Hawk Host Blog

It’s been a very slow week for me anyways with regards to exciting news that involves Hawk Host.  I doubt anyone wants to hear about how I’ve spent the week going through our books and getting our accounting up to date.  I sort of left it for several months which was a very bad idea so I got it up to date.  So procrastination is bad remember that always best to keep ahead of things. Read More

You would be surprised at how often this gets brought up to our pre-sales / general inquiries - people are very concerned whether our company (or other prospects) are “going anywhere”. By this I can only assume they mean financially / going poof overnight leaving them stranded while taking their money. While I don’t blame them for asking, it makes me wonder why they would take the words from our mouth at face value (see below for more clarification). Read More

It’s been an exciting week here at Hawk Host with the launch of our new site, various new features coming around the corner, exciting new customers and other projects now coming into full swing. Read More

This is just a quick rant regarding people who insist on relying on RAID as their sole backup solution. Read More

Most modern Linux distributions have the default scheduler as CFG for all block devices but we’ve found for us and from our reading many other web hosts are finding this to not be the best scheduler.  There are several schedulers available which you can read about here: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/schedulers/ .  The one we’re using now and have for a little bit has been the deadline scheduler.  It is also the choice of many web hosts trying to squeeze every little bit of performance out of their servers.  It is actually very easy to determine the scheduler you’re running as well as change it on the fly to see if the changes make a difference. Read More

We’ve finally decided to break down and setup a Twitter account for Hawk Host. Why? Well actually for several reasons! Besides allowing us to integrate with the new website to add a splash of “freshness” - it will allow you to keep up-to-date with recent happenings here at Hawk Host. Like what you might ask? Read More

It’s that time again for another wordpress release which in this case is just a maintenance release.  By the looks of things 2.7.1 does not include any major security fixes and primarly just for various bugs discovered in 2.7.  The upgrade process is pretty easy it’ll say at the top of your blog there is a new version available.  You click that then there is a 1 click upgrade script which means no dealing with uploading files and visiting pages.  It can all be done through just the one click which to me is new I’ve never used it before so I’m not sure which version this showed up in.  For more information check out their post about it: WordPress 2.7.1 .  As for things on our end with this I’m sure Fantastico will be updated to upgrade to this version soon but it’s just as easy to upgrade yourself.  Happy upgrading! Read More

Zend Framework 1.7.4 was released on Monday and all our servers have once again been updated to have the latest version included in the library folder for php.  Not a whole lot to talk about here it’s a maintenance release to fix a few bugs.   Here’s a list of what was fixed in this version: Read More

The LiteSpeed 4.0 RC1 has been released which if things go as planned when we switched no one even noticed us switching to it.  Since we’ve started using LiteSpeed we’ve been using the 4.0 Beta’s as it had support for SSI which meant no dealing with Apache at all.  I personally reported numerous bugs to them and investigated all sorts of oddities with things so we could have a very stable web server with SSI support.  So we’re to that point and I received a mention on their forum about the RC1 release: http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/showthread.php?t=2677 .  I should not receive all the credit though it’s all our customers with their various usage patterns which helped find all these bugs.  I thought it was worth posting about real quick but other than that no real news.  The new site is being worked on and should be up in a few weeks hopefully. Read More

For the past few days I’ve been playing around with eAccelerator on one of our hosting machines.  Sounds pretty bad, but it’s completely controlled and I was quite confident it would run just fine.  It is running just fine and has been for a few days and overall it’s made a tiny difference in overall load but not to much.   The reason for this is the machine is not having issues with PHP serving but something else.  But the caching of compiled PHP scripts still reduces CPU usage a bit and speeds up how quickly PHP pages load so it’s still worth it. Read More