Hawk Host Review

[frame align=”left”] [/frame]Well it’s time for another review again, this time for Hawk Host shared hosting. I have been giving their standard hosting plan a try for about 7 months – which offers 6GB of diskspace, and 90GB of storage – far plenty resources to run a WordPress website, or a CMS based website. There is no limit set on any other resources such as MySQL databases, email, or FTP accounts – however dedicated IP addresses cost an additional $3-$6/mo. Support is of-course available 24 x 7 x 365 via email/tickets and phone.

As for my own experience, I can’t say I have any complaints at all. I haven’t really had any serious issues with Hawk Host throughout my time with them – and I had made use of the shared hosting account by running several active WordPress websites on them, along with a few personal projects. The one thing I did notice is that during high-peak hours on the WordPress sites timeouts would occur as the CPU usage hit it’s limit. In each case support was very quick to assist with researching the issue, and sending over a few recommendations for the WordPress installs to help decrease the server load. For those curious, some caching and optimizing of the amount of queries the theme sent out was all it really took.

While on the topic of support, I would like to mention that I had never actually made use of their phone support. I probably should have, yet their email/ticket system made it so convenient for me – and the response time was so quick – I really didn’t need to call them. Plus this allowed me to focus on other things at the same time. Maybe in the future I’ll do a support call to them and update this post; if I do, I’ll let you all know.

The server itself never really felt sluggish. All of Hawk Host’s shared and reseller hosting servers utilize LiteSpeed Webserver which is a replacement to Apache. It is up to 900% faster than Apache when serving static content and up to 50% faster when serving PHP requests. GZIP compression is enabled on all of the servers, and DDOS protection, plus LiteSpeed Web server forwards requests to external applications such as CGI, Fast CGI and Servlet engine to process/generate dynamic content – helping increase speed and security. To boot – CloudFlare is enabled on each account, so you can further optimize your websites load time through the use of the ClouldFlare CDN network.

It all sounds like alot of random crap, but it does help your website’s load time – which in turn helps your SEO work, and helps increase your Google rankings.

Hawk Host uses cPanel, which if you’ve read through my GoDaddy Hosting Review, or any of my other ones – you’re aware it’s my favorite one. Everything is just … quicker. So big plus here. Both Fantastico and Softaculous are installed and configured – so you have plenty of scripts available at your 1-click disposal. Furthermore all planned updates and server downtime is announced well ahead of time in their support forums, which by the way is yet another great place to obtain some useful help from the staff, as well as other members.