Hawk Host Blog

This afternoon I switched some things on the Hawk Host site mostly to do with non customer facing things.  The big one was I switched the server the site runs on and the IP address as well.  This was mostly due to our site requiring more and more resources due to the amount of traffic we now receive in a daily basis.  It wasn’t too much of an issue, but our traffic has been going up for some time so I figured it was a good time to make that switch. Read More

We’ve had a few users report that yum is frozen on their VPS’s.  Usually ones running cPanel and I figured it was worth a quick post about how to solve it.  The problem is usually the rpm database has become corrupt.  It’s quite easy to fix all you need to do is run a few commands and it should hopefully fix everything up. Read More

It’s been a few days since I last posted anything on the blog so I figured I’d just post what I’m up to today. Read More

Just a quick note on the blog I’ve went ahead and updated all our servers to have Zend Framework 1.7.  It was released on the 17th but we let these things sit for at least a week in case of any unexpected bugs.  I haven’t had a chance to play around with it myself but here’s some of the new features or major changes: Read More

As I mentioned a month ago we were moving our DNS systems more in house as we now have the luxury of using multiple data centers where we host our web and VPS servers.  It only made sense for us to bring for us to bring this in house to not use as much bandwidth in syncing zones and also speed everything up quite significantly.  On Friday I had planned on migrating NS2 and syncing it up and having it become part of the cluster then announce this on the weekend.  Well I got caught up in other things so I ended up starting the syncing just a few hours ago.  I’ve now realized we’ve had a lot of domains go through our system and it’s a lot more than I had thought. Read More

Shout boxes have been an increasing headache for us the past 6 months or so.  As they continue to become more popular they continue to cause more and more problems for us.  It has come to a point now where rather than dealing with them on a case by case basis we’re just flat out not allowing them.  This situation is similar to when proxy’s were becoming popular.  We just dealt with it as sites became a problem for us, however over time it became quite clear they were all eventually going to be problems. Read More

A year ago we offered a deal where a user could sign up for $5.95/yr on a plan that was actually being sold for $5.95/month.  At the time lots of users said it was an amazing deal and we had a few hundred sign ups as a result of this deal.  At the time we expected each user would stay at least two years.  The reason we did this was to have more people talking about Hawk Host.  It worked great I might add a year later our subscriber base as easily doubled and it’s for sure to double again within six months. Read More

Like every web host we have customers who do not cancel their hosting and simply do not pay.  In some cases they just forget about their site altogether and as a result their users see a suspended page.  For the longest time we just left up a generic cPanel suspension page for our shared hosting customers.  As time as past I thought to myself why don’t we take advantage of this.  The majority of the customers suspended will not be coming back.  We leave sites suspended for up to a month before we terminate them so we need to get something out of that.  So I figured it was time we do it and we threw up a suspended page that resembles our site and also links a support contact page.  Since we put it up it’s brought us numerous new visitors who would not have heard of us if it was not for that suspended page.  The suspended page has also probably resulted in some sign ups as well.  I now understand why lots of hosts are now putting ad’s on their suspended pages due to just the sheer amount of traffic it does generate. Read More

I ordered computers parts last week to upgrade from my aging dual core opteron 165 with 2gb ram to a quad core with 4gb ram.  Well after it taking me from Wednesday to Friday to build the machine it’s finally up and running and has all my programs once again installed.  I probably overspent or made really bad decisions on the best bang for the buck parts but this new machine was an out of the blue build out of necessity.  The week before my former computer’s raid array degraded and refused to rebuild.  It was also now blue screening frequently which made me not feel to confident in it long term.  The obvious solution was to format the machine but I figured it was an excellent excuse to build a new machine.  This now also gives me a machine that can be used to do a lot of testing.  So I’ll probably load my old opteron 165 up with windows server and have it handle a bunch of virtual machines for testing purposes. Read More

Recently its been brought to our attention that not everyone knows how we handle server updates (planned maintenance, emergencies, etc) and as a result they’re noticing brief chunks of downtime with no explanation. Read More