Hawk Host Blog

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

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. Read More

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: Read More

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. Read More