Hawk Host Blog

There was a time when at Hawk Host well I guess it was probably Devoted Host I knew exactly who every single one of our customers were.  xyz.com oh that’s John from New York and abc.com that’s Jenny from California.  As I was working on migrating Saturn to the new hardware I kept seeing all these accounts and I had no idea who they were.  After a while I decided to look the sites up and sure enough they were customers of ours and were paying I simply never encountered them or I don’t remember.  To be fair to myself a lot of these users have never made a single sales, billing or support ticket so I would have to remember them purely off if I set their account up or not. Read More

I cannot believe it’s already October it seems like just a while ago I was talking about how it was January 2009.  There are a lot of exciting things going on in Hawk Host land some of it being related to our corporate identity Hawk Host Inc. as well as our hosting division Hawk Host.  Unfortunately some things I cannot talk about at this point we’re keeping those tight lip right now but it is exciting for us.  So I’ll just go through some of the things I can talk about: Read More

When people are looking for a wordpress theme they very rarely are looking at the performance of it.  The person is looking at how pretty the design is and if it fits their site.  There is however a lot more to it then simple the design of the wordpress.  A wordpress theme can add a lot of extra CPU and memory usage depending on how it’s designed. Read More

This is a short rant regarding emergency maintenance. Typically the only time there is unscheduled downtime (or very abruptly scheduled downtime) is because the issue is urgent for one reason or another. For the most part there are only two to three reasons why we may pull a machine offline abruptly: Read More

Using 64bit is really common now in fact most hosts are using this on their newer systems due to using more than 4GB of memory.  On cPanel there is a common problem that crops up with errors showing up after a while in WHM for resellers after there is quite a few accounts on the server.  cPanel sets the memory limit relatively low and on 64bit systems int’s and such are using more memory due to the 64bit system.  cPanel added a feature which allows you to set a maximum amount of memory used by a cPanel process before it is killed.  As a result in 64bit systems they’re more frequently hitting the modest 256MB limit while 32bit systems do not run into this issue as often.  The reseller user will receive the following error when adding a package: Read More

At Hawk Host we deal with CPU usage issues with accounts like every other host out there.  I’ve noticed an ever growing pattern of the problems always coming from Wordpress blogs and almost always they have no caching what so ever.  When a web page is served without any caching in wordpress it will load up PHP then grab the data via MySQL.  These are both the slowest and most intensive portions of a web page.  The images, css files ect. are all served nearly instantly by the web server and it can serve a lot more of these static files per second then PHP pages. Read More

I’m sure lots of our customers wonder why do we do hardware upgrades once a year or at least every two years.  With the migration of our Skyline server to new hardware I figured it was a good time to explain why we do it and also how we do it with minimal service impact. Read More

The catch all email was a great thing back in the day it was neat you could retrieve mail for [email protected] [email protected] ect. ect. all through one simple email address.  A lot of users used it without issue and it solved having to check various emails they could just tell users to email random addresses and it would arrive at it’s spot.  Fast forward to now and the large amounts of mail received by pretty much any domain on the internet and this once cool feature is now a major headache for us as well as any other hosting provider. Read More

The day started out like every other one with me waking up and starting my walk to the computer while half asleep.  I used to go shower and such like I was going to an office but after a while I figured it be best if I walk to the home office in my boxers to see what happened while I was gone.  I check out our support system just a few tickets but nothing that required my attention.  I checked my email and not a whole lot of mail just a bunch of orders in and the usual log of all the credit cards charges from our batch run.  It was looking like a great day not to busy some orders to check out but other than that great. Read More

The foreign transaction fee has come up a bit in the past year and I figured I’d rant about how ridiculous this fee is.  We’re a Canadian corporation and as such we have a Canadian merchant account.  For the most part we never run into issues with this and no extra fee’s for our users or anything of that nature.  There is however a few select banks in the United States who have now decided to charge their customers a 3% fee and call it a foreign transaction fee.  The best part about this fee is it shows up as if we charged it in a lot of cases when it has nothing to do with us.  This makes us look pretty bad to the few customers we have who’s banks have decided to add fee’s other banks are not adding.  Some users have suggested to us why not get a merchant account in the United States.  There are several reasons the first being we’re not incorporated in the Unites States making such a task a very difficult and if we did it would become a very costly one for us.  The second part is it’s not just the United States who get these fee’s we’ve heard users in the UK get charged a foreign transaction fee when purchasing items from Canada and the United States.  So we’d probably need a merchant account in every single country for our customers to avoid such a fee being charged by a select few banks in each country. Read More