CharlesM

Thumbs down on the current forum scheme. This is an example of going backwards, where branding is concerned. With regards to whatever point in time that you Hawks create a real nest (central office), as opposed to a virtual one, I suggest that you have a flag custom made for your company, and fly it proudly. Of course, where you fly it (indoors or outdoors) will largely depend upon the location of your office. http://forums.hawkho...ndpost__p__5218

I'll tell you what I would like to see. I would like to see the branding aspect taken to another level. You guys have what is, in my considered opinion, one of the best mascots in the entire web hosting industry, based upon what I have seen, to date. It sports a cape, and comes across as some type of superhero, of sorts. Yet, the poor bird has apparently been abducted by one of your evil competitors, and locked away in either suspended animation or a time-stasis vault. Why do I say this? Because, while you guys live out your quasi-fantastical lifestyles hobnobbing with industry cohorts and maniacal personalities of web hosting infamy, our good bird of mysterious origin has been confined to a meager existence in still shots for commercial purposes. BOO! HISS! BOO! HISS! Imagine, if you will - if you can - advertising in another form. A serial comic strip (it can be black and white or color) featuring the resident superhero of web hosting in action, tackling the endless parade of villains that populate web hosting. Instead of locking web hosting's equivalent of Superman in a virtual basement, why not lock Cody in the basement, and set the big, bad ass bird free to kick some ass and to take some names. To what end? Fun. Anticipation within your industry for each new episode. Greater name recognition. Bringing the brand to life,and injecting it with super powers. Because web hosting needs superheroes like.....uh.....what's his name. So, what is his name, anyway? DC has its Justice League. Marvel has its Avengers. Web hosting has its.....uh.....what exactly does web hosting have? It has a gator, and a cow, and a.....bird. A bird with no name. Does it have a name? I'll take bird names for two hundred, Alex. Forget the name. Does it have an origin? Or is it just a mascot, a nameless mascot? One other thing that I would like to see is a more personalized approach to the human elements of your company. I want to see Cody getting dunked in the water tank. I want to see you guys eating that box of doughnuts. I want to see glimpses of personalities, a collage of moments, a cascade of memories. Give me a reason to visit your forums, here, for Pete's sake. Uh, who's Pete, anyway? Does anybody know? You guys follow the crowd to Facebook, and you follow the crowd to Twitter. At any point in time, do you intend to lead, rather than to follow? For web hosting, you seek to be a destination - the destination - for those in need of web hosting services. Yet, your site is a bit sterile. I have a high opinion of your web hosting services. So, why do I hardly ever stop by your forums? It's currently a destination to what? For what? Are you guys seeking to corner the market on boring, or what? Hey, that's my job. We, your loyal denizens of web hosting existence, want to see Brian stepping out of the limo and onto the red carpet. We want to see Tony hard at work. We want to see the real Fabio. The gator doesn't even eat anybody, for crying out loud. What good is it? While you guys swim in the money down at the Hawk Host equivalent of Scrooge McDuck's money bin, I think that it's time to give something back - to us, your loyal following. In a nutshell, what I want to see is some imagination being unleashed. Your services? They're fine. I don't have a bone to pick with them.

Hawks, I hope and I trust that this holiday season, and in particular this Christmas, is a time of great joy and unparalleled peace in your respective lives. I know none of you on a personal level, but I do want to say that I certainly appreciate all of the time, advice, and assistance that those of you on the Hawk Host staff have provided to me over the duration of my time as a customer with your company. The websites that I host with your company are all very small, hobby or personal type sites. None of them are very big, relatively speaking, and it is not my aim that any of them ever become big. Most of the problems that I encounter with my websites tend to be forum related, and even then, the vast majority of those particular problems likely have origins that are traceable to errors on my end. Allow me to take this opportunity to extend a personal thank you to one and all involved on the Hawk Host side of things, so that my websites remain up and running and accessible, for those few souls who do utilize them to interact with both myself and others. I would also take this time to remind each and every one of you hawks that Christmas is special, and that it should always be special, whether one's personal life is happy or sad, orderly or chaotic, full of comforts or bereft of the luxuries that life has to offer. Indeed, anything above and beyond life, itself, is a luxury, I dare say. My son, who is five and one half years old, is the most important person in my life. This individual that didn't even exist a few short years ago has managed to overtake all others in my life to occupy the firmament of my thoughts, both day and night. The relevance of this to Hawk Host? It's all about relationship - the relationship that required an active investment of my time and energy and attention, an investment that is ongoing, and one which I wish to perpetuate ad infinitum. Success is not a slave to money nor to profit. Indeed, success doesn't even depend upon those things, at all. One can make tons of money selling drugs and destroying people's lives. I would encourage all hawks to never lose sight of the importance of crafting, nurturing, and perpetuating relationships with Hawk Host's customers. Over the long run, I truly believe that you will find that you will find that aspect of running your company to ultimately be the most rewarding, and certainly far more rewarding than just raking up customers as mere numbers, or the money that they toss your company's way. It's not about beating the competition. If left to their own designs, the competition will, quite often, be more than willing to beat itself. Never underestimate the willingness of the competition to slice its own throat, or to shoot itself in the foot. The only one that you ever really have any control over is your own self, not the competition. If you invest your time in building relationships of actual substance, then when all is said and done, you will end up with something of great significance. I bid each of you greetings and salutations. I send warm wishes your way for a Christmas marked with meaning, one that finds its way into your hearts and your memories. I wish you Merry Christmas! Because Christmas only has as much meaning as you assign to it, Charles

Recently, I had a domain name with GoDaddy and a web hosting package with HawkHost come up for renewal. I had intended to simply renew both, and it be an uneventful anniversary. But, sometimes things that are intended to be uneventful occasions end up being eventful, nonetheless. I have a wonderful wife. I love my wife. My wife, however, has no appreciation for anything web hosting related. My wife did not grasp the importance of renewing the domain name and the web hosting service on the actual date that the renewals came due. So, I allowed them both to expire. I also decided to try and find the silver lining in this particular cloud. I succeeded. A week or so later, I renewed both. I renewed my domain name with GoDaddy by telephone, since their control panel is still this horrendously dial-up unfriendly monstrosity from the other side of Hell. I hate their control panel. I've always hated their control panel. I will likely always hate their control panel. It's a lot quicker to just renew by phone, where GoDaddy is concerned, than for me to wait until the dawn of the next Ice Age for their control panel to load on my end. That said, my overall experience with the telephone support aspect of GoDaddy has been fairly positive. Their detestable control panel is why I switched web hosting away from GoDaddy, and this most recent experience with it merely affirmed that I had made the right decision, previously, to switch to another web hosting company. Where HawkHost is concerned, HawkHost sent me an invoice reminder, and three separate overdue notices, after I allowed the web hosting account with them to expire. Upon receiving that third overdue notice, which was stated as being the final billing notice, I decided to then renew my web hosting with HawkHost. I did so electronically, and it was a very smooth and flawless transition. I renewed just prior to leaving home for the day, and when I returned home that night, my site was back up and running just fine - as though it had never been gone in the first place. I don't particularly recommend to anyone to allow their domain name and web hosting service to expire, no matter who you are hosting with, but this rather unplanned occasion ended up providing me with a golden opportunity to test an aspect of HawkHost's service that I otherwise would simply not have been in a position to try. Did I even consider switching to another webhost? Oh, sure I did. I considered it, but as I pondered and considered it at length, I concluded that I didn't really have any beef or complaint with the service that I had received from HawkHost over the last year. It is reliable web hosting backed up by a reliable company, one populated by a competent and proficient crew. I don't have any regrets switching my web hosting service over to HawkHost last year. Superb job, gentlemen!

You'll be replying shortly, eh?

Of everyone at HawkHost that I have dealt with and interacted with over the whole period of time that I have interacted with any or all of you, none of HawkHost's personnel have left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Some of you I rate higher than others of you, but one thing that is probably worth highlighting is that I don't rate any of you as being bad or as being a negative for the company. Both as individuals and collectively, as a team, I give HawkHost personnel two thumbs up. If there are HawkHost personnel who warrant a negative rating, then I haven't interacted with them, yet. I don't expect perfection from any web hosting company that I utilize for web hosting services. Things happen, and that's simply a fact of life. Perfection, itself, is unobtainable. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I tend to be a realist. The simple reality is that HawkHost is reliable, on a day in, day out basis. HawkHost is consistently reliable. HawkHost personnel are very consistent in responding to support tickets in a timely manner. There tends to be very little in the way of site downtime. Occasionally, there might be, but there simply have been no extended periods of site downtime - ever. It just hasn't happened, as far as I am aware. I haven't used WHT in a while, although I think that it's a great site. It has its quirks, of course, but even still, it's a very valuable resource for those looking for web hosting services. One of HawkHost's key strengths as a web hosting company is its response time to support tickets. It's not just that you guys respond fairly quickly. Rather, when you do respond, and it does tend to be quick, mind you, it's not just a response. There's actual support that accompanies the communications that take place between myself, as a web hosting customer, and HawkHost personnel. I never fret over which one of HawkHost's employees will be the one that responds, when I create a support ticket. The individual personalities are a non-issue. I already have confidence that support is just a support ticket away. Your team is very good at building the confidence level of the end consumer of your company's products and services. There's always room for improvement. There's no exception to that general rule of thumb. Since you asked, Cody, let's start with yourself. You stated, "I know you're very pragmatic / detail oriented so I'm somewhat surprised we passed with flying colors." The real question here is, why were you, as an employee of HawkHost, surprised that your company passed with flying colors, with me, your customer? To me, it really shouldn't come as a surprise. The only surprise should be if someone doesn't give HawkHost flying colors in their review of your company. One thing that you guys could do is to add a few more links at the top of your forum index page. As an example, there's no link to the HawkHost blog from that page, but there is such a link from your company's home page. You guys have one of the very best mascots in all of web hosting, but HawkHost seems to make little, if any, real effort to exploit that. Fantastic mascot, yet very few poses of your company's namesake in action. You guys finally managed to have the company bird to roost at the top of the forum index page, but that took the proverbial forever. If you guys did everything that slow, then HawkHost would have been out of business long ago. Another area that your company could look at is in the area of following up, either weeks or months after the fact, just to see if your company is up to par with its customers. Because you guys do such a good job, it may be easy to overlook why this type of follow up can be helpful. It's about customer relations, and cementing the bond between customer and company. Where service issues are concerned, if HawkHost will focus upon what I term service-plus, rather than just service, then that will take things another notch higher in the customer satisfaction arena. Tony zeroing in on why my forum didn't look right is one example of service-plus. Ultimately, I did not succeed in getting my forum software upgraded, with the old database imported, in the manner that I wanted to end up at. Had I ended up there, then that, to me, would have been service plus. I don't fault your technical support for failing me, but for helping me to salvage what could have been a disaster for me. To provide service-plus in all instances of technical support will require a more manpower-intensive approach, but it will also effectively elevate your company beyond the absolute vast majority of your competitors in the web hosting industry. That said, the simple fact of the matter is that your customer service is already ahead of the vast majority of your competitors. From your company's perspective, the difference might end up being a difference of degrees. You guys receive lots of compliments about your service, already - and have, for quite some time, now. How often is your company's customer service described as fanatical, though? I rate it as superior, but I would not go so far as to describe it as fanatical. I don't know that I would use that term to describe any web hosting company that I have ever interacted with, though. In some instances in the web hosting sector, it may not even be possible to achieve that level of devotion and commitment to customer service. That's just a fact of life, too. At the present time, there simply are no major voids or gaps in HawkHost's customer service. Granted, that's from my perspective, and I can't speak for any of HawkHost's other customers. Their respective experiences may or may not vary from what my own experiences have been, to date. On a separate note, if I may ask here, whatever happened to HawkHost's other web hosting venture, FrogHost? The FrogBlog hasn't been posted to in almost six months. Somebody sure dropped the ball there. I don't have a FrogHost web hosting account, but I still like to check in on how it is doing, from time to time. The FrogHost forums also seem to have a total of 65 postings in them. That's sad, gentlemen. Sad, sad, sad. And what's with that ugly image in the header portion of the FrogBlog home page? I don't see a single frog in it. Thus, the importance of your company's branding concept is trivialized.

It's been just a little shy of eleven months, since I became a HawkHost customer, if I looked at the right e-mail in my in-box. All things considered, I think that HawkHost has been a really good and reliable web hosting company. On the customer service end of things, I think that HawkHost is top notch. the personnel are very helpful, helping me to sort through whatever problem rears its head on those very few occasions that something does happen. It's a big help, and a true comfort, to be able to call upon their expertise, both individually and collectively, in order to keep my websites up, running, and accessible by site visitors. In a nutshell, I would characterize HawkHost as a quality act. I don't get paid for saying that. I'm not an affiliate. My sites are relatively small, and are basically hobby type sites, but even still, it's nice not to have to continually sort through web host headaches. HawkHost is a good place to roost, if you're looking for a web host. Fabian Porter, Gary Paul, and Tony Baird, all HawkHost personnel, helped me with my latest problem, a forum issue. Tony gave me the solution to a problem that cropped up, saving me time and money. I am trying to recall, offhand, if I have interacted with Gary before, but I can't recall. Fabian, I do recall interacting with, before, on several occasions. Fabian is always a class act, and there just isn't anyone at HawkHost that I have encountered who leads the way in customer service more so than Fabian. I browsed the HawkHost blog, tonight, and noticed where Tony posted that HawkHost's profits were up. You guys need to make sure that Fabian gets a raise, out of those profits. I don't know any of HawkHost's personnel on a personal level. My interactions with them relate to web hosting, in some way, shape, or form. I've dealt with some crappy web hosting companies, before, down through the years. HawkHost, though, doesn't fall into that category, based upon my first-hand experience with them over the last almost eleven months or so. I can, in good conscience, recommend HawkHost as a webhost for anyone out there who might be looking for a web host to host a website with. I say this, whether you are new to having your own website, or if you are a veteran webmaster. HawkHost has a good price and a good product, backed up by good customer service. Their service is actually better than good. It's superior. At a bare minimum, I think that you should at least consider HawkHost, when looking for a new webhost, even if you eventually end up picking another company to host your site with. HawkHost isn't the only decent web hosting company out there. There are others, certainly. HawkHost doesn't hold a monopoly upon good service in the web hosting industry, but it consistently delivers good service to me. And that, I think, warrants sharing with others. - Charles - http://GrimFinger.Net http://PlayByMail.Net

Fly high with HawkHost! Soar high with HawkHost! Send your site soaring with HawkHost! Talk the talk, soar with the Hawk - HawkHost!

I am curious about the Pluto server. In the following thread on the WebHostingTalk forums: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=919152 Tony said on 01-19-2010, 04:56 PM : In the HawkHost forums, Tony more recently said on 02-23-2010, 06:59 PM : If all servers were using 15KRPM sas drives back in January, then why was the Pluto server using 10K SATA drives in February? Or is Pluto a new server? Or, am I comprehending something incorrectly?

I am trying to recall, but I think that I became aware of HawkHost as a web hosting company by browsing and reading the WebHostingTalk forums.

Your forums, here, have a section titled "Customer Reviews." Yet, all of the reviews of customer experiences that are posted in the forums here are not located in this forum. An example of this can be found here: http://forums.hawkhost.com/showthread.php?t=206 Wouldn't it make more sense to move such postings to the Customer Reviews section?

You guys have a great brand look - but, only when you choose to utilize it. I haven't seen a better looking mascot in the web hosting industry. At least, not as of yet, I haven't. I won't say the same for that pitiful looking frog, that you intend to use for the FrogHost brand, but the HawkHost hawk looks great. One thing that would be an improvement for the hawk mascot, though, would be to keep the same look, but different poses. Not extending that brand look to your forums doesn't hurt anything, physically speaking, but it is a partial wasting of something that you guys took the time, effort, and trouble to build in the first place. The plain, vanilla vBulletin forums work fine, but they don't leave the site visitor with the same impression that your site's front page leaves them with. The collective feel is less professional, overall, than it probably would be, were the brand look extended to the forum area. Average Internet users who start websites are more likely to have experience using forums than using support ticket software, which is why forums should be an integral component of a modern web hosting company's support efforts. Web hosting companies tend to have a dreadful tendency to gear things towards themselves, rather than to their clients or to their potential clients. Yes, it's there - assuming that a site visitor bothers to scroll down and happen across it. That aside, it is a very relevant consideration (hardware specifications) in discussions of comparisons between web hosts in web hosting forums such as WebHostingTalk and others, where people post and are trying to figure out what web host to go with. I think that disk space and bandwidth tend to dominate the thought process of people looking for a web host - probably due to the fact that those two things tend to receive the lion's share of web hosting companies' advertising focus. The things that you guys do right is not a problem for either your customers or your company. HawkHost does a number of things right. Some of what you do wrong, or do not do at all, would probably still not be an issue with at least some prospective or current customers. But, if you want to maximize results, then the area to focus is on the problem areas or the areas where you're not really doing anything, at all, but perhaps where you should be. But, the same holds equally true for every web hosting company. You're no different than all of your competitors, in that regard. If you want an advantage over many of your competitors, then one way to achieve that is to simply always be receptive to criticism. If you take criticism(s) personally, then that will incur disadvantage to your company. Criticism is, after all, at the core of a concept known as "critical analysis." I'm not saying that your company takes criticism personally, either. Rather, I am merely elaborating upon how criticism plays a critical role in the ability of a company to improve. My vantage point is somewhat limited, of course, but from what I have seen and encountered, to date, your company really doesn't do a lot of things too terribly wrong. It gets a lot of things right. If your company has an Achilles heel, then it probably a two-fold thing. One aspect of that Achilles heel is communication. The other aspect of it is attention-to-detail. I can even provide you a specific instance to help illustrate the point. I refer you to support ticket # IYE-529039. If you will refer to the third entry in that particular string of support ticket discussions, then you will see where I posted how long that Cody told me that it would take to transfer my site's files from GoDaddy to HawkHost, and how long it had been and it still wasn't done. I am not trying to pick on Cody, but this example is a sterling example of how a bit more attention to detail could have helped to reduce the amount of time that lapsed. The time that lapsed impacted the customer's (namely, myself, in that particular instance - but it could be someone else in a different example) impression and expectation. A single oversight can easily and very quickly magnify a problem and bloat time frames. If you scroll further down that very same support ticket, you will find where I pondered invoking HawkHost's 30-day money back guarantee. If you are trying to win a new customer's loyalty, then you definitely don't want them to begin thinking about possibly needing or wanting to invoke that guarantee. Understand, I don't regret switching from GoDaddy to HawkHost. I go to the trouble of posting this, now, to try and help you guys at HawkHost to understand how even a simple oversight can initiate a cycle that can quickly begin to unravel relationships with clients. It was not HawkHost's fault, of course, that I wait until the proverbial eleventh hour of my web hosting plan's time with GoDaddy to try and switch things over to HawkHost. However, should that really matter? Shouldn't transitions to HawkHost be seamless for new customers? During that episode, I ended up extending my service with GoDaddy for one extra month. Should a client have to do that or feel a need to do that? Why did I do it? One, because GoDaddy's tech support succeeded in persuading me to buy that service from them, even as I was leaving their company. That's a feather in their staff's hat. Two, my disdain for GoDaddy's control panel had grown so great over time that there was no way that I was not going to change web hosts - be it to HawkHost or to someone else. Three, I wanted peace of mind that I would have something of my website left to actually transfer to a new web host. It is the same combination of things, attention-to-detail and communication deficiencies, that is at the crux of what is wrong with HawkHost's blog. HawkHost communicates through its blog only infrequently, with no attention-to-detail apparently given to the need to post with a far greater degree of regularity. Tony writes some great blog entries - but, only when he bothers to take the time to actually do it. What difference does it make? The HawkHost blog could potentially be one of your company's greatest knowledge bases - but, it isn't. If you look hard enough, you might also discover that very same combo to be the prime culprit in the area of HawkHost not cementing relationships with its existing client base, sufficient to the degree that they jump ship to other web hosts. Tony may think that it is due to other web hosts offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth, but that is likely due primarily to those individuals not really sensing that they have a relationship of any note. Rather, you're probably just a web host to them. If tech support is the hinge point of your efforts to build relationships with clients, then any web host offering great tech support constitutes a viable threat to your entire client base. How many web hosts offer 99.9% uptime, these days, by the way? Quite an awful lot, the last time that I looked. In order to provide great tech support, a company has to make it a priority, and it has to allocate sufficient manpower to make great tech support a reality. This is common sense. The same holds true for building relationships with clients. Tech support should be a part of a web hosting company's relationship with its clients. It should not, however, become a substitute for the relationship, which is unfortunately the case with many web hosting companies.

As far as reliability of my site being up, once it was transferred to HawkHost, I don't have any complaints. My web host transition from GoDaddy to HawkHost was not flawless. If I were to narrow it down, the crux of it is probably traceable to an oversight in communication. One day, I will try to go back through the old support tickets, and give you a better idea of how the initial problems could have been avoided. More relevant to the present day and time, though, I don't really understand why you guys have been so slow to extend your branding efforts to your forum area. It doesn't affect the quality of my site's web hosting, certainly, but it does detract from the overall experience - but only if and when I use your forums. Your forum area advertises vBulletin more than it advertises HawkHost. While at your forum area, HawkHost's favicon image doesn't show up in the URL bar of the web browser, either. You upload a favicon file to overwrite the other one, so I'm not sure why that hasn't long since been done, already. I recently was fiddling around with the listed offerings information of different web hosting companies, to get a better idea of which web host offers more for the money, and one area where HawkHost would probably be better off stressing more to prospective customers is server hardware. # Dual Quad Core Xeon 5430 # 12 GB of DDR system RAM Source: http://www.hawkhost.com/Shared/compare That info was easier to find on the HawkHost site than something comparable on the MDDHosting site, for example, where what I came across while comparing plans was the following: Our servers are built using Xeon Quad Core processors and a minimum of 4 gigabytes of ram. Source: http://www.mddhosting.com/company.php I enjoy reading Tony's blog postings. However, there are so very few of them, that I would not rate HawkHost very highly for its use of a blog. The blog seems to be largely an afterthought for HawkHost. I am short on time here, today, and must end this here.

The single best thing that I did to avoid spambot registrations, and consequently spambot postings, when an admin on a vBulletin based forum, was to implement a single question in the registration process, one that asked a simple question, such as 2+5=7. It was added in the User Profile Field.

It took three attempts to register, due to the image recognition process in place here. I started to just fore go registering. More legible images would be an improvement.

Yes. I tried to respond with just a simple, "Yes," but the forum software restrictions won't allow that.