This is a short rant regarding emergency maintenance. Typically the only time there is unscheduled downtime (or very abruptly scheduled downtime) is because the issue is urgent for one reason or another. For the most part there are only two to three reasons why we may pull a machine offline abruptly:

Network maintenance (usually out of [...]

Using 64bit is really common now in fact most hosts are using this on their newer systems due to using more than 4GB of memory.  On cPanel there is a common problem that crops up with errors showing up after a while in WHM for resellers after there is quite a few accounts on the [...]

At Hawk Host we deal with CPU usage issues with accounts like every other host out there.  I’ve noticed an ever growing pattern of the problems always coming from Wordpress blogs and almost always they have no caching what so ever.  When a web page is served without any caching in wordpress it will load [...]

I’m sure lots of our customers wonder why do we do hardware upgrades once a year or at least every two years.  With the migration of our Skyline server to new hardware I figured it was a good time to explain why we do it and also how we do it with minimal service impact.
History [...]

The catch all email was a great thing back in the day it was neat you could retrieve mail for sales@domain.com billing@domain.com ect. ect. all through one simple email address.  A lot of users used it without issue and it solved having to check various emails they could just tell users to email random addresses [...]

The day started out like every other one with me waking up and starting my walk to the computer while half asleep.  I used to go shower and such like I was going to an office but after a while I figured it be best if I walk to the home office in my boxers [...]

The foreign transaction fee has come up a bit in the past year and I figured I’d rant about how ridiculous this fee is.  We’re a Canadian corporation and as such we have a Canadian merchant account.  For the most part we never run into issues with this and no extra fee’s for our users [...]

There is a new release of WordPress that fixes a issue that allows an attacker to reset the first account in the database (usually the admin account). It doesn’t allow remote access, though can be fairly obnoxious.
More Information:
http://wordpress.org/development/2009/08/2-8-4-security-release/
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/11798

If you missed it on Friday Zend Framework 1.9 was released which as always contains new features and bug fixes.  I’d say the biggest thing would be the support for PHP 5.3 which was released last month.  We have no plans on supporting it any time soon on our servers but it’s nice to see [...]

A lot of users look to run Apache’s mpm_worker rather than the prefork mpm as it’s regarded to be much more efficient than the perfork mpm.  Add in FastCGI rather than mod_php and it’s a great combination of stability as well as performance.  Unfortunately there is one issue with running this on OpenVZ and that [...]