Hawk Host Blog

July is finally upon us which means summer is in full swing around here.  Since it’s also July 1st that means it is Canada day but don’t worry we’re not taking the day off. So all that really changes in July is when I drive anyways I see less buses which is great.  I get to where I am going quicker and there is less traffic. Read More

Well I’m bored so I figured I’d throw up some random links people have sent me today. Read More

We have a lot of things comes down the pipe line this week which are very exciting.  The first big one is we’re moving away from our own backup system onto using R1Soft CDP solution.  What this means is we’ll be moving to at least daily backups and storing them for a week or more.  With this we’ll also now allow everyone to restore files through their cPanel (it actually logs into the CDP server the cPanel machine is using).  MySQL unfortunately not being available as an option, however we are able to do it if you file a ticket and I’m sure it’ll show up as an option within cPanel at some point in the future. Read More

Every year during the summer fires break out all over, there’s news coverage and newspapers covering the fire(s), but this one is different. It’s affecting me (and all the people who live within 100~ miles..)! It all started a few days ago when a wicked thunderstorm came during a nice sunny afternoon - it started a few fires nearby (30~ miles away). It didn’t seem like a big deal until one morning I wake up coughing and swear the house is on fire. Fortunately that wasn’t the case - it was only the sourrounding forest. Read More

First of all the title was just to catch every ones attention it’s not strictly digital point based hosts, but for the most part they are the most guilty of doing what I am going to talk about.  So it does in fact happen on other forums such as http://www.webhostingtalk.com/  but I would say at a far less frequency. Read More

We’ve had PostgreSQL feature for over 2 months now and I estimate we have just 1 customer actually making use of it.  I’m basing this off the fact one of our newer customers made a ticket about PostgreSQL being broken on one of our newer servers and sure enough it was!  Today I just checked another machine and it’s PostgreSQL was now throwing errors and not allowing people to make databases! Read More

At Hawk Host we use a combination of the standard cPanel system, but using the script BMU to handle doing our backups.  The system is setup to do a certain percentage of backups per day so over the course of 7 days it makes a complete set of backups.  This system is pretty good compared to backing up all accounts each day and having no script to make sure the loads do not get to high.  Sounds great right?  Well I decided to take a look at our bandwidth graphs for the last month and I was surprised by just how much private network based traffic we are producing each month. Read More

Here at Hawk Host we’ve noticed the art of canceling a service you’re paying for is a forgotten art.  With the introduction if Paypal as a common payment method for many services such as web hosting users are not seeing a reason to official cancel their service.  With web hosting for the host it is not worth the effort to go after the few dollars the customer owed for not canceling the service.  Paypal has provided a great service, but this is the one issue with it is the users now choose when to pay and can cancel a subscription whenever they wish. Read More

As a web host we’re expected to keep things stable, but at the same time introduce new features which means updating software.  This can be problematic as we do not actually develop any of the major software we use which means we are reliant on the developers of the software.  The majority of the developers of the software do not run these on production operations themselves which means we need to hope they introduce new features that don’t break things.  This unfortunately was not the case recently as we had two pieces of software that run on all machines break in someway. Read More

We try to keep up with the latest trends and services people want from us, but we’re careful not to jump into things too quickly. We want to offer a plethora of services - but we want to do it right and keep the quality high. Read More