Hawk Host Blog

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

With Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 released I figured it was time to talk about CentOS 5.3 which is an almost identical copy to RHEL.  As always Hawk Host runs the latest and greatest so CentOS 5.3 will be showing up on our servers once it’s available.  For the most part like any upgrade it’s seamless no one notices as package updates don’t mean any reboots or down time.  This is one thing worth noting though and that’s a new kernel!  So within the next month there are going to be maintenance notices for every machine to have a 5-10 minute down time in order to reboot the machine.  So that’s means users making tickets during the reboots as they fail to keep up with maintenance notices.  Even if we sent emails about this sort of maintenance notice we’d have complaints that this is unacceptable or they do not want maintenance notices at all.  Those are the few that do read them as most do not after our experience with the reseller name server IP change where a large amount of resellers did not bother to change IP’s until their sites went down. Read More

Albeit most people likely didn’t notice - I’ve been MIA for the past couple of months. The reason behind it is my fiance and I moved to New York (from California) - in a Jeep pulling a 12x6 trailer. Read More

For the past two weeks or so we’ve been upgrading all servers to Xeon 5000 series CPU’s, CentOS 5 and 64 bit.  This is finally completed and all our servers are up to the same hardware specifications.  One machine is not 64bit but it was already running high end hardware so we felt it wasn’t a necessary switch.  So this was all completed late last week which meant my 16 hour days were over and I had to no longer worry about migrating accounts.  Being the control freak that I am I made it my duty to complete this all as I had done this before.  Along with that our LiteSpeed setup has drastically improved in terms of compatibility and speed. We’ve worked with them to solve problems we encountered with compatibility.  We have also made tweaks to the setup to improve performance compared to the original deployment of LiteSpeed.  The improvements were nothing to major but in some odd cases it might improve things.  A real learning as you go situation which is always the case with software.  Even to this day every single cPanel trick isn’t known and once in a while a new thing is figured out. Read More