the job. As we’ve grown over the past year we’ve found it necessary to change things on our site and add pages. This is now where it gets tricky as my framework system did not actually have any search engine friendly URL system built into it. We actually manually specify the rewrites in our .htaccess which has become troublesome as more than just myself need to modify our site. Not to say there aren’t some things that are easy to change. One of them being the features of our pages which are dynamically loaded for the most part and can inherit that of other pages. For example our reseller page inherits a lot of the features from our shared hosting page.

PHP 4 Good Riddance

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow some time during the afternoon all our servers will have PHP 4 removed from them due to the end of life being today (August 8th 2008). Although there was new release on Thursday the 7th to address some security holes it’s quite clear it’s time to stop using considering in the PHP news post it also says it’ll be the last release. For anyone who’s curious here’s what was part of the PHP 4.4.9 release:

1-800 Woes

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well as most of you are aware we introduced a 1-800 about a month and a half ago. This has been a godsend and a burden all at the same time. Why? Well currently the 1-800 number forwards to only Tony and I’s cell phones, which is all peachy except the fact that we have a horrible tendency to miss calls. After debating if we should remove the 1-800 number from the public until we can properly staff it we’ve decided to introduce certain “business hours” for the 1-800 number to assure people someone will be on the other line.

PHP 5.3 Alpha!

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I check the PHP site once in a while to see if there are any new updates and to my surprise the other day they announced that PHP 5.3 alpha has been released. We’d love to put it on Hawk Host to play around, but at this time it’s not meant for a production environment. This of course does not stop you from loading it up on a virtual private server from us and playing around with it that way.

A new month..

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well it’s the end of July (already August if you’re picky) and it’s been a crazy one. It’s been one of our busiest months to date and we see no indication of it slowing down. So what should you expect this upcoming month? Well we’ll be working on getting more people on the live chat during the days (and obscure hours) while improving our 1-800 number response time / rate. We will also be working on small things such as the knowledgebase, website, and forums - so keep your eyes peeled.

I Will Miss You Digital Point

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Today at about 7pm EST my career of posting on the Digital Point forums has been put into real jeopardy after receiving a 6 month ban. I do not believe it to be a fair ban by any means considering all the rule breaking and illegal activity that goes on in the various digital point forums.

My ban was for the following:

Reason: Spamming

-—— Quit spamming the same offer over and over and over. ——-

Knowledge.. yes.. knowledge..

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Any of our clients can attest to our knowledgebase here at HawkHost is lackluster. We’re the first to admit it’s lacking some essentials. Well over the next month or so we’re going to try and revamp the knowledgebase with some frequently asked questions (asked to us by clients, prospective clients, etc). Once we finish that we’ll try to address more pointed issues (such as “I receive error ____ how do I fix it?”).

HawkHost Reviews & Testimonials..

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A few month’s ago we were lucky to see one of our customers to say “Hi” to us or grace their precense on our forums - we had a substantial amount of people we hosted yet we never heard a peep from them. We always were under the impression that we offered a solid service and noone had problems so they just went about enjoying their service(s).

Well in the past few month’s we’ve noticed our customers being more “outgoing” and mentioning us on forums, their own websites, and even referring friends. Why the change? We’re not sure - though we’re glad. It is true we’ve grown significantly in the past few months but it almost seems that someone hit a “On” switch and suddenly decided to tell people they liked us. Who knows.

We've been (re)captcha'd!

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

After recieving numerous spam e-mails to our various departments we decided to look into where they were coming from - and as predicted it was from our contact form(s). Being the silly littls nits that we are we didn’t protect it with any sort of captcha.

I recalled Tony mentioning a few weeks ago for me to code one to add onto the forms - but being the good employee that I am I procrastinated until it was to the point of necessity. I opted to try out reCaptcha - a free service that allows you to easily implement captcha’s into your websites .. but it has a dual purpose. Essentially it allows people to help digitize books that OCR has issues reading (below is a chunk quoted from the reCaptcha site):

WordPress 2.6 Released!

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well it looks like yet another new version of WordPress is out which means it’s time to start upgrading blogs again. For us we’ll be making the upgrade in the next few days as we always stay on top of updates. As for the new features of 2.6 here’s the run down

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

It basically works in the same way wiki systems and even version control systems work by keeping track of changes. I do not personally have a use for it, but if we started modifying each others posts on the Hawk Host blog it might be useful.

R1Soft Making a Difference

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I recently made a post about us looking to a new backup solution as our method was using a lot of bandwidth, quite a bit of cpu and taking forever to be completed.

So first I’ll talk about the bandwidth usage we’re now seeing. Here is what it looked like before for a whole month

Here’s what it looks like thus far on the new system

My First VPS Related Support Chat

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We launched a VPS offering recently and anyone who has signed up as gone about their own way and never needed to talk to us. The few that did need some help never ran into me it was usually Cody our resident expert on everything related to our VPS offering.

The day finally came when I had to help someone and put my expertise to the test and eventually I did come through with flying colors:

Database Table Field Naming Conventions

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s another day so it’s time for another rant about something that continues to bug me.

The naming conventions of fields in tables of a database! There seems to be absolutely no consistency between applications and in some cases even within the application it self. My biggest gripe I would have to say is the naming of the primary key’s and foreign keys of tables. I’ve seen the following recently in applications that have say the table customers

Twiceler Bot is Garbage

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Every few months or so we end up having to block the Twiceler bot on one of our servers due to high traffic caused by it resulting in what almost could be described as a mini dos attack. The bot is made by Cuill which supposedly has some people from Google working on it as well as quite a bit of venture capital. It sure does not show with their Twiceler bot however. It is supposedly experimental at this point but they’ve let it loose on the Internet and every web master out there is complaining about it.

July is upon us

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

July is finally upon us which means summer is in full swing around here. Since it’s also July 1st that means it is Canada day but don’t worry we’re not taking the day off. So all that really changes in July is when I drive anyways I see less buses which is great. I get to where I am going quicker and there is less traffic.

My duties today:

Update the accounting books to reflect last months revenue and gateway expenses. Being that we’re not just some kid in his basement we do need to keep records. I find doing the revenue and expenses at the gateway level at the end of the month keeps me more sane. If I wanted it to be hectic I could go and do all the books the week before October (close to our year end). But well that be just insane.

Random Links Of the Day

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well I’m bored so I figured I’d throw up some random links people have sent me today.

Poking along in the left lane? Prepare to pay

Maybe this rule should be everywhere? There’s always someone in the left lane who insists on going below the speed limit and in some cases even at the same pace as the right lane resulting in a log jam.

Birthday party snub sparks debate

R1Soft Backups + Subversion and Trac + More

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We have a lot of things comes down the pipe line this week which are very exciting. The first big one is we’re moving away from our own backup system onto using R1Soft CDP solution. What this means is we’ll be moving to at least daily backups and storing them for a week or more. With this we’ll also now allow everyone to restore files through their cPanel (it actually logs into the CDP server the cPanel machine is using). MySQL unfortunately not being available as an option, however we are able to do it if you file a ticket and I’m sure it’ll show up as an option within cPanel at some point in the future.

Smokey The Bear Failed Me!

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Every year during the summer fires break out all over, there’s news coverage and newspapers covering the fire(s), but this one is different. It’s affecting me (and all the people who live within 100~ miles..)! It all started a few days ago when a wicked thunderstorm came during a nice sunny afternoon - it started a few fires nearby (30~ miles away). It didn’t seem like a big deal until one morning I wake up coughing and swear the house is on fire. Fortunately that wasn’t the case - it was only the sourrounding forest.

Why Digital Point Hosts Fail

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

First of all the title was just to catch every ones attention it’s not strictly digital point based hosts, but for the most part they are the most guilty of doing what I am going to talk about. So it does in fact happen on other forums such as http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ but I would say at a far less frequency.

First of all the back ground here. The majority of hosts who post on forums as their main way of acquiring customers all go out of business in one way or another. The most common occurrence is their server just suddenly go down and never come back up. In these cases the host most likely got their money and ran, so for the hours of work they got a few hundred dollars maybe. The next case is where they sell the company or at least that’s what the new owner says anyways. In these cases the sale is for maybe a $1000 at most if that which isn’t a whole lot of money.

Inefficient Backup System

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

At Hawk Host we use a combination of the standard cPanel system, but using the script BMU to handle doing our backups. The system is setup to do a certain percentage of backups per day so over the course of 7 days it makes a complete set of backups. This system is pretty good compared to backing up all accounts each day and having no script to make sure the loads do not get to high. Sounds great right? Well I decided to take a look at our bandwidth graphs for the last month and I was surprised by just how much private network based traffic we are producing each month.

PostgreSQL Popularity?

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had PostgreSQL feature for over 2 months now and I estimate we have just 1 customer actually making use of it. I’m basing this off the fact one of our newer customers made a ticket about PostgreSQL being broken on one of our newer servers and sure enough it was! Today I just checked another machine and it’s PostgreSQL was now throwing errors and not allowing people to make databases!

Cancellations Difficult?

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Hawk Host we’ve noticed the art of canceling a service you’re paying for is a forgotten art. With the introduction if Paypal as a common payment method for many services such as web hosting users are not seeing a reason to official cancel their service. With web hosting for the host it is not worth the effort to go after the few dollars the customer owed for not canceling the service. Paypal has provided a great service, but this is the one issue with it is the users now choose when to pay and can cancel a subscription whenever they wish.

Software Updates Are Never Fun

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As a web host we’re expected to keep things stable, but at the same time introduce new features which means updating software. This can be problematic as we do not actually develop any of the major software we use which means we are reliant on the developers of the software. The majority of the developers of the software do not run these on production operations themselves which means we need to hope they introduce new features that don’t break things. This unfortunately was not the case recently as we had two pieces of software that run on all machines break in someway.

New Stuff?

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We try to keep up with the latest trends and services people want from us, but we’re careful not to jump into things too quickly. We want to offer a plethora of services - but we want to do it right and keep the quality high.

That being said within the next couple of weeks (or sooner?) we’ll be rolling out another service here at Hawk Host. I won’t say what it is, but I’ll give you a few screenshots to hint at it (which will without-a-doubt give it away).

PHP Frameworks

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Hawk Host we support (and use in-house) Zend Framework on all of our servers and the response has been amazing. I was a bit curious what other PHP Frameworks were available so I went searching and made a little list. The point of this post is to give people some frameworks they can use here at Hawk Host, and if there’s enough demand we may start supporting certain ones.

Hawk Host Security

Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here at HawkHost we take security very seriously. In light of the Nation Threat Advisory (Elevated) we’ve hired some new staff to not only harden our machines, but to protect them physically in case someone attempts to fiddle with the hardware.

We would like to welcome our newest staff, Gizmo.

This is before we released the beast from his holding cell, he’s ready to prowl.

Merely thirty minutes after releasing Gizmo from his jail he stole my lunch, unfortunately he ran off with half of my salami. Ferocious indeed..

The Broken Ipod

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My Ipod was eventually going to break at some point as it was I believe a 3rd generation Ipod and I think it’s over 5 years old now but I could be wrong. It had issues with locking up randomly for close to 2 years now and I had not thought much of it since the original warranty and the store warranty ran out a long time ago. The freezing issues of course could be solved with a simple reset of the Ipod which I was getting quite good at I might add.

Hawk Host Software Development Efforts

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hawk Host although primarily web hosting we do handle various software development efforts as paying developers to do something is expensive and there is no guarantee of it being to your specification. So we take advantage of the fact I am an aspiring Software Engineer and someday hope to actually get a degree (right now I’m too busy doing Hawk Host related things to take the whole school thing serious).

Internal Fun

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks we’ve been making a lot of internal changes to help improve our efficiencies as we were still doing things like we did them three years ago. When Hawk Host started as Devoted Host the primary offering was reseller accounts that came with quite a bit of resources but were also very reliable. I would say over the past 8 months or so we’ve started doing a lot more shared accounts compared to reseller accounts due to our more competitive prices on them and our focus on adding more of them. Now this isn’t a big deal, however due to our reseller focus we never had a good setup for activating and controlling shared hosting accounts. We ran them without packages and also without them being contained in special reseller accounts to do branding of the control panel and various things like that. Over the past few weeks we’ve slowly been migrating shared accounts onto special reseller accounts on each server so that we can stand doing cPanel branding and special offers and things like that. A painful process which we hope to have done very soon.

Spring Deal 50% off First Payment

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Right now we’re offering 50% off the first payment on any of our shared or reseller packages when using the coupon spring2008. This could be a great way to try out our services at a very affordable price. However it could also be used to get an amazing price if you choose to pay a year in advance!

So once again the coupon is spring2008 and act as fast as possible as it expires on June 20th.

Merchant Account Soon!

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well here’s an early announcement that we now have our own Merchant account which means we’ll no longer be dealing with 3rd party credit card processors. It’s just going to be a matter of setting everything up and we’ll be ready to accept credit card payments right from our site and also automatically charge credit cards each month. So once that happens we’ll accept Paypal which will obviously still send you to the Paypal site but credit card handling will be handled on our site.

Improve cPanel Server I/O

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest issues with web servers is I/O due to the fact hard drives are the slowest component of computers. On standard Linux servers each time a file is accessed the OS writes to the drive the time it was accessed. This sort of thing may come in handy in the odd case but for the most part on a standard cPanel server this is unnecessary writing to the hard drive. This can be turned off by setting noatime in /etc/fstab.

Install latest PostgreSQL on cPanel

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As some people may know there is a handy script within cPanel’s scripts folder which can install PostgreSQL, however it does not install the latest versions. It instead installs the vendor versions which on CentOS would be coming from yum. So this means for someone running CentOS4 they’ll get about 7.3 and for someone running CentOS5 they’ll get 8.1. Both of which aren’t the newest version 8.3.1.

So here’s how you can get the latest versions installed with very little work.

Master Reseller Accounts

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had a few inquiries about master reseller accounts and the question always is why do we not offer them? Well I figured it was time to shed some light on exactly why we’re never going to offer them.

The first issue is with a master reseller account you essentially have the ability to fill a server and you do not need to actually manage it. You can create reseller accounts and shared accounts which combined can easily fill a server. So in order for us to offer reliable master reseller accounts we’d be charging over $100/month for a reasonable account. Fact is there are hosts out there if you can call them that which are selling these accounts for $10/month. Of course their reliability is not even remotely close to that of ours but none the less they are offering cPanel based master reseller accounts.

Roundcube Webmail

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well Tony pointed me to this Bugzilla ticket regarding cPanel integrating RoundCube Webmail into cPanel.. and my golly they finally did it.

In case you don’t know what RoundCube is it’s a browser based webmail client (IMAP) that is all prettified with the use of JavaScript / AJAX so it behaves like a normal mail application.

Some Features:

Address Book
Folder Manipulation
Message Searching
Spell Checking (yay!)
MIME Support
More!

I’ve attached some screenshots (courtesty of RoundCube) below.

Driving Annoyances

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t really have anything hosting related to talk about so I’m just going to rant about some things that really annoy me when I’m driving.

So the first thing that really drives me insane is cars who love to slam on their brakes when they go through snow. I don’t know how stupid you can be but every time there is maybe a patch of snow on part of a road instead of driving through it most people like to slam on their brakes. I haven’t crashed as a result of it but every time I have to then slam on my brakes as well I figure it’s just a matter of time and either my car slides or someone else’s does behind me or heck even the person who started it.

Hawk Host March Madness Deals

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Since it’s March Madness time it means we need to offer a crazy deal to be part of the madness!

Shared Deals:

sharedmarchmadness08

Advanced 12 GB Space 120 GB Bandwidth $9.95/month with coupon just $4.98/month

Super 24 GB Space 240 GB Bandwidth $12.95/month with coupon just $6.48/month

Reseller:

resellermarchmadness08 - 40% off all reseller accounts so you could get the following:

Basic 1.5GB Space 15GB Bandwidth $10.95/month with the coupon just $6.57/month

Hawk Host Multiple Locations

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For a little while now Hawk Host has had the option of opening up a new location for hosting customers. Our provider this year is expanding out into multiple locations and bringing their tools to these locations. Our provider gives us the ability to manage all our servers without actually being physically there which a lot of providers cannot do at this point in time. So what I’m wondering is do any of our customers have any interest in having accounts hosted somewhere other than Dallas Texas?

Hawk Host Happenings

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There hasn’t been a post on here since February 20th so I figured it was time to at least post something. It’s been a pretty quiet few weeks around here nothing to exciting going on. There was some network maintenance on March 3rd that went without any issues. Previously to that on the 15th of February we patched a very serious kernel exploit on the Venus server. We were lucky enough not to get exploited but a lot of larger hosts got hit by it before it was even known, so I guess we were lucky in that regards.

Site Builder coming to Hawk Host

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been listening to everyone whether it be shared customers or resellers there has been many requests for a site builder. We have finally made a decision on the software we will be using. So within the next week expect to see RVSiteBuilder on all servers as well as an announcement on our forums about it. We hope this will fill the need for a site builder at Hawk Host.

PHP 5.3 lots of fun

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading around the internet a lot recently about PHP 5.3 and how it is going to include a lot of the features there were slated for PHP6. I see it as an attempt to give users all the features they need because hosting providers were in no way going to upgrade to PHP6 once it was released until 6.1 came along or 6+ months later at the earliest. This of course does not apply to Hawk Host as we had plans on running PHP6 as an option (chooseable like PHP4 and PHP5 right now) as soon as PHP6 hits a point where there aren’t releases after few seconds. So most likely the first stable release or one of the more later release candidates.

Install Ruby on Rails on cPanel Part 2

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We recently installed Ruby on Rails on some other servers and double checked some of the old servers to find something very troubling. Ruby on Rails was not actually functioning on the servers anymore and on the new machines it never worked at all!

I found out that the /scripts/installruby is actually out of date on cPanel and as a result it will not install the most recent version of rubygems which can cause all sorts of problems. So for a fresh cPanel system you’re actually going to need to do the following right now until cPanel updates their install script.

Valentines Deal

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’re going to run a Valentines day deal which actually will last from now (02/06/2008) until 02/15/2008. The coupon is 2008valentines and it will get you 40% off any shared or reseller package on our site. That means you can get a reseller account as low as $6.57/month or a shared hosting account as low as $2.37/month!

Basic Reseller 1.5GB Space 15GB Bandwidth Unlimited Accounts Private Name Servers Dedicated Shared IP $10.95/month but using the coupon 2008valentines just $6.57/month

Zend Framework 1.5 Thoughts

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Hawk Host we use Zend Framework for various applications which right now most are not online and will not be any time soon. I cannot even reveal most of the applications because they’re simply not ready to be announced. So I’d say we make heavy use of Zend Framework and I guess the only part which we don’t is our website which currently uses a framework I made, but that may change in the future.

Web Host Support Secret

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Customers are always asking us how in the world do we respond to tickets so fast at the most random of times. Well I’ve decided to reveal that secret to the world and trust me it’ll surprise you! Our secret is Cyborgs or more specifically the ones that you see in Terminator.

So how does it work exactly? Well while I’m sleeping or out our latest Cyborg Cameron Phillips handles tickets as if she was me. It’s absolutely inguesiness when she is not busy protecting John Connor from terminators so he can survive to be around when Judgment day comes she is handling Hawk Host support tickets. Terminators do not sleep so this is a great solution to solve the boredom because reading the dictionary simply does not cut it every night.

Lets Go PHP5

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I felt it was time to just come out and say it. It’s time every Hawk Host customers goes PHP5 and that will happen by default starting February 1st. PHP5 includes lots of great improvements which are not compatible with PHP4 resulting in most developers currently not taking advantage of the features. As a result of this even scripts compatible with PHP5 are simply PHP4 scripts with a few fixes to make it work in both versions. As a result the new features are not being taken advantage of by developers and the blame is on hosts like us and you the web site.

Hard Drive Failure Without Down Time

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I constantly read about web hosts who lose a hard drive then the server is down for days because data has to be restored via backups. I shake my head every time I read about this as you know 99% of them are not running any form of raid. These hosts figure what are the chances the hard drives are going to fail? I can tell you the chances are much higher than they think and that’s a big reason why we use raid or specifically raid-10 (4 drives)and we make sure all servers the drives are hot swappable.

Improve Apache Start Speed on cPanel Servers

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

cPanel recently made the switch to a new Apache system which improved the maintainability of the system easier however did increase the overhead quite significantly. As a result restarting say apache when you add a domain can take quite a while long enough that it may be noticeable. We were noticing this with a few random 1 minute down times each week which was becoming increasingly annoying getting SMS notices a couple times a week only to find nothing down. The problem comes from all the includes that are there by default to help make it easier to do customizations. Here’s all the includes on each vhost of a httpd.conf

Hawk Host Testimonials

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you didn’t notice our testimonials on the front page (all three of them) are a bit slim / haven’t been updated in some time. It was never mentioned but anyone who would like to be added to the testimonials on the front page (rotation) just submit a ticket with the following details:

Website URL
Full Name
Brief testimonial

We’ll reply to your e-mail and let you know when it’s added to the main page for everyone to ogle over. Looking forward to seeing peoples testimonials!

2008 Hawk Host Coupons So Far

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m just making a quick post to go through the coupons that are currently still active as of 2008

s20percent Gets you 20% off any shared package

firstdeal2008 Gets you 35% off our advanced and super shared packages

r25percent Gets you 25% off any of our reseller packages

That’s all for now, hopefully this is helpful for some of you looking to become Hawk Host customers or those who already are and are looking to add another account.

Shared Hosting Resource Usage Tips

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We have customers from time to time be real resource hogs. We’ve found two common types of users using all the resources

Old Customers

New scripts / features installed The common issue here is users simply not researching the scripts before installing them. A good first step is to check out the scripts forums for users and see what the general consensus is in terms of resource usage. If things are good then install it on your hosting account. If it’s not great, and other users are reporting that they are getting booted from there hosts it may not be a great script in terms of CPU usage. Look for ways in improving the resource usage if possible.The next step is to make sure the script is still being developed! There is nothing worse then installing a script from 2005 then having it exploited over and over again. Or it simply being so out of date common practices to improve performance are non existent.
Testing of scripts It is never a good idea to be testing scripts in a live environment especially in a shared hosting environment. If you’re creating infinite loops, bad queries technicians are going to pick up on this. If it’s very serious you could very well see your hosting disabled. It is always best to test them off site on your computer first to make sure they’re working properly! It’s also easier to develop when it’s on your computer as well, there also will be no need to be uploading files constantly. I would recommend using XAMPP to doing your coding and testing. It is a simple interface that will install Apache, PHP4, PHP5 and MySQL5. Along with that for it’s PHP setup it installs all the common PHP modules so no worries having to modify configuration files. Once you’ve done testing on your computer, upload your files and the chances of the script causing issues are way lower as you’ve already ran it through your computer. So bad queries would probably bog your machine down and bugs causing infinite loops would probably be gone as well.

New Customers

Starbucks Monster!

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Thought his is a bit off topic I thought I would share my story with the Starbucks Monster that was created by having a cup of coffee fester on my desk for a month or so.

Occasionally I grab some expensive coffee from Starbucks when I’m on the run (just a coffee with two packets of Splenda) just to get the much needed caffeine. Well some reason I didn’t finish this coffee and set it on my desk where it was left for a month or so due to my excessive laziness. What happened next was beyond my comprehension: it appeared to have grown some sort of “Starbucky” skin! I documented my finds below:

Hawk Host Boxing Day Sale

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s our first time posting deals on our blog. These of course will be spread around the internet, however not all the coupons will be showing up on forum posts we make. All these coupons will be valid until January 2nd or until they reach their limits since obviously a 1 day boxing day sale would be way too short!

Shared Deals:

2007boxingdayshared

Advanced 12 GB Space 120 GB Bandwidth $9.95/month with coupon just $4.98/month

Happy Holidays + More

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone here at Hawk Host would like to wish everyone a Happy Holidays. Other than that here’s a nice picture :)

……..

So what’s going on other than Holidays? Well we’re now running Apache 2.2 with suPHP on both PHP4 and PHP5 which is a major step to improve performance as well as make our lives easier to manage things. It wasn’t a super smooth migration by any means as we had an issue with the PHP4 installs on one of the machines originally but that was quickly fixed.

Should we take on the elephant (PostgreSQL)?

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve never really considered supporting PostgreSQL (will be referred to as PGSQL for the remainder of this post) until recently when someone had a inquiry about why we don’t offer it. Unfortunately the only good answer we had was we haven’t seen a demand for it.

So that brings us to the point of this post: should we offer PGSQL

After looking around to try to find some of the key differences in MySQL and PGSQL and to help us decide whether we should support it or not I came across a interesting comparison sheet:

Installing Ruby on Rails on cPanel

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After my last post about Ruby on Rails we’ve gotten a view inquiries about exactly how you install Ruby on Rails through cPanel these days. So I figured a quick post with the steps required to run through the install would be great for those still running without Ruby on Rails on their cPanel servers. So here are the steps:

Login to SSH and root and run the following command: /scripts/installruby This should install Ruby, Rails, Mongrel and FastThread for you.

Ruby On Rails Support

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I thought it was time to unofficially announce that we do in fact support Ruby on Rails and have for over 3 months now without I imagine anyone really noticing. It’s not a huge language so I imagine that’s why no one has asked what is that Ruby on Rails option in cPanel or what is that Ruby Gems page either. But Ruby on Rails does have a following although not as big as PHP or Perl or anything like that there are developers working on it along with that some solid software made using it.

Hawk Host Approves Tacos

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well after having Tacos for dinner I’d like to say Hawk Host is a Taco ready web host. We approve of Taco eating and not just Tacos from places like Taco bell but home made ones as well. In fact home made ones are way better anyways so stick to those.

So if you’re looking for a web host who likes Tacos look no further than Hawk Host. We give Tacos the thumbs up

Subversion and Trac on cPanel

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well I’d just like to say we’ve started testing a cPanel plugin that will allow us to support Subversion and Trac installs right from cPanel! Yes you heard that right simple to use SVN along with awesome web hosting you just cannot go wrong. Right now it is a beta product so obviously it is not polished by any means and is not a standard feature just yet. But we’re hoping within a few months it will be standard on all our servers.

Apache 2.2.6 + PHP4 suPHP + PHP5 suPHP

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This afternoon we were forced to make an early upgrade on one of our servers to Apache 2.2.6 with the suPHP setup due to memory leak issues relating to Apache 1.3.3.9 and PHP 4.4.7 DSO.

We’ve been testing this setup on several servers that were one time production and contained some web sites on them still. So we were well aware of all problems that could crop up during this migration and had been working with cPanel to resolve any of the issues relating to building this new setup.

Bosco Hard at Work

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We recently decided to bring our backup duties in house opposed to have storage provided by someone in else in the data center. The big reason for us making this decision was just how slow our backups were becoming as a result bogging down the servers much longer than they should. So we added Bosco the 3x500GB Raid-5 server to be used as our machine to put backups on. It has thus far been up for about 2 days now and has been hard at work syncing our backups once again. So here’s the traffic for bosco over the past 24 hours over the private side of our network.

Lots of Servers Added

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well, first of all we really didn’t add a lot of servers we simply have updated our server status page. We are now listing not just our cPanel servers but all our other machines that serve various other purposes for us. We felt the need to do this as it felt like we just did not have a lot of servers which is not true at all. We unlike a lot of other hosts were not listing those secondary servers that serve lesser purposes. Right now we now have our DNS servers along with our backup server listed under our server status page. We hope to continue to add other machines to the list but for now we feel this much better reflects our size.

Zend Framework Update

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In August Cody had announced we were now offering Zend Framework as a standard php include. Well some times you forget to update things and unfortunately on one machine we had an older version of the framework running (1.0.1). Thanks to a support ticket we updated that server to the latest version (1.0.2). I’ve also just went ahead and gone through all our other servers confirming they are in fact running the latest version. So if you were having any issues using the Zend Framework they should hopefully now be resolved.

Quad Core Raid-10 Servers

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After successfully upgrading our Mercury server to raid-10 and seeing the dramatic speed increases I’ve been in the process of securing machines so we can get all our old dual Opteron machines upgraded. This time around we’re upgrading Mars to Quad CPU raid-10 configuration. Due to the fact in the background over the past few months we’ve been fixing up our internal infrastructure we’re able to upgrade servers on the fly without any noticeable down time. All our servers have the ability to use others IP’s with a quick command. This is unheard when it comes to hosts our size or even some big ones rather switch your IP and have you deal with all sorts of dns issues. This does not just apply to server upgrades either, we can move customers to other servers by request if performance is not up to par.

Better Servers Soon?

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

For the past month or so we’ve been evaluating whether it is worth it to upgrade our now very old Dual Opteron 248 based servers. We currently have one quad core CPU being used in the form of an Intel Xeon Clovertown and it has shown that it destroys our Opterons in MySQL, and web pages serving. This of course if pretty obvious when you factor in it’s 4 cpu’s vs 2 cpu’s but cheaper for us than what our opterons are costing us! Now I’m not making any promises yet (it’s on the blog which makes it not official) but we’re looking to upgrade our Dual Opteron 248’s to quad core Xeons in August or September. That isn’t even the best part about this whole situation, we also have plans of introducing a much better raid system in the form of raid-10. It should hopefully provide even better performance but it will also mean it will no longer be possible to grab instant backups we’ve generated. We’ve found that most people rather generate new ones anyways so we’d rather have a faster hard drive system.

Zend Framework

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We’re now offering support for the Zend Framework (Latest release, currently 1.0) on all machines and accounts. We will be keeping the framework updated to the latest stable release at all times.

If you’re looking to read up on what it’s all about, you can check the official website, or you can jump straight to the documentation and give it a whirl (no install needed on your part).

Some Features:

How I enabled PHP5 Soap in Just a Few Clicks

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Recently we had a customer request soap be enabled for our PHP5 configuration. At first I was thinking why isn’t it enabled in the first place there must be a good reason. It turns out there was in fact no reason not to have it enabled and it was not there due to the fact our php5 shares the same configuration as our PHP4. The problem with this is PHP4 does not contain a SOAP module so obviously was not in the configure.

How to Successfully Destroy an Update Email

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We recently sent out a mass customer email about changing our name from Devoted Host to Hawk Host. The email was great had lots of great content and explained numerous changes we had made over the past weeks or even further back. It also went on to talk about future offerings, cPanel updates and miscellaneous changes. It sounded great it was well thought out or so we thought. We forgot one of the most crucial components of this email our website address change! So for anyone viewing this post from our email our web site is at http://www.hawkhost.com/. Of course all our former domains http://www.devotedhost.net/, http://www.devotedhost.biz/ ect. still work.

Welcome

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the Hawk Host informal blog. We plan on sharing company happenings which just aren’t up to the annoucement level but you may be curious. We’ll also of course share various company story’s and some random tips that may not be hosting related but we feel like sharing! So stay tuned!