Hawk Host Blog

We’ve been listening to everyone whether it be shared customers or resellers there has been many requests for a site builder.  We have finally made a decision on the software we will be using.  So within the next week expect to see RVSiteBuilder on all servers as well as an announcement on our forums about it.  We hope this will fill the need for a site builder at Hawk Host. Read More

I’ve been reading around the internet a lot recently about PHP 5.3 and how it is going to include a lot of the features there were slated for PHP6.  I see it as an attempt to give users all the features they need because hosting providers were in no way going to upgrade to PHP6 once it was released until 6.1 came along or 6+ months later at the earliest.  This of course does not apply to Hawk Host as we had plans on running PHP6 as an option (chooseable like PHP4 and PHP5 right now) as soon as PHP6 hits a point where there aren’t releases after few seconds.  So most likely the first stable release or one of the more later release candidates. Read More

We recently installed Ruby on Rails on some other servers and double checked some of the old servers to find something very troubling.  Ruby on Rails was not actually functioning on the servers anymore and on the new machines it never worked at all! Read More

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Here at Hawk Host we use Zend Framework for various applications which right now most are not online and will not be any time soon. I cannot even reveal most of the applications because they’re simply not ready to be announced. So I’d say we make heavy use of Zend Framework and I guess the only part which we don’t is our website which currently uses a framework I made, but that may change in the future. Read More

Customers are always asking us how in the world do we respond to tickets so fast at the most random of times. Well I’ve decided to reveal that secret to the world and trust me it’ll surprise you! Our secret is Cyborgs or more specifically the ones that you see in Terminator. Read More

I felt it was time to just come out and say it. It’s time every Hawk Host customers goes PHP5 and that will happen by default starting February 1st. PHP5 includes lots of great improvements which are not compatible with PHP4 resulting in most developers currently not taking advantage of the features. As a result of this even scripts compatible with PHP5 are simply PHP4 scripts with a few fixes to make it work in both versions. As a result the new features are not being taken advantage of by developers and the blame is on hosts like us and you the web site. Read More

I constantly read about web hosts who lose a hard drive then the server is down for days because data has to be restored via backups. I shake my head every time I read about this as you know 99% of them are not running any form of raid. These hosts figure what are the chances the hard drives are going to fail? I can tell you the chances are much higher than they think and that’s a big reason why we use raid or specifically raid-10 (4 drives)and we make sure all servers the drives are hot swappable. Read More

cPanel recently made the switch to a new Apache system which improved the maintainability of the system easier however did increase the overhead quite significantly. As a result restarting say apache when you add a domain can take quite a while long enough that it may be noticeable. We were noticing this with a few random 1 minute down times each week which was becoming increasingly annoying getting SMS notices a couple times a week only to find nothing down. The problem comes from all the includes that are there by default to help make it easier to do customizations. Here’s all the includes on each vhost of a httpd.conf Read More

If you didn’t notice our testimonials on the front page (all three of them) are a bit slim / haven’t been updated in some time. It was never mentioned but anyone who would like to be added to the testimonials on the front page (rotation) just submit a ticket with the following details: Read More