Hawk Host Blog

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: Read More

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: Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More