Hawk Host Blog

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

There is a new release of WordPress that fixes a issue that allows an attacker to reset the first account in the database (usually the admin account). It doesn’t allow remote access, though can be fairly obnoxious. Read More

If you missed it on Friday Zend Framework 1.9 was released which as always contains new features and bug fixes.  I’d say the biggest thing would be the support for PHP 5.3 which was released last month.  We have no plans on supporting it any time soon on our servers but it’s nice to see support for it in Zend Framework which is a popular framework used on our servers.  It also of course maintains compatibility with PHP 5.2.4 and up so you can use it at Hawk Host.  We’ve already been working on upgrade all our PHP scripts that use ZF to 1.9 so we get all the fixes and new features. Read More

A lot of users look to run Apache’s mpm_worker rather than the prefork mpm as it’s regarded to be much more efficient than the perfork mpm.  Add in FastCGI rather than mod_php and it’s a great combination of stability as well as performance.  Unfortunately there is one issue with running this on OpenVZ and that is the stack size.  Even the modest VPS with very little traffic will end up using it’s allowed memory as well as it’s burst memory.  Many suggest just not running mpm_worker with OpenVZ but this is not the best solution.  The problem has to do with the default thread stack size of 8MB which with OpenVZ becomes real memory rather than simply virtual that will not actually be used by the system unless necessary.  There are several easy fixes for this: Read More

Bosco our current CDP server has been a little slow as of late and we anticipated this day would come we’re just surprised we’re already there.  We have an agreement in place to have it replaced with a new system within the next few weeks.  At this time we’re currently awaiting the availability of a 2U chassis that can handle the twelve 1TB drives we will be putting into the machine.  The current machine is a four 1TB drives in raid-5 which was great when we originally had it deployed but we’ve doubled the number of machines we have.  The new system will be using the twelve 1TB drives in a raid-10 to provide the write and read performance.  This upgrade should mean much quicker backups and restores as well as extra space to handle double the number of machines we currently have. Read More

Over the past six months we’ve grown quite a bit, and as a result we want feedback from current (and prospective) customers regarding our services. Since we’ve grown significantly we would like to hear from you guys to let us know if you think we’ve been able to maintain the quality service we strive for. It’s a slippery slope when a company grows quickly and as a result some companies let that get in the way of the service - we don’t want this to happen. Read More

Wordpress 2.8.1 was released yesterday and looks like the major reason for upgrading in this case is a new exploit that from my quick reading could be potentially dangerous.  You can find the exploit details here.  Other than that just a standard set of fixes: Read More

We’ve been a softlayer customer for a long time and we have quite a few machines with them at this point and we have people once in a while asking how in the world do we do what we do at softlayer.  Some examples are routing our IP’s on a VLAN and having ranges on various machines and quickly routing them across different servers.  Another common one is how do we route private network IP’s to our VPS plans giving a user the potential to use say NAS.   I’m going to quickly go through them for anyone curious Read More