Hawk Host Blog

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

As Dr. House likes to say it’s never Lupus I like to say It’s never Litespeed.  We get support tickets all the time about how it worked in Apache it must be a Litespeed issue but it never seems to be that case.  Although users are convinced it always is until we take a quick look at the page or account and instantly know it had nothing to do with Litespeed. Read More

It’s been a few weeks and the upgrades continue for all our servers with some surprises along the way.  As of this post we’ve now upgraded 4 servers with 3 of them being cPanel servers as well as one VPS node.  Here’s a quick break down of the big change after the upgrades for some of the machines after the upgrades pulled right from our Munin system: Read More

The last week of September we noticed something strange that hasn’t been an issue in some time we were unable to keep up with the support demands.  September was our best month ever in terms of growth and as a result we were seeing a lot of support inquiries from new users.  We had a lot of questions just about various portions of our hosting but also had a lot of account restores from previous hosts.  Restoring an account can be a time consuming thing to do depending on the size of the account and the speed of the other hosts.  So our response times were becoming slower to general inquiries as well as our restores taking much longer than they had in the past during certain times of the day. Read More