Hawk Host Blog

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

Here at Hawk Host we support (and use in-house) Zend Framework on all of our servers and the response has been amazing. I was a bit curious what other PHP Frameworks were available so I went searching and made a little list. The point of this post is to give people some frameworks they can use here at Hawk Host, and if there’s enough demand we may start supporting certain ones. Read More

Here at HawkHost we take security very seriously. In light of the Nation Threat Advisory (Elevated) we’ve hired some new staff to not only harden our machines, but to protect them physically in case someone attempts to fiddle with the hardware. Read More

My Ipod was eventually going to break at some point as it was I believe a 3rd generation Ipod and I think it’s over 5 years old now but I could be wrong. It had issues with locking up randomly for close to 2 years now and I had not thought much of it since the original warranty and the store warranty ran out a long time ago. The freezing issues of course could be solved with a simple reset of the Ipod which I was getting quite good at I might add. Read More