The Canadian Flag

There are a lot of common stereotypes about Canadians, some true, some not. We have a reputation for being overly polite, apologizing profusely (sorry), and riding our pet Moose to work every day (that one may be a stretch). We also love maple syrup, hockey, and poutine. Here are some fun facts about Canada you may or may not have known:

1. We’re mad about hockey – This rumor is 100% true. Some people say we’re born with sticks in our hands and skates on our feet, and that isn’t too far from the truth. Canada is known for producing some of the best and most consistent hockey talent in the world, and is ranked amongst the top countries internationally year in and year out. Of the 6 original NHL teams, two were from Canada (Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens). There are currently 7 professional hockey teams in Canada, and each is arguably the largest sports franchise in their respective cities. To this day, Toronto and Montreal have a reputation for having the most diehard, committed, and loyal fans. That is especially impressive for Toronto, a city that hasn’t brought home a Stanley Cup since 1967. (Sorry to remind you Leafs fans)
2. O Canada – Our national anthem, O Canada, was first performed in 1880 in Quebec, a predominantly French speaking province to this day. The anthem was translated to English in 1908, and became the official Canadian national anthem in 1980. The anthem is also in the public domain, so if anyone is interested in creating a unique anthem for Hawk Host based on O Canada, we’d graciously accept.
3. Captain Canuck - Most people have heard of (or seen the movies) Captain America, but how about Captain Canuck? He’s our very own comic book superhero, originally created in 1975.
   

   The Hero Canada Needs

   As of 1979, Captain Canuck was the first Canadian comic book distributed throughout the United States. Given the already full and popular comic book market in the US, to have a Canadian comic book in circulation made us all quite proud. There was even a stamp made to honor Captain Canuck. You can read more here if you’re curious about our favorite superhero.

4. Geography Time! – Did you know Canada has 10 provinces and 3 territories? Canada is also the second largest country by total land mass, with Russia being the only other larger country. Our capital is Ottawa, our most populated city is Toronto, and Canada as a whole has a population of around 34.5 million people. According to Wikipedia, that makes us the 35th most populated country in the world. We may not be the most popular, but we’re definitely not crowded.
5. We have awesome wildlife and nature – We’ve got bears, moose, lynx, bison, badgers. bobcats, wolverines, wolves, seals, walrus, whales…and that doesn’t include any fish or birds. Our official flora is the maple leaf (we do love our syrup) and official animal is the Canadian horse, but a lot of people associate us with the beaver. We have 8 mountain ranges, the most popular of which is the Rockies. Canada offers you the ability to hike, ski, surf, boat, and sail. Whatever outdoor activity suits your fancy, you’ll find it here.
   

   Canadian Beaver Pride

Now that you’ve got a quick overview of our country and who we are, why don’t you come visit us, eh? Happy Victoria Day

Semi-Dedicated Hosting Upgrades

Great Job. You Earned It!

We launched our semi-dedicated hosting plans back in August of 2012. Since August we’ve discovered, and so have a lot of customers, that these plans are a great step between shared and VPS hosting. The extra CPU resources, SSD caching, and top of the line hardware really help improve performance for any sites that heavily rely on PHP/MySQL. We knew there was a market for this type of hosting but we had no idea it would be as well received and successful as it is.

All plans, including our current customers, are being upgraded at absolutely zero cost to you. Similar to the reseller hosting upgrades from earlier this week, this is simply a thank you for helping make the launch of our new services a success. Here is a breakdown of the upgrades:

Plan
Old Values
Upgraded Values



Nestling
10GB Disk / 150GB BW
20GB Disk / 350GB BW


Feather
20GB Disk / 400GB BW
30GB Disk / 600GB BW


Beak
30GB Disk / 800GB BW
40GB Disk / 1000GB BW


Talon
40GB Disk / 1000GB BW
50GB Disk / 1200GB BW

As you can see, each plan is receiving 10GB more disk space and 200GB more bandwidth. These upgrades have been applied automatically and you should see the new values once you login to cPanel. If you don’t, just contact our support team and we’ll make sure your account is upgraded.

Minor cPanel Theme Changes

We’ve had our custom cPanel theme for a while now, and I think it’s one of the best in the business (not that I’m partial). We’re constantly trying to make slight tweaks/improvements, today we added three new features:

1. Server Location: cPanel will now display the location of your hosting account. Since we have 6 locations worldwide, people with multiple hosting accounts sometimes forget which account is where.
2. Server Status Page: There is now a direct link to our status page which will go directly to the server you’re on. Any upcoming maintenance notices are posted on our status page, along with any ongoing/current issues.
3. Speedtest Page: You can now go directly to the network information/speedtest page for the location you’re in. This is useful for checking any potential network issues, and seeing just how fast you can get to your website from our servers.

We know these are minor changes but sometimes the small things matter most. If there are any additions or changes you can suggest for cPanel to make your lives easier as a customer, please let us know!

Whats up with PHP?

Technically, PHP 5.3 isn’t exactly “new”. PHP 5.3 was first introduced back in 2009, and it was first made available for customer use in November of 2010. We even have PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 available on all servers, so why’d it take us so long to move to PHP 5.3 as the default version? Primarily, compatibility. We have a lot of customers running software that for the longest time wasn’t compatible with the newer branches of PHP. An unannounced, sudden switch would have broken a number of their sites. Obviously, as a webhost, our job is to avoid those situations. Crisis averted.

Nowadays PHP 5.3 is pretty much the de facto standard for minimum requirements on new software. In addition to this, most software maintainers/developers have added compatibility for the newest versions of PHP for their software, making this transition a logical decision finally. You’re not going to be forced to run PHP 5.3, if you wish to stay on the 5.2 branch that is fine for now. Eventually it’ll be removed from our systems entirely, but for those slow to upgrade or using legacy scripts which absolutely require 5.2, we’ve got you covered. That said, look into upgrading or finding new scripts. You shouldn’t be relying on a language version that reached its end-of-life over 850 days ago.

As for benefits to this, primarily it comes down to new features and performance. Even if users on our shared plan rely on the default PHP version, moving their application from 5.2 to 5.3 should show them a slight boost in overall load time and execution for anything using PHP. This should hopefully make customers more aware of the importance of keeping their software and versions up to date.

Welcoming MySQL 5.5 to the Hawk Host Family

Continuing the theme of performance, moving away from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5 should show a drastic improvement for all of our systems and customers. Simply put, our MySQL servers are busy. I don’t have exact numbers, but I would venture a guess and over 75% of our customers use software that relies on MySQL. Whether it happens to be WordPress, Joomla, Magento, IPB,  SMF, vBulletin, their own custom solutions, etc…you get the idea. MySQL is the backbone of what we offer. We’ve done a lot of work over the years to improve MySQL performance at the hardware level, so now we’re finally getting a major upgrade at the software level.  Here are a few highlights of the changes from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5

• Improved Innodb performance
• Multi-core scalability improvements
• Improved crash recovery performance
• IPv6 Support

You may be wondering why it took us so long to upgrade. I mean, MySQL 5.5 has been out since 2009, just like PHP 5.3. Whats our problem, right? The major reason is the control panel we use, cPanel, has only recently started supporting MySQL 5.5 in their stable releases. And while they claim it is stable, we prefer to do our own evaluation and testing as well. Our philosophy has always revolved around not jumping on the latest and greatest, instead staying a little behind the times to guarantee uptime, reliability, and a lack of critical bugs. This mindset has treated us well for years and waiting a bit to move to MySQL 5.5 is further evidence of that.

For those who may have missed it, here’s a brief timeline of what we’ve started offering over the past few months:

• PHP 5.5 support, along with a PHP version changer
• CageFS, keeping you secure from hackers
• SSDs for CacheCade and FlashCache

The next few months should bring some more exciting announcements, including new products and changes to our existing services. We hope you’re all looking forward to it as much as we are

Our Gift To You

This upgrade applies to any reseller customer on our bronze, silver, gold, or platinum hosting plan. You’ll see the new values reflected on your account within the next week, but if you’d like the upgrade applied sooner just send our billing department an email, or submit a ticket directly through https://support.hawkhost.com

The new values for your plans are as follows:

Bronze Reseller Plan: New bandwidth quota is 300GB, up from 150GB.
Silver Reseller Plan: New bandwidth quota is 600GB, up from 300GB.
Gold Reseller Plan: New bandwidth quota is 900GB, up from 450GB.
Platinum Reseller Plan: New bandwidth quota is 1200GB, up from 600GB.

You’re reading that right friends, twice the bandwidth by simply being a customer of Hawk Host. No need to thank us though, this is just a small token of appreciation for you choosing us to host your websites.

We’re not done here though. Anyone looking to sign up for a reseller plan, this is the week to do so. For the next 7 days (Saturday, May 11th through midnight on Friday, May 17th) we’re offering the following deal for any reseller plan in any location:

Sign up using coupon code resellerspecial2013 and you’ll receive a 40% recurring discount. This promotion is valid for the lifetime of your reseller account.

You can sign up right through our website to get started. Don’t forget, our reseller plans come with some other great perks:

• Get a free WHMCS license with any silver plan ($15 value)
• Get a free WHMCS license, dedicated IP, and AlphaSSL certificate ($33 value) with any gold or platinum reseller plan

If you have any questions at all our sales team is happy to assist. Just send us an email or submit a  sales ticket and we’ll be happy to answer any questions.

Back To Basics

What is shared hosting, and who should use it?

If you’re starting your first website, shared hosting is for you. Its cheap, easy to use, and provides everything you need and nothing you don’t. On a shared hosting plan, you’re in a hosting environment with other people, hence the term ‘shared’. Each user has a set amount of resources (bandwidth, disk space, CPU, etc..more on this in a bit) and even if they exceed their limits, it doesn’t impact you. We also have software in place to truly keep you in your own environment, but that is a bit outside the scope of this post.

All shared hosting accounts with us come with a web based control panel, called cPanel. cPanel is the most popular control panel in our industry. With the click of a few buttons, you can setup email accounts, add more domains to your account, view your resource usage, and much, much more. Here is a screenshot of what our custom cPanel theme looks like, and a preview of some of the many features available in the easy to use interface:

Hawk Host Custom cPanel

As you can see from this screenshot, control of your hosting account is right at your fingertips. On the left side you can see your home directory, CPU usage, disk space, bandwidth, and then if you expand the stats a lot more becomes available to you. Additionally, the options shown under ‘Hawk Host Links’ and ‘Preferences’ are just a small percentage of what you can do. For anyone getting started with webhosting, a shared hosting plan with cPanel is your best bet.

Earlier, we mentioned things like bandwidth and disk space. Lets explain a bit what each of these are:

• Bandwidth:  In simplest terms, bandwidth is the amount of data your site can transfer over the course of a month.  The more monthly bandwidth you have the more visitors your site can have. Anytime someone visits your site, it takes bandwidth to ‘serve’ their request.
• Disk Space: Similar to the hard drive on your local computer, disk space is the amount of total storage space you have on your plan. If you have a 3GB space limit, and upload 1GB of photos, you’ll have 2GB remaining.
• CPU Limit: When you have people visiting your website, in addition to the bandwidth they use, they’ll also consume a small portion of CPU. Unless you have a very busy website, you’ll probably never reach your CPU limit. If you do, we have tools available in cPanel to help show you why.
• Addon Domains: When you setup an account, you provide us with your primary website. You can also add additional domains to the account, each with their own unique content. As long as you have enough bandwidth, disk space, and CPU, you can host as many websites with us as you want.
• DNS: DNS is what helps the rest of the Internet know how to access your site. When you setup an account, you’re provided two nameservers (For example, ns1.hawkhost.com and ns2.hawkhost.com). Once you change your website(s) to use those nameservers, we then host your website and control your DNS. DNS is what helps determine your sites IP, where your email is hosted, and much more.

Now that we have the basic terms down and an idea of what shared hosting is, we’ll cover reseller hosting.

What is reseller hosting, and who should use it?

Reseller hosting is similar to shared hosting in a lot of ways. You’re still given a web based control panel (cPanel), you still setup email accounts and manage your resources the same way, and you’re still on servers with other people. So what is the big difference?

For starters, in addition to cPanel, you’re also given access to WHM (WebHost Manager). Before we begin, here is a quick look at what WHM looks like with Hawk Host:

Hawk Host WHM

The first thing you’ll notice, compared to our cPanel interface, is that WHM is entirely unbranded. We provide a true whitelabel reseller service. What this means is if you chose to sell webhosting to friends, customers, associates, etc, they wouldn’t know you were using us as a provider. In addition to an unbranded WHM, we also provide anonymous nameservers, so even DNS lookups won’t reveal you’re hosting with us.

So what benefits come from reseller hosting? For starters, instead of having to use the ‘Addon Domain’ option like you would in cPanel for shared hosting, you can create entirely separate cPanel accounts for each website you wish to host. A major benefit of separate cPanel accounts for each website is they won’t share certain resources, such as email limits, CPU usage, concurrent processes, etc. This greatly reduces the risk of one addon domain limiting the rest of the sites hosted on a single cPanel account. This means a unique domain, login details, content, and complete isolation from your other websites. If you’re looking to sell webhosting, or you’re a designer providing hosting for a number of clients, reseller hosting is for you. You can also create your own custom, branded cPanel themes and configure your own disk space/bandwidth limits for the cPanel accounts you create. WHM also allows you to have a central login to each of your cPanel accounts, making it easy to manage your websites without needing to store each individual cPanel login.

What is semi-dedicated hosting, and who should use it?

Afraid your website will be too busy for shared hosting, or have you started hitting the limits of our shared hosting plans? Not to worry, semi-dedicated hosting may be the answer for you. To put it succinctly, our semi-dedicated plans are like shared hosting on steroids. Lets take some time to breakdown the differences:

• CPU Limits: In shared hosting you’re given access to 1 CPU. All semi-dedicated plans get access to 2 CPUs, providing a higher threshold for your busier/resource heavy sites.
• Email Limits: Our shared plans allow you to send 1,000 emails per hour. For most folks that is more than enough, but for those of you with a lot of customers to reach or some highly subscribed newsletters, those extra 1,000 emails per hour may make the difference.
• Hardware: While we’re working on moving all of our servers to this setup, our semi-dedicated servers include solid state hard drives (SSDs) for improved caching and performance. Anyone who relies on MySQL heavily will see a noticeable improvement on an SD plan.
• Backups and data protection: Your data is backed up twice per day and retained for 7 days. Even if you make a mistake, we can easily revert your site and get you back online.

If you’re a new user and looking to jump straight to semi-dedicated plans, I suggest reading the section above about shared hosting first. It covers all the basics so you know the lingo before you need the benefits of an SD plan. How do you know you’ll need semi-dedicated hosting? For starters, if you’re hitting a CPU limit in shared hosting it may be time to upgrade. Outside that, if you’re running a site that is PHP/MySQL based (any forums, WordPress, Joomla, etc) or if you absolutely cannot afford slowdowns on your site, you’ll find the benefits of a semi-dedicated plan right up your alley.

What is VPS hosting, and who should use it?

VPS stands for “Virtual Private Server”. A VPS is your own server, not shared with anyone else, and you’re 100% in charge of the environment, configuration, and management. Need to install software that isn’t available on our other plans? Does your application or script require more memory and CPU than a shared plan allows? A VPS is for you.

When you order a VPS, you’re given a base installation of the operating system you choose. You’re given full root (administrator) access, and we don’t restrict what you install or how you configure the VPS. You can use it as a dedicated mail server, setup a webhosting environment, or even run a Minecraft server. The choice truly is yours to make.

In most cases, anyone ordering a VPS also purchases cPanel/WHM along with it. WHM, when you have full root access (unlike reseller hosting where you only have limited access), helps you manage, install, maintain, upgrade, and configure all the necessary software to host a website. This includes your webserver (Apache, Litespeed, nginx, etc), DNS server (bind, MyDNS, NSD), database server (MySQL, PostgreSQL), FTP server (pure-ftp, ProFTP) and a myriad of other services. While administering your own server is not easy, especially if you’re just getting started, WHM makes it as simple as possible.

There are alternatives to WHM, but we find it to the best option for anyone who is managing their own server for the first time. In addition to your web control panel, all VPS plans with us include access to our own custom, in house VPS panel. This panel provides you a resource overview (disk space, bandwidth, memory usage), allows you to easily change your VPS hostname and root password, and lets you start/stop/restart your VPS as needed.

Hawk Host VPS Panel

If you’re looking to setup or upgrade to a VPS, odds are you’re not new to the hosting industry and a lot of what we’ve covered is a second language to you. If you’re not, and a VPS sounds better to get started with, there is no shortage of documentation and help available on Google.

What other resources are available for a first timer like me?

For starters, Google is your friend. The webhosting industry is far from new and mostly every aspect has been covered in some capacity. That said, here are some links we find useful for folks just getting started:

• WebHostingTalk – WebHostingTalk (WHT for short) is easily the most popular and reputable hosting discussion forum around. Topics range from shared, reseller, and VPS hosting all the way up to colocation and security.
• cPanel User Guide – Expanding more on what we covered earlier about cPanel, this is the official userguide straight from the developers themselves. If you’re not sure how to do something, this guide will walk you through.
• WHM User Guide – While this guide is only useful for VPS users primarily (most of it needs root access), you may still find some tips and tricks in here to help coast through your hosting setup.
• Hawk Host KnowledgeBase – A lot of the information contained in our KB is specific to our services, which if you’re a user of ours should be very helpful! We also have our 24/7/365 support available through helpdesk and email to provide a hand if the KB doesn’t do it.

These are just a few of the many resources on the web to turn any rookie into a professional webmaster in no time. A carefully crafted Google search, including any errors you’re getting or your specific question, should turn up an answer in no time. With a little bit of patience and some legwork to start, you can have a successful website up in no time.

The Choice is Yours: PHP Selector

The Choice Is Yours

Anyone who has ever seen the Matrix (and who hasn’t?) knows of this infamous scene, where the to-be hero Mr. Thomas Anderson, aka Neo, is introduced to Morpheus. Neo is then given the option of two pills, one red, one blue, each leading to a different fate. While the Matrix is cool, we think multiple PHP versions are cooler, so we’re one-upping Morpheus by giving you four options for PHP versions. Take that, Morpheus.

While we’ve had PHP 5.2.X, 5.3.X, and 5.4.X support available for a while, with our new PHP selector you’re also now able to select the PHP 5.5.X branch. To change your PHP version, simply login to cPanel and use the top-left finder to search for ‘Select PHP Version’. Click the icon and you’re off to the races.

One important note: you should no longer use the “Apache Handlers” option within cPanel when managing your cPanel versions. This will still work however over time it will become depreciated (PHP 5.5.X will not work via this method currently). If you’re changing PHP versions, only use the PHP Selector from now on.

When you first open up the PHP Selector you’ll see a page that looks like this:

PHP Selector – Default View

From here, you can obviously see all of the currently enabled extensions at the server level.  Without making any changes these are the default values we have set server wide. As you can probably assume, checking the radio button next to an option and clicking ‘Save’ will enable that extension for your account. You have the freedom to enable them all if you want, and each PHP version can have different extensions enabled. Play around, have fun, make changes, and do us a favor if you could? If you find any bugs, report them please!

Similar to how easy it is to enable extensions, changing PHP versions is just as simple. All you’d do is use the ‘PHP Version’ dropdown, select the version you want, and hit ‘Set As Current’. Two seconds later, you’re now running a new version of PHP. Before we had this installed customers had to manually add a handler for their PHP version through cPanel, and it didn’t always work like we wanted. Customers often had issues installing certain software through Softaculous as the recognized default PHP version was too old, so we were spending plenty of staff hours researching and fixing that on a case by case basis. I can safely say none of us will miss those tickets, and I bet our customers won’t either.

Last but not least, you now get access to modify your php.ini! We used to allow various changes via directives in your .htaccess file but this wasn’t as nice as being able to edit a php.ini directly. With the PHP selector, you just need to click the ‘Show PHP Settings’ and you’ll be taken to a page that looks like this:

PHP Settings – Custom php.ini Control

From here, you can change various settings of your own personal php.ini file. Things like timezone, error reporting/displaying, memory limit, etc. Previously you’d need to manually edit your .htaccess (which can be a pain) but now there is an easy to use interface for those same options. Progress is good!

Introducing PHP 5.5

For the most part, the changes made in PHP 5.5.X aren’t terribly exciting for us as a hosting company. Developers and PHP enthusiasts alike may get more of a rise from the new features, but we’re just happy to be able to support it for our customers. Anyone looking for a full read on the changes can check out the PHP 5.5 new features manual on the php.net website. One big change that may impact a few of you reading this is the improvement to the GD extension, which is easily one of the most used extensions by our shared hosting customers.

As this is brand new for us we’re expecting a bug or two, but that happens with any new software. Like I said before, should you guys get any errors / weird behavior, we would really appreciate you reporting it to us. Even if it seems trivial or small, we can likely find a larger underlying problem and make sure no one else is affected.

While this post is by no means all inclusive, nor is it a “one stop shop” for website security, it should at least provide you a basic understanding of how to keep your site safe and defend against run of the mill attacks.

Be smart about what you install – Without a doubt the most common attack vector we see is from customers running untrusted or vulnerable themes/plugins on their accounts. Just because a theme for your WordPress blog ‘looks cool!’ or the latest plugin ‘guarantees higher traffic!’ that isn’t a reason to trust and blindly install them. A lot of these themes/plugins/addons have nasty code embedded deep in their config files which a remote attacker is just waiting to exploit. There is also the possibility that what you’re installing relies on a library or module with plenty of known exploits, and again those remote attackers are just waiting to find your installation and gain access through those holes. Before you install *anything* on your website, do your research. Read reviews, make sure it’s in active development, and most importantly don’t install random software from a random website. It’s the same idea your parents taught you as a kid, don’t take candy from a stranger.

Keep your software updated – If an account is not exploited from a vulnerable addon, the next most frequent reason is due to running outdated software. Whether it’s WordPress, Joomla, Magento, or any of the hundreds of other platforms our customers use, running the most recent version (especially for security patches!) is the most important step you can take to stay safe. Software platforms like Softaculous (which we provide through cPanel on all shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated plans) provide you notifications and an easy way to upgrade, but almost every administrative panel these days offers a one click way to upgrade your software. Most popular software suites also have a mailing list which sends out emails when a new version is released. You should subscribe to those lists and make it a priority to read the changelog and update your sites accordingly. Sometimes it’s only a matter of hours before we start seeing exploits from outdated software once a release is pushed.

Permissions and protocols -

Permissions are King

Having your password stolen (or worst, your personal details) is an equally scary and frustrating experience. How did this happen? Is my computer infected? Did someone sniff my traffic? Is my website compromised? These are the most common questions we’ll see from customers immediately after they realize something isn’t right with their account. It’s important that when you’re using your account with us, or the Internet in general, you always use secure protocols. For starters, anytime you access your account with us you should be using SSL. Here’s a quick list of the proper URLs/ports for common services with us:

cPanel:
http://yourdomain.com/cpanel – This URL will always redirect to the secure version of cPanel. You can verify this by making sure your URL includes ‘https’ and the port ’2083′ before logging in. For example, https://cougar.hawkhost.com:2083 would be secure whereas http://cougar.hawkhost.com:2082 is not.

Webmail:
http://yourdomain.com/webmail - This URL will always redirect to the secure version of webmail. You can verify this by making sure your URL include ‘https’ and the port ’2096′ before logging in. For example, https://cougar.hawkhost.com:2096 would be secure whereas http://cougar.hawkhost.com:2095 is not.

Client Area and Helpdesk:
These should always be accessed via https://my.hawkhost.com/ and https://support.hawkhost.com respectively.

Email through Outlook/Thunderbird/etc:
These should be configured to use the server hostname and SSL. As each server is different, please contact our support team for help setting this up if you’re not sure how.

FTP:
FTP should always be accessed using SFTP (SecureFTP). All FTP clients support this protocol. If you’re unable to connect using SFTP, we may need to enable SSH on your account.

It should be noted that we use valid SSL certificates for all of our cPanel/WHM logins, as well as our email servers. If you ever receive an invalid certificate warning accessing your cPanel account or email, *do not* attempt to accept the certificate and provide your login information. Instead, contact our support department immediately and let us know. Additionally, all of our websites (client area, helpdesk, VPS panel, etc), use extended validation certificates. What this means is you should always see a green bar in your browser when accessing those sites. Just like our hosting servers, if you ever receive an invalid certificate warning from our websites *do not* attempt to accept the cert and login. Instead contact us immediately letting us know about the warning!

While the above list is far from conclusive it should at least get you thinking about security in general. This goes for logging into sites like your banking, credit card, etc. We strongly recommend installing the HTTPS Everywhere plugin from the EFF which will automatically redirect you to HTTPS versions of websites if available. A bunch of us here at Hawk Host rely on this plugin and find it rather useful. We also recommend installing your favorite browsers version of NoScript. This plugin will prevent Javascript, Java, and Flash from automatically executing on websites which is one of the most common ways for an infected site to compromise your system.

In addition to using secure protocols, it’s also important to run the right permissions on your website. A lot of software installers/configuration programs tell you to chmod a directory to 777. This is simply terrible advice and should never be followed, as those permissions will allow anyone on the server to read, write, and modify that directory. There’s no quicker way to guarantee a compromise than to run 777 on anything. Proper permissions for your account are:

/home/yourusername: 711
/home/yourusername/public_html: 750
Directories under public_html (/home/yourusername/public_html/directory/): 755
All files under public_html: 644

That said, with our recent deployment of CageFS you should be protected against some of the more common exploits due to incorrect permissions. Still, it is important to make sure your permissions aren’t leaving your account vulnerable for no reason.

There are almost no circumstances in which these should be changed. If you feel they should be different, or your software says to change them, you should consult either us or your webmaster first.

Password policy - Using strong and unique passwords is one of the most important steps you can take to keep your website and account safe. While it may seem simple in theory, there is a tremendous difference between an 8 character password that is a variation of your childrens names compared to a 16 character password that looks like a military keycode. As a general rule, each website you use should have a unique password. You should also get in the habit of rotating your passwords at least once every 3 months, if not sooner. While this may seem difficult to keep track of, there are a number of utilities/tools you can use to maintain and manage your logins:

LastPass: Found at https://lastpass.com/, this is a browser plugin (with a desktop utility) that keeps all of your login credentials safe in one place. You only need to remember one master password to login, and the rest of your passwords are stored securely and encrypted for you. LastPass also supports two-factor authentication with Yubikeys and Google Authenticator to add another layer of security.

KeePass: Found at http://keepass.info/, KeePass is an encrypted database stored on your local computer with the same general behavior as LastPass.

Password Generation: While both LastPass and KeePass have built-in utilities to generate passwords, websites like GRC will help you generate various secure passwords.

Proactive scanning and monitoring:

Website Monitoring

There are a number of websites out there that offer proactive monitoring/scanning of your files, and also attempt to remove any malware they find. For those of you who like to take the extra step in securing your site using third party services, you may wish to consider signing up with one of these companies:

StopTheHacker: One of the most well known (and trusted) third party services we can recommend is StopTheHacker, a website security service that proactively monitors, scans, and attempts to fix your website if it finds any malware or trojans. In addition to the scanning services, StopTheHacker also provides a plethora of other security services, a full list can be seen on their features page. 

SiteLock: Similar to StopTheHacker, SiteLock is a proactive monitoring and security service to help keep your site secure and malware free. An entire feature set can be found here but they offer reputation management, vulnerability scanning, expert support from security experts, and more.

CloudFlare: CloudFlare is one of (if not the) most well known website security and protection utilities available today. We’ve been an official partner with CloudFlare for almost two years now, and as a result we’ve been able to offer one-click activation through cPanel for any hosting account with us. We have a whole writeup on CloudFlare and how it can benefit you on our CloudFlare FAQ Page but you should also check out CloudFlares own website for a full rundown on how they can make sure your site both faster and more secure.

Incapsula: Incapsula is the closest competitor to CloudFlare we know of, offering a free website security + optimization service. Taking advantage of a global network which is constantly detecting (and learning) about the most common threats, putting your site behind their services will protect you from the most common bots, attacks, and malicious traffic. You can take a tour of their feature set here, which includes proactive traffic monitoring, simple PCI compliance, and in depth website analytics.

A Final Word

Hosting Like The Wild West

Every day this industry feels more and more like the Wild West of old (the Buffalo Bill Cody days). There is a constant struggle between the good guys (you and us) vs. the bad guys (the hackers) to see who can prevail and keep control of your websites. While what we covered above is again by no means an all-inclusive list or a sure-fire way to stay safe, employing best practices at all times can at least keep you safe from some of the most common exploits and “skiddies”. Keep in mind, security is a mentality, not just a checklist one should run through every 2 weeks to make sure they’re ‘safe’. Stay diligent, stay smart, and you’ll be one of the lucky ones who never has to go through the trouble of seeing their website hacked.

A Secure State of Mind

Cages are Always Secure

(If anyone is wondering, that is a picture from a 2008 blog post – we’ve been thinking and talking about security for years.)

Security is brought up so often in the hosting industry these days it’s almost starting to become a buzzword. That isn’t to say security isn’t important, because we all know it is. A properly secured environment, be it a server, hosting account, or even a WordPress blog, is paramount to ensuring you don’t get that dreaded 4AM phonecall saying you’ve been hacked. But security isn’t some set it and forget it solution with one general set of “rules” to follow. Much like the hosting industry and the web in general, security is constantly evolving and new ideas are introduced daily. It’s our job to stay on top of those changes and keep you, as our customer, as safe as we possibly can.

Enter CageFS. Even though this product has been around and publicly available since August of 2011, we believe the product has finally reached a point where it’s mature (and stable!) enough to install on our entire fleet. According to CloudLinux, CageFS “is a virtualized file system and a set of tools to contain each user in its own ‘cage’. Each customer will have its own fully functional CageFS, with all the system files, tools, etc”.

To expand on our comment about putting our users in a cage, that is essentially what CageFS does. Before CageFS, users were able to list other usernames on the server, view system configuration files, and also inspect another users running processes. With CageFS installed you’ll have no way of determining any of that information.

Major Changes and Improvements

As a customer you shouldn’t notice any changes or issues, this is a seamless introduction. In fact, if it weren’t for this blog post and us publishing this information you may never know we’re running CageFS. That’s assuming you weren’t previously snooping for other users information though, in which case we’re sorry to ruin your fun. We just think things are better this way, and we’ll trust you agree!

In list form, here are the primary differences between a CloudLinux server with CageFS as opposed to one without:

• Utilization of /tmp – Previously all users wrote to the systems /tmp directory, which on occasion would get full from a runaway script or poorly coded application. With CageFS each user writes to a /tmp directory inside their home directory, improving both security and reliability. 
• User and system access – You’re literally in your own environment now. No looking at other users, their processes, or what’s happening on the server. You won’t be able to view what other users are logged in via SSH. You’ll even only get access to specific binaries.
• Commands – A user under CageFS has a very limited set of commands they’re able to run from the shell. Essentially you should have everything you need and nothing you don’t. For example, here is the output of the ‘top’ command on a non-CageFS server:

And here is what top looks like on a server with CageFS installed:

As you can clearly see the user running ‘top’ with CageFS can only see their running processes and nothing else (other users, system processes, etc).

There are a number of other changes (Check out the documentation here) but those are the major changes we’re most excited about. CloudLinux also keeps their blog both active and up to date with releases and changes, so anyone looking for a more granular breakdown of CageFS can browse through there.

‘Cage’ Closed

That was a bad pun on ‘case closed’, forgive me. CageFS was thoroughly tested before moving into our live environment, so we’re more than confident in its ability to perform (and operate) reliably. However, no software is bug free, especially a program as integrated with the OS as CageFS. We do anticipate some strange or even unexpected behavior so please don’t hesitate to report any oddities you may see. Having been a partner of CloudLinux for over 3 years now (we installed our first CloudLinux system in August 2010) we’re confident if we report an issue they’ll figure it out and fix it.

As a final note, as your host we do our absolute best to keep your account and websites as safe and secure as possible. However, we can’t protect against everything which is why it’s important to take your own security very seriously. We’ll be publishing a post about basic shared hosting security in the coming days, stay tuned

HostJury: Hawk Approved

For those of you not familiar, HostJury is a website users can go to read and submit reviews about their web hosts (both good and bad). Hosts are judged on four categories, which consist of uptime, support, features, and price. A hosts overall score in each category is determined by taking an average of all reviews. Past customers can leave parting words about their experiences with a given host, and future customers can browse through this information to make an educated decision on who to host their site with next. In addition to host reviews, HostJury also has a webhosting news section with all the latest announcements and changes from the industry as a whole. There is also a job board where interested parties can go to find employment in the hosting sector (and what a great sector to work in it is!). Everyone at Hawk Host is very familiar with HostJury and have been for years.

Now that we’ve got an idea of what HostJury is, lets get to the promotions. As mentioned before, these coupons will go live Wednesday, February 27th at 12:01AM CST and they’ll remain valid through Friday, March 1st at 11:59PM CST. To take advantage of these deals, sign up using one of the two following coupons for any of our shared hosting plans:

60% one time discount: Receive a 60% discount on any shared hosting plan in our Dallas location by signing up using coupon code hostjury60

35% recurring discount: Receive a 35% recurring discount on any shared hosting plan in our Dallas location by signing up using coupon code hostjury35

These coupons are only valid on new accounts and cannot be used for existing services or in conjunction with any other promotions.

If you’ve got any questions about this deal, our sales team will be more than happy to work with you until you feel comfortable signing up with us. You can reach us day and night at https://support.hawkhost.com. If you’re not sure our Dallas network is right for you, a speedtest may help make up your mind. Here’s some useful links to test your speeds:

• Speedtest URL: Test your speed now!
• 10MB Download URL: Test your download speeds!
• 100MB Download URL: Test your download speeds!

And last but not least, if you do sign up please don’t forget to leave a review (once you’ve had a chance to try our services) on our HostJury review page, which can be found here. We love to hear back from our customers (past, present, happy or mad) so please don’t be shy

Solid state drives can provide access latency of under 0.1ms while even the fastest 15,000RPM serial attached scsi (SAS) drives have access latencies of 2ms and a typical 7,200 RPM hard drive has a latency of 4.17ms.  Even the cheapest solid state drives can provide 350 random read and write operations per second while a 15K SAS rpm drive provides just 120 random read and write operations per second.  The only negative for solid state drives currently is the cost per GB.  A 600GB 15,000RPM SAS drive can be purchased for just $300 while a 600GB solid state drive is well over $1000.  At this point it is just not cost effective to be utilizing strictly solid state drives, which is why we turned to caching (initially Flashcache, now CacheCade).

Our Flashcache implementation utilizes 64GB or 120GB solid state drives for strictly read operations.  What it would do is when data is written to disk it would also be available on the solid state drive.  If the data is accessed frequently but not written frequently it would start reading from strictly the solid state drive.  This has resulted in 64-120gb of data actually having its reads served from the significantly faster solid state drive.  The best example I have is showing the access latencies of one of our systems utilizing strictly four 15,000RPM SAS drives in a raid-10:

Here are the access latencies of one our of our solid state drives that is being utilized for Flashcache:

As you can see for the 64gb of data being stored on the solid state drives we’re able to read data in just 2.23ms compared to the 13.41ms time of our SAS raid setup.  This is a 600% improvement in read latency for the data that is being cached.  Once we had implemented this setup we quickly realized there was one negative.  We were not caching writes which meant for our systems we were still having write latencies of 20ms or more.  We started researching solutions that cached both reads and writes which lead us to using LSI CacheCade.

LSI CacheCade allows for reads as well as writes to be sent to the solid state drives on the system.  This is a raid card/hardware based solution rather than the software solution of Flashcache.  The raid card uses algorithms to determine the most frequently accessed data and it is placed on the solid state drives, similar to our Flashcache implementation.  What changes is with the write caching it first writes the data to the solid state drives.  It then places the data on the regular mechanical drives on the system when it’s the most unobtrusive time possible.  We place two solid state drives in each system as a raid-1 CacheCade to make sure no data is lost when utilizing both read and write caching. I could continue to talk about all the great technical details but I think it’s easiest to just show some graphs.  Here is one of our systems before switching it to having LSI CacheCade:

Here is the same system after switching to using LSI CacheCade:

As you can see this is a huge improvement.  Even the slowest reads and writes from the system are faster than minimum read and write latency on the system before LSI CacheCade was introduced.

While LSI CacheCade is the most exciting our use of Flashcache is also still a significant improvement for systems which are utilizing it.  It has meant we’re caching upwards of 120GB of data on significantly faster solid state drives.  The operating system does do caching with free memory but adding 100GB or more to memory on many systems would not be possible nor cost effective.  It also may not provide the same real world performance gains our solid state caching does.  With that being said this is why we’re working towards migrating all systems to LSI CacheCade.

We’ve been migrating servers to CacheCade based systems in our Dallas location since October 2012.  We hope to eventually have systems in all our locations utilizing some form of solid state caching.  It is definitely a lot of work for us but solid state drives are the future.  We wish for all users to be able to enjoy the advantages having consistent disk access times brings.