Hawk Host Blog

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More