Hawk Host Blog

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 . Read More

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. Read More

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: Read More

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. Read More

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: Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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: Read More

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. Read More

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: Read More