Hawk Host Report – May 2011

We’re about a week behind posting this months report (as surely you avid readers have noticed). This isn’t because we don’t just love writing blog posts and interfacing with our audience, because we do enjoy it. The problem is simply that we’re very, very busy. We’ve got new locations, new machines, new employees….lots of new.

San Jose

In this April 25th blog post we announced that we were officially opening up a San Jose location, which would be location number 4 for us. Since that announcement (and the ensuing 50% off special) we’ve seen a huge upswing in orders. The kicker, if you didn’t already figure it out, is that huge upswing correlates directly with us offering San Jose. Primarily, we’ve seen a major increase in the percentage of orders coming from regions in the Pacific / Asia. The reason behind this of course is the routing to San Jose is pretty darn good, and that means a better overall browsing experience for those users. The clear success of San Jose has us wondering just how successful Amsterdam and Singapore will be for us once our provider opens up there in about 6 months 🙂

The staff

There was a lot of moving and shaking within the ranks of our workforce this month. We had two employees head out for other opportunities (great opportunities, and we’re absolutely thrilled for the guys) so we had some vacancies to fill. The good part is it didn’t take long to hire some qualified individuals, so over the next few weeks you’ll once again start seeing some new names and people replying to your tickets. Our new hires will be in all departments so odds are if you need anything from us you’ll get the chance to work with them.

SSL certs and Reseller plans

Earlier this month we announced that we’ll be offering both SSL certificates and revamping our reseller plans to meet growing demands of the market. The consensus, so far at least, is that we should have rolled these new plans out a while ago. They’ve been a resounding success (we’ve seen a sizeable increase in reseller orders), and we think a lot of that has to do with the fact that you can get a WHMCS license + SSL certificates with some of our plans. Not only that but we allow for much more space and bandwidth, and the total amount of cPanel accounts you can create increased drastically. Whereas the old plans were more of a utility for people, these new plans are primed for people to sign up and begin legitimately selling hosting services.

Upgrades for everyone

This isn’t *technically* something that happened in April, but we wanted to brag (ahem, announce) that we’re rolling out fleet wide memory upgrades on our shared and reseller servers. All the machines currently have 12GB which is ample for the current load. However, bigger means better and 24 is bigger than 12, so that’s what we’re moving to. The upgrades start this upcoming Monday, May 13th and will take approximately 3 weeks to complete in total. Fun fact: at Hawk Host, that’s 312GB of memory being added into our servers. Add Frog Host into that (which will be getting the upgrades) and we’ve got a total of 348GB of memory being added. This will also be the standard moving forward, so all future machines will be 24GB from the start.

Miscellaneous

We’ve started using the chat application Hipchat as a means of communication for the company. Since we don’t have a central office (yet) and we have some employees who telecommute, it’s vital we have a reliable and useful means to communicate. Hipchat fills that need and then some, and we’ve also worked with an old friend (@Cjoudrey) to write a Hipchat bot (Wobot) in Node.js (blog post / GitHub repo) for our own internal fun and testing. More fun than anything, but work can’t be all about work.

Outside of that, we’ve just finished up another server migration to a shared only server, and will be re-purposing some old hardware for internal properties. We’re also testing some new software for things like email blacklist monitoring. All in all, things are incredibly busy (but a good busy) and we’re all working as hard as ever to continue improving an already solid hosting experience 🙂