We recently had a couple of clients ask about announcements via RSS feed. Well if you weren’t aware we post all of our announcements through our forums - which has RSS feeds enabled as an ouput type!

So if you would like to get the latest announcements from our forum you will use the following URL:

http://www.hawkhost.com/forums/external.php?type=xml&forumids=5

.. and if you would like the last five posts from the announcement forum use this URL:

http://www.hawkhost.com/forums/external.php?type=xml&forumids=5&lastpost=true

Until next time,
Cody

Yesterday there was a report of a strange bug by a user on a system I’m currently working with.  I was told a specific row was not showing up in the data set.  The system was using PostgreSQL for the database and used ExtJS grid component to render the data set so my first instinct was the user was not paging to the next set of data.  To my surprise even when paging I was unable to find the data as well.  I was really confused on this one so I decided to throw the query into my trusty SQL editor and see what is going on.  The first thing I did was remove the limit and offset portions of the query as I had no interest in paging.  To my surprise the entry did in fact show up when I ran it without the limit and offset.  When I ran the query with a limit and a offset and paged through each page I could not find this row.

I was really confused now and to add to my confusion ExtJS was set to do sorting on the ID field of the dataset once the data arrived.  Yet the data itself did not do any sorting so it came back sort of out of place but not entirely.  So I then decided to add an ORDER BY to the statement just so the result would turn up on the first page and sure enough it did.

The reason for this is if you do not set an ORDER BY the database determines how to sort it.  Now usually this is fine if you have one table it’ll end up sorting by the order the data came into the database which usually means it’ll be ordered by the primary key.  This data set however joined several tables and did some sub queries.  So with the changing of the offset on the query resulted in the query planner changing how it was sorting the data set or at least that’s my theory.  It seems strange for it to do it but if you play around with a query analyzer for a bit some times you can see very different ways of putting a query together depending on just a few small changes in the query that you’d think would not result in any changes in how the data is put together.

So my tip to everyone righting queries make a habit of putting an order by statement in no matter how simple the query may be.  You may get logical results on simple queries but as they become more complicated the sorting may start to become unpredictable especially when you’re using offset or limit clauses.

The Hawk Host site currently uses a semi framework I built several years ago to do MVC.  It was great at the time was very light weight and did the job.  As we’ve grown over the past year we’ve found it necessary to change things on our site and add pages.  This is now where it gets tricky as my framework system did not actually have any search engine friendly URL system built into it.  We actually manually specify the rewrites in our .htaccess which has become troublesome as more than just myself need to modify our site.  Not to say there aren’t some things that are easy to change.  One of them being the features of our pages which are dynamically loaded for the most part and can inherit that of other pages.  For example our reseller page inherits a lot of the features from our shared hosting page.

So here goes our road to having our site in Zend framework while keeping our existing url’s while using new url’s for our old url’s.

The site will be using the following Zend Framework features:

• Zend routing system including the controller system
• Zend loader to handle all the autoloading of classes
• Zend_DB for our database needs.  Specifically we will be utilizing the MySQL portion as our current database is MySQL
• The Zend_Db_Table portion for some of our data handling along with our own model class to minimize the amount of times we’re loading meta data from the tables when it is unnecessary.
• The site currently uses smarty and we’ll be sticking with that putting a Smarty view helper into the controllers.
• Other portions I’m forgetting at the time of this post

Now as far as what exactly will be changed once the site goes up.  Not a whole lot it’ll still be as fast as ever and it will continue to still use the same design.  Using Zend Framework however enables us to easily add new features without all the annoying manual rewrites going on.  So some features we may even have for when the site is Zend framework powered are:

• Weekly specials page which will be read from the database and controlled by anyone on our sales staff.  This will allow us to be much more dynamic with our deals
• A more robust server status page with monitoring of all the key services on each server.  The services will be dynamic allowing for scaling of various types of servers.  We will also cache the status’s so it may be 1-5 minutes delayed.  Which is great if you want a quick check as doing checks on the fly can be very slow

So there’s a preview to our road to Zend Framework.  I’ll be sure to make another post once we have our site running using Zend framework.

Tomorrow some time during the afternoon all our servers will have PHP 4 removed from them due to the end of life being today (August 8th 2008).  Although there was new release on Thursday the 7th to address some security holes it’s quite clear it’s time to stop using considering in the PHP news post it also says it’ll be the last release.  For anyone who’s curious here’s what was part of the PHP 4.4.9 release:

• Updated PCRE to version 7.7.
• Fixed overflow in memnstr().
• Fixed crash in imageloadfont when an invalid font is given.
• Fixed open_basedir handling issue in the curl extension.
• Fixed mbstring.func_overload set in .htaccess becomes global.

The one thing that has been holding us back from doing this migration is we have customers specifically setting their PHP scripts to PHP4!  This after we sent an email almost a year ago about PHP4 now being unsupported and could be removed at any time.  We’ve also had several more announcements about the pending removal of PHP4 including one last week.  So I’m expecting numerous tickets complaining about this change, but unfortunately you need to get rid of legacy things like this eventually especially when the pose security risks.

So here’s hoping no one complains but I imagine we’ll have at least a few tickets related to the switch.  Hopefully it’ll be a matter of the users just updating to a newer version of their script but who knows.  People just do not upgrade things until their sites break even after being warned countless times over the course of a year.
So good riddance PHP4!  You should have been removed from our servers 3 years ago!

Well as most of you are aware we introduced a 1-800 about a month and a half ago. This has been a godsend and a burden all at the same time. Why? Well currently the 1-800 number forwards to only Tony and I’s cell phones, which is all peachy except the fact that we have a horrible tendency to miss calls. After debating if we should remove the 1-800 number from the public until we can properly staff it we’ve decided to introduce certain “business hours” for the 1-800 number to assure people someone will be on the other line.

As of right now we’re still discussing the proper hours / days to staff the 1-800 number - though it will likely be normal business hours (Mon-Fri 9-5). We’re also training another staff member to alleviate some of the work load and provide extra 1-800 and live chat coverage.

On a side note we’re starting to revamp the knowledgebase after fixing the templates (they weren’t parsing newlines) - so expect to see it grow over the next few weeks. If you have any particular you think we should add please let us know!

Until next time,
Cody

I check the PHP site once in a while to see if there are any new updates and to my surprise the other day they announced that PHP 5.3 alpha has been released.  We’d love to put it on Hawk Host to play around, but at this time it’s not meant for a production environment.  This of course does not stop you from loading it up on a virtual private server from us and playing around with it that way.

Important changes:

• Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated)
• Late static binding and __callStatic
• Lambda functions and closures
• Addition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensions
• Optional cyclic garbage collection
• Optional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysql
• Windows older than Windows 2000 (Windows 98, NT4, etc.) are not supported anymore (details)
• New syntax features like NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut “?:”

So there are quite a few useful things coming to PHP 5.3 which I believe originally were going to show up in PHP 6 but these features were deemed backward compatible enough to be in PHP 5.3.

So based on things right now we do not expect a stable version of PHP 5.3 based on the PHP wiki until September or October.  So I personally cannot wait for some of these features!

Well it’s the end of July (already August if you’re picky) and it’s been a crazy one. It’s been one of our busiest months to date and we see no indication of it slowing down. So what should you expect this upcoming month? Well we’ll be working on getting more people on the live chat during the days (and obscure hours) while improving our 1-800 number response time / rate. We will also be working on small things such as the knowledgebase, website, and forums - so keep your eyes peeled.

This was just a quick blog post to recap this past month - hopefully next month is better and we can introduce some new and exciting services or features to Hawk Host!
Until next time!

Today at about 7pm EST my career of posting on the Digital Point forums has been put into real jeopardy after receiving a 6 month ban.  I do not believe it to be a fair ban by any means considering all the rule breaking and illegal activity that goes on in the various digital point forums.

My ban was for the following:

Reason: Spamming

——-
Quit spamming the same offer over and over and over.
——-

This is the first infraction I’ve received on this forum in probably over a year.  I was given two identical infractions and a 6 month ban so pretty much no warning there.

If there was a way to appeal the ban I probably would give an attempt, but unfortunately you have no say in infractions or bans on that forum.  Like a main stream sports athlete I will sit out my suspension awaiting my chance to post again which will not come until January 24th 2009.  My fans are welcome to show their displeasure for the ban by making their voice heard on the various forums on digital point.  I do not think it will do anything so I will train hard to be ready for the next time I can post on the forum and hopefully I can come back better than ever.  But like most sports stars that sort of come back after a lengthy layoff there will be many skeptics that will say I’ll never be the same again.

I will continue to work on my skills by posting more on WebHostingTalk, Sitepoint and heck maybe even a few other forums I do not frequent as much as I used to.

Now as far as this affects Hawk Host well it will not affect us in anyway.  Of the hundreds of new customers we add each month from various forums via referrals Digital Point while being one of the larger ones did not have as many sale conversions as many others.  The few that did come via the forum also used stolen paypal accounts frequently as well.  For the few that did come to us via digital point as always you can use our standard forms of support which we encourage opposed to sending us private messages on forums because obviously at least one of us cannot respond to them on digital point anyways.

Any of our clients can attest to our knowledgebase here at HawkHost is lackluster. We’re the first to admit it’s lacking some essentials. Well over the next month or so we’re going to try and revamp the knowledgebase with some frequently asked questions (asked to us by clients, prospective clients, etc). Once we finish that we’ll try to address more pointed issues (such as “I receive error ____ how do I fix it?”).

The point of this quick blog post was to let people know we’re going to work on the knowledgebase and would like input from anyone (client or not) to let us know of some helpful stuff you would like to see.

If your question isn’t in the knowledgebase please don’t hesitate to contact us!

A few month’s ago we were lucky to see one of our customers to say “Hi” to us or grace their precense on our forums - we had a substantial amount of people we hosted yet we never heard a peep from them. We always were under the impression that we offered a solid service and noone had problems so they just went about enjoying their service(s).

Well in the past few month’s we’ve noticed our customers being more “outgoing” and mentioning us on forums, their own websites, and even referring friends. Why the change? We’re not sure - though we’re glad. It is true we’ve grown significantly in the past few months but it almost seems that someone hit a “On” switch and suddenly decided to tell people they liked us. Who knows.

There’s no real point to this post beyond me ranting - below are just some reviews that people have posted about us recently in case you’re curious.

HawkHost Reviews

• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=708279
• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=704680
• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=699282
• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=683723
• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=681634
• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=677300
• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=670929
• http://hostjury.com/reviews/hawk+host

Also we still accept testimonials for the frontpage - if you’re interested just send us a ticket with the topic of “Testimonial” and provide us with your name / website. We’ll put it up un-altered for the world to see (we may fix grammar issues if there is any).

Thanks to all of our customers, especially the ones who have gone out of their way to plug us one way or another. We do appreciate it and we’re glad to hear that you’ve been ejoying your service(s) with us. We try our best!

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-Cody