Hawk Host Blog

PHP released the first release candidate for PHP 5.3 which means it’s only a matter of time and that will be the latest release of PHP.  It’s going to be interesting for us as PHP 5.3 adds features and could potentially break things.  There are several extensions that have been moved to PECL which will mean potentially cPanel’s PHP compile system will be broken for a period of time.   Some of them are replaced by others which are I assume more supported than their predecessors but it still could break things for users who are using the functions.  Then there are changes of handling of deprecated functions which could mean errors for some users.   I could see us being a month or two behind on this PHP release as there are just a lot of variables besides PHP itself.  Like I said cPanel is one end but also LiteSpeed and it’s support for 5.3 with it’s specialized SAPI (how it communicates with PHP).  We also have things like Ioncube and Zend optimizer which should work but you never know.  So we’ll end up allowing others to be the guinea pigs on this one and we’ll wait until things seems to be all ironed out.  Here’s a run down of the changes: Read More

It’s been a little over a month since we’ve actively been on Twitter (twitting, tweeting, and possibly twatting) and over that time period I’ve learned several things about how Twitter works and how people utilize it. Here are my observations: Read More

We’ve added Git to all of our servers for people to use. Git is a VCS (version control system) that’s similar to Subversion but addresses several shortcomings of todays popular VCS’ (CVS, Subversion, etc). If you’re interested in utilizing Git you will need to request SSH access simply by submitting a ticket on our support center. Read More

**WARNING** The formatting on this post is lackluster - once again who am I to fight against the ways of WordPress? Hopefully the point / useful information gets across. I haven’t checked the spelling in this post either - so don’t kill me if you find a typo. Read More

On our new site we have a phone number displayed on each page as well as on our contact pages we have the extension of each department listed.  Even with this we have not seen much of an increase in the frequency of calls which is a good thing.  It may just be our target market who do not feel comfortable calling or just people who buy web hosting find making a support ticket far easier. Read More

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