Brian

It appears this system is still experiencing issues, due to what we believe is an issue with the RAID card. We are working on resolving this and will most likely be replacing the systems RAID card. We will continue to update this thread as the maintenance progresses.

The server is back online and we've confirmed all services are working and sites are loading. If you're experiencing problems still please submit a ticket at https://support.hawkhost.com

FSCK has completed and we're rebooting the server now.

FSCK on the /var partition is completed though it appears we will need to run it on other system partitions as well.

It appears the /var partition on this system has gone read-only forcing us to take the system offline to run an FSCK. This thread will be updated as we progress.

Very small change to our domain registration offerings, but we're now accepting 2 and 3 year registrations and renewals on the following domains: .com .net .org .info .us .biz .name Previously the longest term we offered was one year. Pricing for all these TLDs is $21.90 for 2 years and $32.85 for 3. We're also looking into offering some different domains, specifically .ca, com.au, .net.au, .me, and maybe a few others. If there are any specific ones you guys would like offered / see value in, I'm all ears!

I'm most likely going to the coffee shop today (my writing haven, of sorts) and plan on pushing out a "What the hell have you guys been doing this summer?" type post. I can't promise it'll be published today but it will be worked on and likely live by the end of the week.

Thanks for signing up with us! Regarding your questions: 1) Our sng001 server has been online for about 3 months now, with the last downtime being due to planned/scheduled maintenance when we upgraded the systems memory from 24GB to 32GB. If you're a new customer I'm not sure how you're checking any uptime metrics accurately, as a lot of those 'monitoring' sites use the ICMP protocol which we filter, so it shows fake values. 2) All shared hosting services are eligible for a 100% refund within the first 30 days. Additional services (SSL certs, dedicated IPs, domain registrations, etc) are non-refundable.

We have a firewall on all of our systems that block requests (in or out) for any non-standard port. If I had to guess I would say the port you're trying to reach is not allowed through the firewall. It shouldn't be an issue getting the port opened on your server though you would need to submit a ticket for this so we can escalate it to our sysadmin department for review. Please submit a ticket at https://support.hawkhost.com, provide us the path to the script(s), the port(s) you'd like opened, and any other relevant info and we'll get this taken care of for you!

You can order these all through our website and just add them to your cart. For the domain, go to https://my.hawkhost.com/domainchecker.php and register the domain you want. Once the domain is added to your cart and you're on step 3 of the order form, click the VPS tab in our navigation and add the VPS you want to your cart. Before you check out, repeat the same process for the SSL certificate. Before you complete the order you can review your cart and remove any items you don't need, add any promo codes in, etc. Alternatively you could place three separate orders and do each one at a time

Under the 'Addon Domain' interface, the same place you added the domain originally, you will have the option to delete it from there. Once you remove the addon domain it should automatically remove the subdomain entry as well. If this doesn't work for you we'll likely need to take a closer look at your account specifically so you'd want to submit a ticket (https://support.hawkhost.com) with the details of this issue.

Shakespeare said something once about "Whats in a name...blah blah" (paraphrasing, of course). On a serious note the details of the plans and the advantages are listed right on the site and so far everyone who has signed up has had a clear understanding of what they're getting. I can see where you're coming from, though the naming is set and we won't be changing it. IMO in this instance the name is less important than the service itself, and on that front all feedback we've received indicates we've done it right Low cost VPS isn't our business model. Never will be. If it was our core business we'd probably be more interested in having a wider range of plans but we're a shared hosting company that offers complimentary services for a similar industry. We've never once argued that we can (or will) compete with cheaper VPS hosts on price. Thanks for the feedback!

The Tornado server has gone down for emergency maintenance due to file system inconsistencies. We'll be running a FSCK and will post updates on its progress via this thread.

We've got some interesting blog posts coming up here shortly (more technical/nerdy ones) from some of our systems engineers and developers which I'm personally looking forward to reading. Being more of an operations/customer service guy myself, my posts tend to be more in the obscure, or what our company is up to, changes we're making to the business, etc. I figured I'd open up the floor and see if there is anything you guys would like a "behind the scenes" post about? Obviously if your ideas involve revealing trade secrets or non-public information I'd not be able to write about that, but if you have an idea let me know and I'll see what I can do!

Resell in the sense of referring users, being their webmasters (with them knowing), etc is perfectly fine. A true reseller situation (whitelabel, anonymous, you have WHM access, etc) is unfortunately not possible with these plans. I broke this down a little bit more verbosely in this post (click here!) if you're looking for more detail

These are not reseller accounts and we're not really promoting them as such either. You're limited to one cPanel account, there is no WHM access, no IP assigned solely to your sites (unless you have a dedicated IP), etc. Essentially it doesn't include anything that a typical reseller comes with. The semi-dedicated plans are meant as an in-between from shared accounts to a VPS, or for someone who wants more resources for their site. The full advantages are broken down at http://www.hawkhost.com/semi-dedicated-hosting/advantages We don't want to compete in the budget VPS market so you're right, there are a large number of companies out there that provide cheaper VPS solutions. Our VPS offerings are for existing customers who are looking to customize their environment or gain more resources and have found themselves extremely happy with the services we provide, or for people who need a reliable solution that they know will be online. Knock on wood but I can't recall the last time we had an issue with our VPS nodes so they're certainly reliable.

PM coming your way mate

Spot on, or even a regular reseller account through us right now. The plans are priced the way they are (that is to say as expensive as they are, though IMO you're getting a lot of bang for your buck) because we're using expensive hardware (SSDs aren't cheap) and we've put a lot of R&D time into making this work right (thank you to our awesome sysadmins). So for us to make it enticing enough for resellers to sign up and offer enough space, bandwidth, cPanel accounts, etc we'd have to price it at a level where you'd most likely see a better ROI from a VPS. It would be a really tough market to hit and a really touchy price point to reach. So instead of trying to crunch numbers and find that happy zone, for now we offer it as a "shared" type solution. TL;DR - cost/benefit

Whoops, misread. Sometimes I see only what I want to see -- I suppose this is something we could consider, but we learned our lesson putting "resellers" (I use that term loosely in this case) on the same machines as non "resellers" years ago and won't be going back. So we'd need additional hardware, and we'd have to charge a good amount of money to make it a service worth offering. Additionally it would require different configurations than the ones we're using to offer the kind of space/bandwidth a reseller would need on these hardware configs. So as of right now, not something we can do unfortunately. In the future? It's on the table. You're quite welcome. I want to get as much information out there regarding these plans as quickly as possible and answer any questions people may have. Since it is such a new product we still have time to make improvements/changes before we get too committed to where we're at, and I know we've got some sharp minds around here that can offer valuable feedback. I think of it as a form of crowd-sourcing

What you'd pay us for a WHMCS license is the exact same you'd pay going through WHMCS directly, so we always suggest users go directly through them for licenses. Avoids having a middle man that way. I've thought about adding that option into these plans, but in our experience most people who need WHMCS go with reseller plans anyway, not shared/semi-dedicated. No to both, you'd need a VPS for that. Even with the beefed up hardware + setup we're using those still wouldn't play nice on the accounts and we don't want to risk anything at the server level to allow something we're not comfortable with. We went month to month for now to keep it simple and to allow us to launch and get a feel for the product in the public realm. I have full intentions on working up some pricing for 3, 6, and 12 month prepayments just like the other plans but for the initial launch we're trying to keep it simple. Phew, you guys are keeping me busy today!

A lot of the advantages, and looking at it the opposite way, limits, can be found at http://www.hawkhost.com/semi-dedicated-hosting/advantages -- Though working from the more common questions we get, the limits are: Your account has access to 2 CPUs, if you reach that limit you're account will be slowed down until more resources are freed up. 7 PHP processes, 20 concurrent processes (perl scripts, cron jobs, etc), 50 concurrent MySQL connections. A VPS has no limits on these values. Memory is not limited though it is monitored and anyone abusing this policy will be contacted. This policy is similar to shared, on a VPS you are limit to what your plan allows. 2,000 emails per hour. This is double the shared limit though VPS has no limit. That all comes to mind as to what varies between shared and semi-dedicated, though more to the point the TOS/AUP and SLA/uptime guarantee are the same on each. If there is a specific feature/limit you're curious about I'd be happy to clarify

PHP limit is still set to 7, though this *may* change. A lot of the problem with raising this is each PHP process uses a lot of memory, and until we know how these systems will perform in the real world we don't want to get to crazy with what we're offering. This one has been in the pipeline for quite some time, and I'm equally excited about the launch. We have a large number of existing and potential customers that want a plan in between VPS and shared and we truly believe this hits that niche perfectly. Nothing is set in stone right now as far as the values, so I will bring this up with the powers that be. We're going to see how these plans sell first and if we feel more bandwidth or space will entice more people, well then you know exactly what we'll do. We're looking to expand this out to Washington DC and maybe another West coast location in the coming months though for now we're going to stick to our guns and keep it in Texas (enter joke about Texans and guns here). Finally, CloudFlare is available still and if you view the comparison page (http://www.hawkhost....icated-hosting/) you'll see it on the right nav. We didn't make it an 'exclusive' or 'featured' offering for these plans since shared has it as well. Thanks for the quick feedback guys!

I made an "official" post at http://forums.hawkhost.com/topic/2319-semi-dedicated-plans-now-available/ but since that forum doesn't permit comments/feedback, I wanted to open up a topic here to introduce our newest service, semi-dedicated hosting. What do you guys think of the plans? Any feedback or suggestions you can make initially? These plans are brand new, we launched them maybe an hour before I made this post so we're very receptive to feedback and opinions right now. Let us hear it

You're welcome

You're welcome, and sorry about the initial delay. Thank you for signing up with us