Hawk Host Blog

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

It has started we are once again having to actually add new machines.  The last four months rather than adding new machines to deal with growing number of users we decided to do a mass hardware refresh.  We went from four CPU systems with 4GB ram and slow 250GB 7.2K RPM SATA drives to eight CPU systems with 12GB ram and fast 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives.  When we were doing this it obviously added capacity making it unnecessary to continue to add machines to deal with the growing number of users.  Well that time has ended as Seattle needed a second machine to deal with the growing demand there.  It’s the first of many of new machines at our new specifications. Read More

For the past few months I’ve been going nuts every time my computer boots up or even at how slow loading programs and everything else were becoming.  With the more developing I was doing it was becoming pretty frustrating dealing with this it was actually slowing down my productivity.  I finally said enough is enough I’m going to purchase a SSD as I’ve heard nothing but great things for solving the exact issues I was having. Read More

I cannot believe it but it’s 2010 already and I figured it was a good time to update our blog.  The updates have been pretty scarce during the holiday season for obvious reasons.  So I hope all our customers had a great holiday season like we did! Read More

A couple of days ago I needed a way to see how a particular client was interacting with a server. Obviously there are numerous ways to do this, but I was curious how easy it would be to implement something similar with a quick netcat command. Sure enough after a little bit of fiddling I was able to produce exactly what he needed. Read More

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