Hawk Host Blog

After my last post about Ruby on Rails we’ve gotten a view inquiries about exactly how you install Ruby on Rails through cPanel these days. So I figured a quick post with the steps required to run through the install would be great for those still running without Ruby on Rails on their cPanel servers. So here are the steps: Read More

I thought it was time to unofficially announce that we do in fact support Ruby on Rails and have for over 3 months now without I imagine anyone really noticing.  It’s not a huge language so I imagine that’s why no one has asked what is that Ruby on Rails option in cPanel or what is that Ruby Gems page either.  But Ruby on Rails does have a following although not as big as PHP or Perl or anything like that there are developers working on it along with that some solid software made using it. Read More

Well after having Tacos for dinner I’d like to say Hawk Host is a Taco ready web host. We approve of Taco eating and not just Tacos from places like Taco bell but home made ones as well. In fact home made ones are way better anyways so stick to those. Read More

Well I’d just like to say we’ve started testing a cPanel plugin that will allow us to support Subversion and Trac installs right from cPanel!  Yes you heard that right simple to use SVN along with awesome web hosting you just cannot go wrong.  Right now it is a beta product so obviously it is not polished by any means and is not a standard feature just yet.  But we’re hoping within a few months it will be standard on all our servers. Read More

This afternoon we were forced to make an early upgrade on one of our servers to Apache 2.2.6 with the suPHP setup due to memory leak issues relating to Apache 1.3.3.9 and PHP 4.4.7 DSO. Read More

We recently decided to bring our backup duties in house opposed to have storage provided by someone in else in the data center. The big reason for us making this decision was just how slow our backups were becoming as a result bogging down the servers much longer than they should. So we added Bosco the 3x500GB Raid-5 server to be used as our machine to put backups on. It has thus far been up for about 2 days now and has been hard at work syncing our backups once again. So here’s the traffic for bosco over the past 24 hours over the private side of our network. Read More

Well, first of all we really didn’t add a lot of servers we simply have updated our server status page. We are now listing not just our cPanel servers but all our other machines that serve various other purposes for us. We felt the need to do this as it felt like we just did not have a lot of servers which is not true at all. We unlike a lot of other hosts were not listing those secondary servers that serve lesser purposes. Right now we now have our DNS servers along with our backup server listed under our server status page. We hope to continue to add other machines to the list but for now we feel this much better reflects our size. Read More

In August Cody had announced we were now offering Zend Framework as a standard php include. Well some times you forget to update things and unfortunately on one machine we had an older version of the framework running (1.0.1). Thanks to a support ticket we updated that server to the latest version (1.0.2). I’ve also just went ahead and gone through all our other servers confirming they are in fact running the latest version. So if you were having any issues using the Zend Framework they should hopefully now be resolved. Read More

After successfully upgrading our Mercury server to raid-10 and seeing the dramatic speed increases I’ve been in the process of securing machines so we can get all our old dual Opteron machines upgraded.  This time around we’re upgrading Mars to Quad CPU raid-10 configuration.  Due to the fact in the background over the past few months we’ve been fixing up our internal infrastructure we’re able to upgrade servers on the fly without any noticeable down time.  All our servers have the ability to use others IP’s with a quick command.  This is unheard when it comes to hosts our size or even some big ones rather switch your IP and have you deal with all sorts of dns issues.  This does not just apply to server upgrades either, we can move customers to other servers by request if performance is not up to par. Read More

For the past month or so we’ve been evaluating whether it is worth it to upgrade our now very old Dual Opteron 248 based servers.  We currently have one quad core CPU being used in the form of an Intel Xeon Clovertown and it has shown that it destroys our Opterons in MySQL, and web pages serving.  This of course if pretty obvious when you factor in it’s 4 cpu’s vs 2 cpu’s but cheaper for us than what our opterons are costing us!  Now I’m not making any promises yet (it’s on the blog which makes it not official) but we’re looking to upgrade our Dual Opteron 248’s to quad core Xeons in August or September.  That isn’t even the best part about this whole situation, we also have plans of introducing a much better raid system in the form of raid-10.  It should hopefully provide even better performance but it will also mean it will no longer be possible to grab instant backups we’ve generated.  We’ve found that most people rather generate new ones anyways so we’d rather have a faster hard drive system. Read More