We added Softaculous recently as we were becoming more frustrated by the lack of updates to Fantastico.  To go along with Fantastico’s lack of scripts it was months behind in some cases on versions of scripts which is unacceptable when dealing with exploits.  It appears the only thing Fantastico really has going for it these days is it’s name as we still have customers using it over Softaculous even though Fantastico might even be installing an older version of a script.  So it’s definitely not something we’re removing as a feature as it stands on it’s brand and if we did remove it we’d be losing customers.  So just how great has Softaculous been over the first week of us using it?  Well here’s a summary of all the script updates we’ve seen:

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The web hosting season is a long a hard one in fact the season really does not end we’re here 365 days a year.  So there are bound to be some injuries some of which could put staff out 6-8 weeks others are just nagging injuries that can last weeks or months.  We’ve been relatively healthy this year with nothing to take out anyone for any long amount of time.  Recently we have been hit by the injury bug in the form of nagging injuries that we just play through.

I currently have a sort wrist from all the programming and working mega hours I’ve been doing lately.  Sitting there programming and next thing I know I haven’t got up in 4+ hours. That’s recipe for a sort wrist or even a sore elbow or shoulder depending on the day.  I lead by example though and I cannot opt for time off or rest I’m the leader of the team.  I’m like Kobe I’m not opting for rest or surgery when I can continue to play through the pain.

Cody in an attempt to fix his posture opted for a new way of sitting but it has resulted in a sore back.  In the long term this change will help him but for the short term it has created a nagging injury.  Following my lead he is playing through the pain realizing the team needs him for our playoff push (Frog Host).  He continues to receive treatment in order to play through this and we command him on his dedication to the team.

Brian has the most serious injury right now on staff.  He opted to grow a beard to improve his game but it has come at a cost.  His beard is now becoming problematic with that extra facial hair.  He has developed a problem of food in the beard which if left untreated could develop into something that could affect him long term.  He’s not going to give up his beard without a fight though and has opted for the time consuming work of cleaning it every day.  He’s inspiring everyone else the most with his resilience to play through such an injury.  Next time you run into him on chat or in a support ticket make sure to tell him you’re supporting the team.

We realize we’re a playoff team and this regular hosting season is just a tuneup for the serious stuff.  You need to still play though which means while grueling and sometimes painful we’re there every day putting the work to make Hawk Host a success.

So if you have not realized yet just a joke post : -) My wrist is a little sore from aggravating an existing injury from playing sports by working to much lately.  Cody really does have a sore back because he wants to improve his posture. Brian does indeed have a beard and look like a caveman although he doesn’t have problems with getting food in it.  I just thought it be fun to post about something totally random and with no helpful information.  I hope you enjoyed reading it : -)

It has started we are once again having to actually add new machines.  The last four months rather than adding new machines to deal with growing number of users we decided to do a mass hardware refresh.  We went from four CPU systems with 4GB ram and slow 250GB 7.2K RPM SATA drives to eight CPU systems with 12GB ram and fast 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives.  When we were doing this it obviously added capacity making it unnecessary to continue to add machines to deal with the growing number of users.  Well that time has ended as Seattle needed a second machine to deal with the growing demand there.  It’s the first of many of new machines at our new specifications.

For everyone asking when are new machines coming well the answer is now with the one in Seattle now being up.  That’s only one machine obviously but with growing demand in every location and seemingly every month breaking our previous months sales record it’s really only a matter of time.  So do not be surprised to see new Dallas and Washington DC machines as well but not yet.  We’re all about spending money properly and acquiring machines for the sake of acquiring them is reckless spending.  We try to be as smart spending as possible so we’re not buying machines when we have room.  There is no point in paying for a bunch of machines that are losing money for the sake of saying yes we have x amount of machines.  Instead we rather keep that money that would have been spent on that useless machine and invest it where it can actually be used.

There are various ways funds can be used that either help us grow or just enhance our services.  For example we could spend that money advertising our services more around the internet.  It does not directly affect our users but the more customers we have the better deals we get for things we have to buy such as licenses.  So other ways to spend it though are things like having new software on our servers.  So possibly new plugins to cPanel or outside software that is used internally to help manage servers or just the company in general.  Finally another obvious one is staff that money could instead be used to beef up our staff so having more people available all the time to deal with support.

Anyways just to spice this post up a bit more I’ll talk about some differences in the Phantom server.  First of all it’s running cPanel 11.25 as we have no choice since it’s now the official RELEASE version although on current machines we’re still holding off due to bugs people are encountering.  We do not anticipate these bugs cause any serious issues on a brand new machine.  The other interesting change is it’s our first machine running MySQL 5.1 which eventually all our servers will probably be running.  As for when we’re not quite sure as of yet sorry.

Quickly here’s what an empty server looks like as far as graphs go:

You can see where I ran unix bench on it again to see what it would score.  It scored very well that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

It’s the same as the CPU usage case you can see the unix bench run as well as looks like the initial R1Soft seed.

Not a whole lot to talk about here we’re using nearly no memory since no one is hosted on it yet.  I’m sure that’ll go up to the 6gb used when it’s full.

That’s about all I have to talk about right now hopefully will have some exciting new features to talk about next time.

For the past few months I’ve been going nuts every time my computer boots up or even at how slow loading programs and everything else were becoming.  With the more developing I was doing it was becoming pretty frustrating dealing with this it was actually slowing down my productivity.  I finally said enough is enough I’m going to purchase a SSD as I’ve heard nothing but great things for solving the exact issues I was having.

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I cannot believe it but it’s 2010 already and I figured it was a good time to update our blog.  The updates have been pretty scarce during the holiday season for obvious reasons.  So I hope all our customers had a great holiday season like we did!

We accomplished a lot in 2009 it’s tough to pick out just one thing that we did so here’s just a quick refresher.  We’ve seen expontential growth in 2009 as more and more customers recommend us.  As a result of this we added quite a few new servers in 2009.  It probably would have been even more servers but we also upgraded every single cPanel server to 12GB of ram.  All machines also now run 10K RPM drives at a minimum with most of our machines running 15K RPM SAS drives.  With the growth we also beefed up our backup server switching it from a tiny 4 drive system to a 12 drive system.  It helped us deal with the growing space demands as well as improve performance of our CDP server with backing up servers as well as restoring files.  Probably the most important thing during the year was our growth in the number of employees.  We went from a tiny 3 person team up to 7 people due to the amount of growth we’ve had.  Our support has not slowed down during our growth which is something a lot of providers struggle with.  We saw it coming and were working towards a solution before things got to a point where it would be very difficult to fix it.  I think that covers a lot of the key points during 2009 but if you look back at the blog posts in 2009 I’m sure you’ll find things I missed.

Now that 2009 is out of the day I can finally address what is happening in 2010.  It’s looking to be a big year for Hawk Host Inc. based on our current road map of things.

New Brand

By the end of this month hopefully we will be launching our 2nd hosting brand.  The second brand is Frog Host which naturally continues with our animal name theme we have going.  Frog Host is a mass market hosting which has a much more expensive entry in comparison to Hawk Host.  It’s an unlimited hosting brand but do not worry if you’re a Hawk Host customer or a prospective one nothing is going to change on the Hawk Host side.  Frog Host will be using it’s own servers for web, dns and such.  About the only thing in terms of infrastructure it will share is our backup infrastructure which is not a bad thing.  We can add more CDP servers as necessary so it’s not going to affect anything on the backup front.  The reason we’re doing Frog Host is because we understand we’re losing out on a big market.  We constantly lose customers to unlimited brands as well as lose potential customers as well.  We were not losing these people due to our level of service it was all because of the lack of care free unlimited offering.  Frog Host will be using features developed by us to hopefully help deal with some complaints of unlimited offerings.  We will be giving users access to CPU usage of their account (PHP and MySQL) as well as things like inodes and possibly even other things as we expand on it.

So as I said nothing to worry about on the Hawk Host end nothing is going to change for the worse or anything of that nature.  We’re still going to continue to offer what we do and still have the same quality service we always have had.  If we had not talked about Frog Host at all then no one would even know because nothing is going to change as I said.  This second brand might even make the experience even better with our increased buying power as well as possible features from Frog Host coming over to Hawk Host at some point (I’m thinking the CPU stats).

Web Site Migration

We are in the process of migrating our site as well as our support area, billing, blog and forums. to a new web server.  The reason for this is we wish to have our site not being affected by any other type of outages our other servers have.  Now we cannot guarantee every outage but now the only thing that should make our site be down as well as a large number of our servers is if there is a complete outage in Dallas. We are no longer on the same network switches or routers of any of our other servers.  If you’re wondering why not just go completely offsite?  The reason is customers gage our speeds and uptime based off of our site so it being somewhere else could be costly.  Along with the web site being migrated we’ve updated our CMS code for our site to make updates in the future easier.

Internal System

We’ve been hard at work at revising our internal system.  It should be ready to go before the Frog Host launch which means more information readily available to technicians.  It’ll be much easier for us to keep track of things like IP addresses for example of users.  It will also allow technicians to quickly see stats from our servers, as well as pending issues and things of that nature.  It’s just a start though eventually it’ll be a very comprehensive system but right now it’s just a matter of having the infrastructure in place to do it.  Then once that’s done switch over tools that are specific to a server and have them be in our centralized system.

Misc Projects

We have various miscellaneous projects as well going on right now as well as some that have been completed.  For example we’re now using puppet to handle manging our servers opposed to cfengine.  Does not mean a whole lot to our users but it’ll make it much easier for us to manage our servers.  We’ve also been working on evaluating our security policies to see if they still are up to par with today’s security standards.  Finally we’re looking at various pieces of software for improvements to our services.  For example an alternative to Fantastico is going to be coming for sure.  Other software though  might show up as well that’s a really up in the air thing.

A couple of days ago I needed a way to see how a particular client was interacting with a server. Obviously there are numerous ways to do this, but I was curious how easy it would be to implement something similar with a quick netcat command. Sure enough after a little bit of fiddling I was able to produce exactly what he needed.

nc -l -p 12345 < pipe | tee outgoing.log | nc server 12345 | tee pipe incoming.log

Now this may seem a little cryptic so I’m going to dissect each portion to explain how it works. Keep in mind the “pipe” references an actual pipe. You can make a FIFO pipe by running “mkfifo pipe” or “mknod pipe p” – the former is the most usual way. If you’re not familiar with named pipes I recommend reading up on them before continuing with this post as you may get a little confused.

nc -l -p 12345 < pipe

This portion simply has netcat listen on port 12345 and send anything from the pipe to the connected client. If you’re not familiar with the pipes think of it as a simple file with the word “hello” in it. When someone were to successfully connect to the netcat instance it would send the “hello” to the client.

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I cannot believe it December is already upon us which means 2009 is almost over.  Time sure does fly by when you’re really busy.  December though is not going to fly by this has been historically our slowest month which it means it’s time to get a lot of the to-do list finished.  First of all though this month we’re running a 50% off coupon which is pretty rare so tell your friends to sign up now using the coupons holidays2009 .

So the to-do list what exactly is on it?  The first one is to complete our migration of some of the Hawk Host url’s to make it possible in the future to separate them onto different servers if we want.  So like how our forums, support are already switched we’ll be doing the same for our client area within the next few days.  It’s really not that big of a deal but it makes it possible like I said to move them in the future to all different servers without much of a headache.

We’ll also be migrating the Hawk Host site to new hardware as we’re going to need extra processing power in the new year for other projects some being public others being internal.  So we’ll be posting about that in the next few weeks and get that completed.  That brings in the other portion what exactly is this public thing?  Well sorry we cannot reveal that unfortunately until the new year.  I can however talk about more internal things that we’re working on which will link back to that public portion as well.  We have internal systems to help keep track of things like IP’s, server notices ect. ect.  Well it’s needed a overhaul for a while so that’s a big project that’s going on.  Once completed it should help us keep better track of things and respond to issues and potentially see trending issues much easier.

It’s not all about nothing though that will affect Hawk Host though.  We have been throwing around the idea of adding an additional script installer to go alongside Fantastico or even at some point replace it.  So that’ll be something that we’re testing this month and might be live in the new year.  There is a topic about it at http://forums.hawkhost.com/showthread.php?t=665 if you’re interested in providing your input.

So while it might seem like a slow month to an outside observer in terms of activity in our forums and such.  We’re using this time where things are typically slow to get things done that we typically cannot do when it’s extremely busy.

I’ve been doing some work with Zend Framework in the javascript front and I figured I may as well post a bunch of the things I’ve noticed as of recently that might be useful for others.

Adding javascript files on a specific controller

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DMCA notices as well as other legal documents has been something that has annoyed me for some time.  We get them all the time due to our size and we’re expected to become the judge and jury involving content and other situations.  In some cases they’ll be sent to us and we’ll work with the party on resolving it.  Other times it’s sent to our provider Softlayer and we’ll be in an even tougher position.  I see the DMCA especially being abused a heck of a lot to take down competitor web sites as well as just be a general nuisance.  For example here are some recent examples:

Forum Posts

We had received a DMCA letter demanding that forum posts from web site be taken down.  Some user was posting on a forum and they decided they no longer wanted to be a part of it and claimed they owned a copyright to all their posted content.  No matter the choice we made on this matter we were in a tough position.  We have no idea if legally the user owns the content in the posts or if the terms of the forum even would stand up in court as far as the forum owning the content.

Similar Websites

We get DMCA’s about sites copying design aspects from another web site on the internet.  In some cases it’s pretty cut and dry and an obvious use of stolen HTML and things of that nature.  Some cases though it could be as simple as they used the same colors or the designs had similar inspirations.  In these cases under the DMCA essentially the web site has to remove their web site design.  Even if it was clearly not intentional in anyway and the code or graphics were clearly not stolen.  The other option is the the site that was referenced in the DMCA notice sends a counter notification.

Similar Content Wording

We’ve also had cases where someone files a DMCA over someone using the same sort of style of writing or quoting the same book.  Once again another example of us having to make a decision that no matter which way there are going to be consequences.

We’re expected to rule on these situations which we have no business in doing.  More and more users are realizing they can pretty much DMCA anything and someone down the chain will say it looks real enough it’s valid someone must comply.  So you have competitor web sites making DMCA’s with no actual intention of taking the matter to court if necessary.  They simply realize the provider will forward it to the web host who will send it to the customer and the site will most likely be shut down.

This whole system has resulted in us having to shut down web sites because a competitor decided to file a DMCA.  Our provider gets a DMCA from their provider who then sends it to us and we have 24 hours to comply before the IP hosting the site is null routed.  What an awful situation for us to be in so we lose the customer over most likely a false notice.  You also have misinformed notices where someone is using a software and their piracy division sends us a DMCA.  We tell the user to provide proof of a license and they do and we still have to shut them down because the party who sent the DMCA did not retract it even though it was a mistake.

So in summary I really think the DMCA is great in theory but in practice it’s a mess.  The web host cannot be expected to be the judge and jury on any legal situation but we are expected to in order to avoid being liable.  So it results in us losing customers and our customers losing money or in some cases their business entirely.  Malicious users have learned how to cheat this DMCA system and now have made what seemed like a good system all but a joke.  The DMCA system had not been adjusted to deal with this growing problem so if we are to avoid us being liable we have to continue to fold to the false complaints and incorrect ones.

As Dr. House likes to say it’s never Lupus I like to say It’s never Litespeed.  We get support tickets all the time about how it worked in Apache it must be a Litespeed issue but it never seems to be that case.  Although users are convinced it always is until we take a quick look at the page or account and instantly know it had nothing to do with Litespeed.

Syntax Errors on PHP Files

Litespeed has been blamed for syntax errors on PHP files.  We’ve had cases where users timeout while uploading files to their space with us.  They then visit the page and there is some nasty syntax error.  It takes us looking at the file and seeing oh it sort of is missing half the file.  Opps!  Wasn’t litespeed after all.

Htacces Formating Issues

We get complaints about how litespeed did not properly parse a htaccess file once in a while.  We typically just take one look at the file and instantly know the issue.  Typically it comes from users on Mac’s who opened the htaccess file and saved it in Mac and it ended up adding all kinds of extra characters to the file.  The other cases have been scripts concatenating code onto the file and they forgot to go to the next line or even make a space so it breaks the htaccess file.

Mod Security Triggered

Another great case is the mod_security rule being triggered.  These are all the same really stupid scripts doing really stupid stuff that even without mod_security doesn’t work half the time.  For example http://mydomain.com/index.php?script=http://anotherdomain.com/anotherfile.txt or something like that.  We always block these requests due to the fact the majority are url includes being used to upload shell scripts.  Our Apache systems blocked these requests as well but apparently Litespeed is to blame for them.

Firewall Blocked Port

We run firewalls on all our servers and block the majority of ports.  It seems though most hosts don’t run anything so when someone comes from Apache and their script trying to access a service on port 4824 or something like that does not work.  We get a ticket about how Litespeed doesn’t work with x script and it worked with this other host on Apache.  We check the script and say oh it’s because you’re connecting to this ip on port 4824.  We’ll make an exception and suddenly it’s not Litespeeds fault at all!

So just remember it’s never Litespeed well except for that time it was.

Okay it says it’s Not Lupus but imagine it said it’s not Litespeed because I don’t feel like changing that as I’m horrible with graphics.