Hawk Host Blog

February Is Over

Tony — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:51:00 +0000

I cannot believe it but the short month known as February is already over and we’re onto March already. February was a very exciting month for us with lots going on so I’ll just go through it all really quickly in this blog post.

We talked about it forever but we finally did it on February 6th Frog Host was officially launched. The second division of Hawk Host specializing in the unlimited hosting which every month we’d lose a customer here and there to. We can finally say hey wait a minute check out Frog Host which we also own they offer unlimited and the quality you loved at Hawk Host! We think the first month went pretty well with a limited amount of promotion we gained quite a few customers from various sources. It’s seen a huge number of affiliates already which means lots of promotion from people trying to cash in on potentially large sums of money if users sign up long term (50% payout first payment of $100 is $50!)

It did not just stop at Frog Host though we added all kinds of new stuff to Hawk Host as well! We added Softaculous as an alternative to Fantastico which has now 136 scripts and seems to grow every day. They also actually keep their scripts up to date unlike Fantastico which mean no longer are we dealing with users installing scripts that are already out of date. Unfortunately though we cannot remove Fantastico entirely as users still want it even though they’re using it based on hype from years ago. We just cannot remove it though from a marketing stand point we can only point them in the right direction.

It did not end with just Softaculous though we also are now using KSplice to help us stay up to date with the latest kernel security fixes while not having to constantly post maintenance notices. This will allow us to have to reboot machines less frequently so more like every 180 days or so while still being very much secure. We’d still do reboots to get onto those newer kernels that contain other fixes as well as potentially performance improvements. So like I said every 180 days or probably every major OS release so CentOS 5.5 for example would be the next logical one.

One last software change we cannot forget is all our servers are now running cPanel 11.25. That means DNS editing within your cPanel is now possible among other things. It includes various fixes and security changes and such. We already talked about it in the blog post cPanel 11.25 – We’re stable baby

So with all these changes how did we do exactly? Well it was our best month ever in revenue and total sales so we’re doing something very right it seems. Although I think I’ve been saying we did better than the previous month every single month for over a year so I guess it’s getting old at this point and is just expected. I suppose I could also talk about how we’ve now generated over 20,000 invoices to customers. The next milestone there would probably be about 50,000 as the rate at which we generate them is going up so another 10,000 is just not that far away anymore. Our hawkhost name servers are now showing over 10,000 domains pointed at them according to most domain sites that check the number of domains on name servers. So that is pretty exciting considering how quickly that number as gone up. That number also does not include resellers using their own name servers or using our anonymous name servers.

Now what’s in store for March exactly? Well it’s already sort of started with Pluto having been migrated over to SAS drives after being on Raptor drives for the past year. We’ve seen an increasing number of drives failures of them over the past few months so we decided enough was enough and switched over to SAS drives for Pluto. We’ll also be doing the same for Titan this week and most likely Marlin VPS node at some point as well. They served us well for a while for a boost in performance while still being cost effective but at this point we get similar pricing on 15K RPM drives. So it makes far more sense for us to just spend a little more and get the better drives and know we’re not going to be repairing file systems at 5am very often hopefully.

Along with the few upgrades we’ve also added yet another server but there is a twist. We’re growing at such a pace we thought it would be wise to start specializing our web hosting servers even more so. When we were smaller we’d mix and match resellers and shared hosting users on the same servers. With Mustang it’s our first of hopefully many shared hosting only servers. We’ll also be doing reseller only as well once we need more servers. It does not really mean a lot to either type of customers but it helps us easily separate the types of users. In the future we might be able to add some features specific to one type of user but right now that is not the case.

Other than that really nothing else going on just some things in the background we’re working on that everyone might see eventually but not yet.

Multivariate Testing – A Real Life Example

Cody — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:46:04 +0000

About a year ago I posted a little tutorial / guide on how to get a simple A/B or Multivariate test running using Google Website Optimizer. Unfortunately I never made a follow-up post, though we still use this internally to help improve our conversions. I figure shedding some insight on why this is useful and how we utilize this internally may be of interest to some people, so here it is.

Now if you’re not familiar with Google Website Optimizer or A/B / Multivariate testing I would highly recommend stopping here and taking a quick moment to get the jist of what they are. In simplistic terms you have several changes on your website with defined goals (here a sale, or conversion). You send traffic to these changes and after awhile you will gain enough statistics to determine if a particular change helps you or not (or in some cases does exactly the same).

So now that you have an idea of what the point of the testing is let’s take a peak at a current Hawk Host one that’s not quite conclusive yet.

The Variates

In this particular test we decided to go with one of the more prominent sections on our website: the portion above the folder and in the center (mostly). The reasoning behind this was it’s one of the first things people see and in theory would be the first thing that could potentially be improved to get people to order. Here is the “block” that we’ll be playing with:

In particular these are the elements we’ll be changing and testing inside of the above section:

Now in this particular test we decided to go with some generic changes – as you can see there are two elements in particular we’re focusing on. The main heading and subheading (we decided to lump these together as they can compliment each other – with variate testing you learn to appreciate that the smallest change can result in experiments that run months longer) and the image.

The headings / subheadings we are testing are the following:

World Class Hosting / Safe, Secure and Reliable Hosting
Lightning Fast Hosting / You won’t find faster servers
Hosting You Can Trust / Safe, Secure and Reliable Hosting
Hosting You Can Trust / Safe, Secure and Reliable Hosting (Colored “You” and “Trust”)

And the images we are trying:

Now one thing you must realize with variate testing is what you think will do well (or not do well) isn’t always what the results show. Luckily for us that smiley face was weeded out within the first few days due to its lack of performance (and utter creepiness).

The Results (thus far):

Now you need to wait for the results – this can take awhile depending on the amount of impressions / conversions / combinations you’re running. In this particular test we started out with 16 combinations (4*4) 1 of which was the original website. We’ve whittled it down to 8 combinations after a few weeks of letting it run and seeing which combinations are consistently doing poorly (you need to gather ample data to make this decision, patience is your friend).

So what can these small changes do for your business’ bottom line?

As you can see numerous combinations are out performing our original – some to a very large degree! I’ll let you interpret these results but at a glance you can see that several of these changes are converting significantly better. We’ll let this run until we gain enough data to be 100% sure that a particular change will yield better results but it’s looking promising.

In case you’re curious here is the original vs. the winning variate (at this time):

Original

Winning variate

That’s right, in this instance the combination with only the image different is converting well 2x-3x better than the original. Always keep testing – small changes can make large splashes.

-Cody

cPanel 11.25 – We’re stable baby

Cody — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:56:09 +0000

In case you missed our recent announcement in the forums we’re now upgrading all of our cPanel versions to 11.25 as it’s recently been moved out of testing phase into stable. This is highly anticipated release as it adds a few features, and more importantly fixes a lot of poorly implemented features. Here’s a quick laundry list of what’s changed in cPanel 11.25:

CSRF Protection – Security tokens! This protects you from those nasty CSRF attacks. They also are checking for blank referrals (not the best method, but added onto tokens and you’re golden)

Optimized Mail – Mail servers (Dovecot / Exim) have had their configurations tweaked for a lower memory footprint as well as quicker processing. One of the things changed is now a single Exim process can listen on several ports at once.
Faster Webmail – The popular Roundcube e-mail system can now use a SQLite database which is umpteen times faster than the current system (mailbox files)

Queueing System – They’ve finally added a queuing system for things that require a webserver reboot. One of the common problems is when people mass add or remove domains it causes a short period where the webserver is constantly restarting causing slightly higher loads and longer response times.

Faster Transfers – Apparently you can now have transfers ignore the homedir directory and allows you to manually move it via Rsync or another method allowing for more flexibility.

And more..

Needless to say the update has been long needed – expect to see it on all of our systems shortly!

Rebootless kernel updates ahoy! Initial thoughts on Uptrack (Ksplice)

Cody — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:04:16 +0000

In case you missed it we recently have added Uptrack to all of our machines to take advantage of being able to update the kernels on our machines without having to reboot. This has several implications, though the primary one being security. A large amount of hacks take place on a day-to-day basis and a large portion of them are due to out-of-date software. When there is a security issue in a web application the repercussions are plenty, though when there is a security issue in the kernel the repercussions are simply scary.

Needless to say Uptrack allows us to keep our kernels patched with the newest kernel patches to maintain a solid, stable and secure environment.

So how does it work? Well in laymans terms when new patches come out they automagically make it into a “rebootless update” and then apply it (according to them a large majority of the updates can be created without any programmer intervention). This allows you to apply updates on-the-fly without the need of rebooting. There is of course a more technical explanation, but I’ll stick with automagically for now.

One of the cooler features of Uptrack is it allows you to auto-update your kernels – this essentially leaves any need for human intervention. Now we’re not too keen on that since having our machines become self-aware is scary (arghh) so we opt for another cool feature. They offer a little web application that’s very simple yet effective. It simply lists all of the machines with Uptrack installed and their current kernel version. It let’s you know if any kernels our out of date or if any had issues installing. You can even view the update history of a machine to see which patch has been applied and what it fixed.

One of the things that we were concerned about was what if we ever decide to move away from using Uptrack? Does Uptrack gracefully “detach” from the machine with any issues? The answer is simple yes. When you remove Uptrack it reverts back to the original kernel when installed (yes, this means you would need to upgrade to a new kernel per usual). Cool beans.

We’ll post any updates regarding our experience with Uptrack here, though I doubt there will be many. We’re happy knowing there will be less maintenance windows needed and we can rest assured our kernels are up-to-date.

Cheers!

Power of Unlimited

Tony — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:59:29 +0000

A lot of web hosts and people in general underestimated the power of unlimited hosting to users. Since we launched Frog Host on the weekend we’ve lost several customers some of which put right in their comment that someone recommended they switch to Frog Host instead. I am pretty sure a lot of them are not even aware Frog Host is ran by the same company which is all that surprising. The reason being we’ve seen an increase in affiliate users with Hawk Host and those same people are also promoting Frog Host on their websites and to their friends. So these users have chosen to pay Frog Host $80/yr rather than Hawk Host $40/yr when their space usage suggests they’d be fine with just 3GB of space.

I have no doubt the affiliate system has a part to play in this with the Frog Host plans being higher and it’s commission percentage being higher it’s smarter to push it to make money. Now wait a second Frog Host has higher numbers? Well this is because offering 50% on a $80 plan is less of a hit than doing say 50% on a $40 plan. We can afford to pay out more with Frog Host since the plans are much more expensive and with the power of unlimited a lot of users cost a heck of a lot less than $80/yr.

That’s about all I have to talk about I just thought it was interesting looking at some recent Hawk Host cancellations and seeing reasons pointing to Frog Host with various explanations given. It just shows you the power of unlimited heck even if you own multiple unlimited brands I’ve heard of a lot of them losing a customer with one brand and gaining them back on another. So they’re no further ahead and still using the same company in the end.

Softaculous Doing Great

Tony — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:49:25 +0000

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:

LifeType 1.2.10 – Successful
phpMyFAQ 2.6.2 – Successful
DokuWiki 2009-12-25c – Successful
Piwigo 2.0.8 – Successful
phpMyFAQ 2.6.1 – Successful
Noahs Classifieds 4.1.0 – Successful
PmWiki 2.2.10 – Successful
NetOffice 2.5.3 – Successful
Serendipity 1.5.1 – Successful
MediaWiki 1.15.1 – Successful

That is pretty amazing in comparison to Fantastico which never could have so many updates out in a just over a week. We just hope more customers will make use of Softaculous over Fantastico which is just alive due to reputation not actual quality of the software. Which is unfortunate for Softaculous which is really impressive with their script library and how quickly they can update scripts.

Injury Bug

Tony — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:52:39 +0000

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

Tony — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:23:04 +0000

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.

Intel X25-M G2 160GB

Tony — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:25:56 +0000

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.

I did some research looked at the OCZ vertex drives as well as the Intel ones. They seemed pretty close in most aspects except the vertex series was 128gb vs the Intel 160GB. I decided I needed the extra space and went ahead and ordered the Intel X25-M G2 drive as well as the essentials like a bay converter so I could put it into my computer and Windows 7 for TRIM support. Getting the drive into the system went without a hitch and I of course disconnected my current 640GB drives to avoid any potential problems. The installation just flew by and in probably less than 30 minutes I had Windows 7 installed. Once I updated everything and had all my drivers for things I went ahead and connected my 640GB drives back up turned on the raid for them and everything still worked. I’ll be honest I was surprised I figured turning on raid for my mechanical drives would have broke everything but surprisingly that was not the case at all. I still have TRIM support on the drive and everything I expected to see is still there so great a working system!

Now the speed of this thing is pretty amazing. Once I had all my programs installed just like on my system before boot times were still unbelievable. Before when I booted my system up to start the work day I’d start it up then go grab a drink and windows would be booted up to the login screen. I’d then need to login and wait another minute to actually be able to load programs without a massive delay. With the SSD I turn my computer on look away and I’m pretty much ready to login to windows. Once I login to windows I can instantly start loading everything up I need which is just crazy. So these days I actually go grab a drink first then turn on my computer since there is basically no wait time anyways as far as booting up.

For loading of actual applications and things of that nature there is a major improvement. I can load up everything just clicking as I go rather than dealing with my sl0w mechanical drive seeking things at random parts on disk. So I can load up Zend Studio, Firefox, Apache, MySQL, SecureCRT and other programs all at once with no regard to how much trashing the drive is taking. It just loads them one after another no problem without it slowing down my system at all. What has me surprised the most is even the improvement of sequential reads and writes over my mechanical drive. Although I’m not sure if the drives I was using were that great or if my raid was part of the problem for such slowness. Anyways here’s a quick comparison:

640GB Drives Raid-1:

Intel X25-M G2 160GB:

So I’d say if you looking for an upgrade for your computer and you’re a workaholic like I am then a SSD can be one of the best upgrades you can do.

2010 Is Here

Tony — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:15:37 +0000

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.