Hawk Host Blog

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

As Magento software gets more popular, we’re increasingly running into people who are experiencing errors with our setup. A majority of these are addon issues from Magento Connect and have been addressed via their forums / knowledge base - though we’ve had one that took us a moment to figure out. Read More

PHP 5.3 was released on June 30th and everything is already asking when is Hawk Host going to have it on our servers!  Well this is unfortunately going to take some time until it shows up on our servers is it is a major release that does have some deprecated features users may be using.  It also has some changes to functions and of the core of PHP itself and we just don’t know how well it’ll play with various open source, commercial and custom PHP scripts users make use of it.  So as it stands I estimate at the earliest August it’ll be on our servers but it may actually be more like September.  This comes down to knowing all PHP scripts work fine as well as cPanel having support for it and litespeed.  Right now we’re actually waiting on cPanel to fully support 5.2.10 which we could install ourselves but best to let others deal with the issues and we’ll just run things when all the issues are figured out. Read More

I cannot believe it but we’re now into July it feels like just yesterday June was starting time sure does fly by.  Things have been great due to the fantastic growth we’ve seen over the month smashing our old record for number of new accounts in a month (old one was set in May 2009).  As a result of this things have been busy as we work on adding capacity such as adding a new VPS node Marlin and most recently a new web server Venus (was an old server name but we want all planets used for names).  We’ve done a lot more than just add capacity though we’ve been working on various things. Read More