Hawk Host Blog

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. Read More

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Litespeed the installation information and tutorials as far as setting it up in a cPanel environment have become really out of date.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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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! Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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: Read More