The upgrade should be seamless to everyone as we’ll be just running the cPanel update system and everything should go as planned.  We’re actually running cpanel 11.32 already on machines we recently did hardware upgrades to and a few select machines were updated already due to resolve other issues.

As for cPanel 11.32 it’s really not that big of a change for end users but it does add DKIM support which should help with email delivery.  It also improves the cPanel interface a bit and the file manager.  Also of course bug fixes that never made it into the previous release.  If you’re curious about the new release you can check out the official cpanel page at http://cpanel.net/releases/1132/index.html

Here are some neat new features in PHP 5.4

• OO Traits
• Short tags are enabled regardless of php.ini settings (<?= ?>)
• Class::{expr}() syntax is now supported
• The session extension now supports tracking of upload progress
• A built in development web-server accessible via the CLI
• And more

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need any assistance or run into any issues while running PHP 5.4 on your web hosting account.

To take advantage of this deal, use coupon code leapyear when completing your order. This is valid on of our shared plans on any payment term we offer. Take advantage of this special today, or else you’ll have to wait another 4 years

At this point I assume you’re thinking “Wow, this is too good to be true!”. So, lets go ahead and get the “gotchas” out of the way:

• Right now, we’re only able to offer these AdWords credits to customers based in the United States and Canada. No, this is not because we’re partial to North America. It’s a restriction based on our terms with Google so unfortunately our hands are tied.
• Eligible customers are able to redeem one AdWords credit per client area account. What this implies is even if you have 100 shared hosting accounts under your client account, you’re not entitled to 100 credits.
• You don’t need to purchase a specific hosting plan to redeem the credit, you can buy any of our shared, reseller, or VPS plans.
• You must have an active service. Simply registering an account with us will not provide you a credit.

As far as terms go for a free AdWords credit, those are pretty easy to live by.

Last thing, this is brand new for us. If any of you run into a bug with the client area or have an issue redeeming the code with Google, please tell us. We’ll do everything in our power to fix the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

VPS Upgrades

We must have been particularly swept up in the holiday spirit this year, as we gave all of our VPS customers a free upgrade on their accounts bandwidth and memory allocations. Each plan received about a 50% bump in memory and 100GB of bandwidth. Along with this upgrade, we’re now able to offer cPanel on our basic VPS. We couldn’t do this previously since the memory allocation was too low. You can now get an OpenVZ based VPS, with 768MB of burst memory, 10GB of space and 250GB of bandwidth, with cPanel, all for $30/mo. Paired with our custom built VPS control panel these new plans make us even more competitive in the VPS market. Check them out here.

Boxing Day

No more than a month after our Black Friday specials ended, which offered up to 80% off our shared hosting plans, we ran our annual Boxing Day sale which included the same promotions. Much to our surprise the sale took off and put up numbers that rivalled Black Friday in total orders. As a result just how well Boxing Day went, we’ll be lighting up a bunch of new hardware over the next 30 days.

The Toys

As a general rule, we like to do things securely. Even back in 2008, security was treated as a critical part of our operation. But no matter what you do to be secure, you can usually find ways to improve. For us, that next improvement is evaluating hardware based two factor authentication. We picked up a 10 pack of YubiKeys to test and evaluate adding into our existing operations. So far, so good. We have nothing but good things to say and while our testing is far from over I can see a place for YubiKeys, especially as we continue to grow.

Miscellaneous

We upgraded to the latest version of WHMCS, our billing and client management software, a move that delivered a brand new client area experience. There were a number of visual changes, like an admin dashboard full of widgets which can be customized unique to each admin. The “pretty” factor aside, there are about 101 new features and usability tweaks we’re finding remarkably handy.

From all of us at Hawk Host, thanks for a great 2011 and we wish everyone the best through 2012.

A few months ago, all of our shared hosting plans received a free bandwidth upgrade – shortly before that, we re-did all of our reseller plans. With these VPS upgrades, that means throughout 2011 every one of our services received an upgrade. If you’re one of our shared or VPS customers, those upgrades came at absolutely no extra cost to you. In fact, you probably saved money if you were able to avoid upgrades on services as a result of the free bumps.

As for the upgrades, check out the breakdown below. All the new package values can also be seen right on our site –

Basic Plan:

• 192MB RAM / 384MB Burst 384MB RAM / 768MB Burst
• 150GB Bandwidth 250GB Bandwidth

Standard Plan:

• 348MB RAM / 768MB Burst 512MB RAM / 1024MB Burst
• 250GB Bandwidth 350GB Bandwidth

Advanced Plan:

• 512MB RAM / 1024MB Burst 1024MB RAM / 2048MB Burst
• 350GB Bandwidth 450GB Bandwidth

Super Plan:

• 1024MB RAM / 2048MB Burst 2048MB RAM / 3048MB Burst
• 450GB Bandwidth 550GB Bandwidth

We’ve essentially doubled the memory limits and added 100GB to all the bandwidth limits. All existing customers will get these upgrades free of cost and you do not need to contact us, it’ll be applied automatically. Of course you’re welcome to login to your VPS control panel and double check — should you see any issues please contact our VPS support department and let us know.

We hope all our VPS customers enjoy the free bump in resources!

Shared Hosting

80% off super shared hosting package for the first year using the coupon boxing2011super (Regular Price: $129.48, Black Friday Price: $25.90)

55% off the first payment on all shared hosting accounts using the coupon 55boxing2011

Order Here

Reseller Hosting

35% off recurring on all reseller accounts for Dallas and Seattle using the coupon boxing2011r35percent

55% off the first payment on all reseller accounts for Dallas and Seattle using the coupon boxing2011r55percent

Order Here

Our VPS Panel

I wanted to put a time frame on when we first started this project (I got all the way back to before November 2010), and then realized it wouldn’t be fair to do. While we’ve focused on this panel, it hasn’t been the star child for all that long. That changed in the past few months and with a lot of grit and determination we were finally able to launch the panel. In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a ‘VPS Panel 101′ type blog post with some of the features, screenshots, and some more information about what sets our panel apart from existing solutions. Since we’ve pushed customers over to our in house panel, we’ve had no complaints about issues and have continued implementing new features and upgrades.

Amsterdam went live

Back on November 8th, our sixth location (and first in Europe) went live in Amsterdam. In addition to the actual datacenter, network POPs were also opened in London and Frankfurt, which has helped reduce latency for our users visiting sites on our US servers from Europe. We’ve had a number of existing users who live in Europe move their sites to Amsterdam and have reported a near 100ms latency drop as opposed to hosting in our Washington DC location. That said, if you’re catering to a European based audience, you should consider looking at our Amsterdam location

Black Friday

As is becoming an annual event here at Hawk Host, we had yet another massive Black Friday sale.  As we did last year we’ll publish a full blog post on how this year went with some stats included sometime this month, however for a quick figure we did over 10x our daily order average. Needless to say it was a huge success and pushed us to our best order month to date. While I can’t disclose the margin of which we broke that record, suffice it to say despite all of us (and I mean all of us) being required to work a near 24 hour shift, we all went to bed with smiles on our faces. It was definitely an exciting day, but we’ll get into that more with the Black Friday stats post!

Miscellaneous

I (Brian) took a 5 day trip down to Orlando and visited Walt Disney World. I haven’t been there since I was 6 years old and surprisingly, it was still just as fun. My family and I stayed at one of the resorts (Pop Century) and hit up all the local attractions / theme parks. Perhaps the nicest part of the vacation was seeing the sun again and being able to go out for a run at night, as it was a cool 60 degrees the whole time (That’s 60 Fahrenheit, of course). After going through all the pictures we took, I figured I’d share the one of a Mickey Mouse statue that was nearly as tall as the buildings themselves:

That aside, December is always a busy month for us and it is truly hard to believe we’re already half way through the month. Another few weeks and we’ll be into 2012, can you believe that? Given how much we’ve done in 2011, who knows what another year will bring!

October

The month of October brought the launch of our first Asian location, Singapore. This was one of the most anticipated steps of the year for us as we’ve been looking forward to this since early Q1 of this year. We’ll get more into Singapore later though and how it’s performed since we’ve been online.

In addition to going online in Singapore, we also turned up new servers in our Dallas and Washington DC facilities. The new servers were brought up for a couple of purposes. A few were used for new orders (seems we get more each day!). Others were used to complete our reseller and shared services migration in an attempt to isolate the services.

Singapore

Early October brought the opening of Singapore, our first international location. We discussed the launch in this blog post but since it’s been about a month, we figured an update is in order.

Since we’ve been online in the Asia-Pacific region, the demand has been pretty much what we expected. There were a few network hiccups to start which made some local users weary, but as time has gone on and peering policies with local ISPs have improved we’re seeing even better connectivity. We’re also happy to report that the brand new CPUs we had installed, the Intel Xeon E5-2650s, have been performing wonderfully. Not that we had any doubts (they do pack 8 cores CPU!), but for us, we always seem to fall into a honeymoon phase with new hardware. Nerds at heart, I suppose.

Amsterdam

Our second international location and newest yet, ams001 has helped filled a gap in our service. For the longest time we’ve had users from Europe looking for hosting with us a little closer to home. Sure, our Washington DC facility provided a solid solution, but we can understand the need to have a site hosted on the same continent you live on.

There is a certain confidence that comes with having Amsterdam available, and the same could be said about Singapore. We’ve always felt that as far as a hosting experience goes, there are few providers who can match (and fewer that exceed) what we’re capable of providing. In my eyes we just took a large step forward in continuing to set ourselves apart. Few providers of our size who can offer the range of locations we do, with the number of services available, and all at a price that breaks down to being cheaper than your daily cup of coffee. And no, that doesn’t have much to do with Amsterdam necessarily, but the big picture should be considered when small victories are had. We’ll touch more on Amsterdam as time goes on and we get some more user feedback. That said, if you’re hosting with us (or plan on hosting with us) in ams001 please let us know how things are going for you!

Miscellaneous

Launching Singapore and Amsterdam took up a lot of our attention, so there wasn’t a lot of free time floating around to work on other projects. We did make some minor improvements to our website and pushed some internal workflow changes. One important thing to note is we’re putting the final touches on our VPS panel. I’ve been told the launch is quite literally around the corner so who knows, could be seeing another blog post shortly with some news

Shared Specials

80% off super shared hosting package for the first year using the coupon bf2011super (Regular Price: $129.48, Black Friday Price: $25.90)

55% off the first payment on all shared hosting accounts using the coupon 55bf2011

Shared hosting deals are available in all locations. Order Here

Reseller Specials

35% off recurring on all reseller accounts for Dallas and Washington DC using the coupon bf2011r35percent

55% off the first payment on all reseller accounts for Dallas and Washington DC using the coupon bf2011r55percent

Reseller hosting deals are available only for our Dallas and Washington DC locations only. Does not include Seattle. Order Here