Hawk Host Blog

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

Update:  This post is no longer accurate

This post previously discussed our evaluations of using out sourced support during high growth periods.  We have since expanded significantly since then and utilize our own in house team.  Anyone responding to tickets works exclusively with Hawk Host customers. Read More

As you may have noticed there hasn’t been many posts as of recently and this is due to the fact things just are not progressing as planned.  This does not have to do with development difficulties but the fact things here at Hawk Host have been extremely busy.  In the past six months our subscriber base has doubled with each month us having more sign ups than the previous month.  This has caused things to be a little hectic to say the least with constant expansion (many new servers added) and having to deal with the increased support load and having to come up with a solution to that.  With myself handling the majority of the development of the panel having all these things going on has resulted in some days where unfortunately I’m busy making calls, dealing with suppliers or just working with customers.  Obviously with myself being a huge part and with the rest of our team mostly assisting with testing this can slow down development a lot even in testing with such a huge amount of growth we’re seeing.  My hopes are to have this all solved by the latest July as I’m in the last portion of getting it all straightened out.  This means a much more focused development effort and less other things getting in the way. Read More

The one thing we lack in our development effort is someone who can draw things.  I personally am very good at drawing stick men but that is where my artistic skills end.  The problem with finding someone is they are either just cookie cuter web site design or they want insane fee’s for something that is very simple.  We’re looking for someone is reasonable priced and knows what they’re doing.  So this means knowing html, css and being able to make a nice interface that is also intuitive.  In the past when we tried to bring in someone to do some basic HTML, CSS and images for some applications we were building they wanted to charge $1000 per page which as much I’d love to believe we have that kind of money to spend we do not.  I’m still going to give it a try before I produce one of my amazing interfaces with colors that do not match and images created in paint Read More

A lot of the panels out there advertise support for a specific platform for example OpenVZ or Xen.  We’re taking a different approach where in theory our system could handle any platform assuming there is a driver built for it on our system and all the relevant data in the database.  This would mean the variables available to that platform are within the database and an actual entry for that platform exists so a machine can be set to that platform.  So here’s how it all breaks down: Read More

Yesterday was not the success we were hoping for with development.  Things were very hectic in Hawk Host last yesterday and with us not having a full team of developers this sort of thing causes delays in any development processes.  What was completed yesterday was the operating system handling system which I had talked about yesterday.  Besides that we were discussing the best options on how to approach the safety of the slave servers. Read More

It’s that time again a new version of wordpress is out as an official stable release which means time to upgrade.  Of course as of recent versions you can upgrade with just a simple click within the wordpress admin making it a quick and easy upgrade.  With that being said never risk having the upgrade not go right so make sure to backup your files and database before upgrading. Read More

Every single day I learn something new and yesterday we no different with the development.  It was pretty tiny though but it did provide some confusion for a little bit and it was with Zend Framework.  The way we develop anything with the Vezoz in the front uses models obviously but also Zend_Db_Select to construct any query that needs to be created.  So rather than doing something like this: Read More