What's New at Hawk Host June 2017

We’re been a bit quiet lately but we’re still working behind on the scenes on many great new features and improvements to our services here at Hawk Host.  Here’s just a quick run down of a few features that have recently became available to everyone.

Web Server mod_geoip Support

All of our servers now support mod_geoip which can allow you to make changes to your web site depending on the location of your users.  For example if you wanted to have all your users in the United States and Canada go to a different folder it be as easy as this:

[code] RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^(CA|US)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/usca/$1 [L] [/code]

IMAP Full-Text Search Indexing (powered by Solr)

On all our systems we now have full text search indexing which provides a major usability improvement when searching IMAP mailboxes.  No longer will you find searching slow when utilizing iOS, Outlook, Thunderbird or our webmail programs SquirrelMail, Horde or Roundcube.

Cloudflare Railgun Available in Amsterdam

Our Amsterdam location is the latest to have support for the Railgun Origin Network Optimizer by Cloudflare.  If you’re in our Amsterdam location and have Cloudflare enabled in cPanel you’ll now see an option to enable Railgun.  Railgun ensures the connection between our web servers and the Cloudflare network is as fast as possible.  It compresses previously uncachable web ojects by up to 99.6% which can mean up to a 200% additional performance increase for users utilizing Cloudflare.

CloudLinux Resource Usage Snapshots

Previously when visiting your resource usage overview page there were very few pieces of information.  You may have historical charts of your CPU, memory and I/O usage but this would not be helpful to you if you weren’t checking your site the moment you saw a spike in usage.  We now offer you the ability to see snapshots of your account at the moment you reached your limits.  You’ll now see the process list, the database queries you were running and most importantly the actual pages thanks to Litespeed adding support for mod_proctitle.  This is especially useful for applications like Wordpress where all requests go to your index.php file.  You’ll now be able to dig deeper and know which specific pages may be causing the slowdowns.

Additional Backup Infrastructure

As more users sign up for our services that means more web sites we’re backing up.  As user web sites grown in populairty and add more feature rich content this is more important data we need to backup.  As a result we’re continually adding more hardware to help with our growing backup demands.  We just finished adding another 20% capacity to this infrastructure.

Various Internal Improvements

Our software vendors are always adding new features which we of course want to take advantage of.  Many of these features require specific updates to software, changes to various software configurations and changes to our custom code.  Over the coming months we’ll be announcing many new security features as well as even more control over the software available on your account (clue it might have to do with Ruby and Python).