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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    237

    Thumbs up HawkHost.com review

    Hello guys, time has come to review my host.

    I'm with HawkHost.com for 1 month. Before that I never registered a domain and never hosted websites out of my PC, I just installed apache+tomcat at home and an university a few times to develop Java web applications. So, consider me as a noob user entering on this world and they having to deal with that


    I decided to register a domain and pay a host, firstly because I was pissed with Yahoo's SMTP restriction and its POP3 blocking legitimate email at the same time I keep receiving tons of spam everyday. I wanted freedom to choose my email provider and my own domain with as many emails as I wanted.

    Since I was not going to use lots of storage (I don't need thousand of GB for each email either) nor bandwidth, I wanted a service as cheap as possible, with small storange and bandwidth, and still with unlimited email accounts, subdomains and addon domains: since the quantity of subdomains and addon domains doesn't increase host bugget, I don't see why to limit them.

    As a total noob and without looking for reviews, I found HawkHost on Google offering what I wanted, with good price and still lot more storage/bandwith than I needed, and chose them for my domain and email house


    Since then, I had great support, everything I couldn't do with cPanel (like DNS configs) they have been helping me, and sometimes when I was lost they did all they could to solve my problems. I can assure their support is very good and they are patient with noobs

    Their speed is the same of other websites I access and of yahoo when it comes to email download, I don't feel any difference. Nobody that accessed my site complained about speed. I also noticed their DNS servers are geographically separated from each other and from host, which is damn good.


    Everything was so easy and fast that I started to like it, and from a simple site I had with my PC configuration (which I used to host on geocities and transfered to my host to not let my domain empty), I created a blog first on blogspot and then transfered it to wordpress, added a few AdSense to it (which is still on US$0,00 and I may remove soon ) and I even was able to create other 2 subdomains with wordpress installed to test stuff. Everything easy and smart.

    I also registered a few other domains, one of them being a .br domain. Its registrar is very poor and require DNS server configured BEFORE releasing the domain to me, cPanel was not letting me add this domain and they helped me too.

    Another cool thing they helped me to do was let me redirect a subdomain to DNSExit.com, so that I can use my domain to point to my home dynamic IP.


    Well for me and my requirements HawkHost.com is almost perfect and Tony Baird is really trying to help on support. I always talked only to him, on online chat and email.


    Good:
    1. support
    2. unlimited subdomains and addon domains
    3. geographically separated DNS servers
    4. speed
    5. SMTP and POP3 over SSL
    6. price


    Bad:
    • I need to contact support every time I need to do any DNS config
    • Live chat is not 24/7
    • I cant redirect all unused subdomains to root domain, to not let a wrong access return an error


    I will review it again with 6 months and when I renew contract.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Aberdeen, Scotland.
    Posts
    179
    "I cant redirect all unused subdomains to root domain, to not let a wrong access return an error"

    If needed, you could easily just add an html document called index.html in the subdomains folder, and if there's nothing in it, you should type this into it after <head> and before </head>

    <meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="4; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/">
    So you could do this:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="4; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/">
    <title>Untitled Document</title>

    </head>

    <body>
    Sorry, you accessed an non accessible area, please wait while we redirect you to the main site.
    </body>
    </html>
    Hope that helped on that particular matter.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    237
    2 things I forgot. SSH shell is disabled by default, I never really needed it and I can contact support to enable it if someday I need it. But I'm allowed to use SSH for transfer, so I use WinSCP instead of FTP.

    And on cPanel server status, I can see they are not overselling: server is not on heavy use and has a lot of space to grow.


    Quote Originally Posted by BetaOrange View Post
    "I cant redirect all unused subdomains to root domain, to not let a wrong access return an error"

    If needed, you could easily just add an html document called index.html in the subdomains folder, and if there's nothing in it, you should type this into it after <head> and before </head>
    hmm that's not it. What I wanted is to point *.domain.com to domain.com, any subdomain like invalid.domain.com blablabla.domain.com crazy.domain.com u4yasj34hiu.domain.com redirecting to root domain and returning a valid page instead of an error, while used subdomains like blog.domain.com keeps working normally.

  4. #4
    Congratulations on finding a hosting provider that fits your needs!


    Quote Originally Posted by Hikari View Post
    2 things I forgot. SSH shell is disabled by default, I never really needed it and I can contact support to enable it if someday I need it. But I'm allowed to use SSH for transfer, so I use WinSCP instead of FTP.
    Enabling SSH on permission basis is a good approach, imho.

    What you write about geographically separated namservers sounds good too.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Aberdeen, Scotland.
    Posts
    179
    If that's what you want, then you should:

    Log into cPanel, then select "Error Pages" (If you can't find it, use ctrl+f then type error pages), then click on 404, then change the code to the code given above, then if someone visits a subdomain or directory that doesn't exist, It will take them back to the original site.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    237
    Quote Originally Posted by BetaOrange View Post
    If that's what you want, then you should:

    Log into cPanel, then select "Error Pages" (If you can't find it, use ctrl+f then type error pages), then click on 404, then change the code to the code given above, then if someone visits a subdomain or directory that doesn't exist, It will take them back to the original site.
    hmm good idea, but it wouldn't work also. If I try to access let's say unused.domain.com, I don't receive an error message, I'm sent to http://guide.opendns.com/?url=unused.domain.com ... yeah I use OpenDNS here I also tried with ISP DNS and I'm sent to search page.
    It seems to be a DNS issue and not a cPanel or web server one.

    I'm not expert on DNS, but on name.com I have 2 domains registered using WebForwarding. On it there is a A record resolving *.domain2.com to the same IP domain2.com is resolved, and their server forwards any subdomain. I already asked HawkHost to do the same with my main domain but they said it is not possible.


    Anyway tnx for the cheers and trying to help

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Indiana, USA
    Posts
    19,196
    Add an A name to your DNS configuration

    "*.yourdomain.com." (the trailing period is important) and point it to your web server's IP address. This way ANY subdomain that is not specified in the DNS will all go to the root home page.

    Edit: I see you have to call your host for any DNS changes - I guess you are relying on them for this. Call them up and tell them what you want it to do and they *should* be able to do it for you - if not... I'd ask why not at the least.
    Last edited by Mike - MDDHosting; 03-09-2008 at 01:14 PM.
    Michael Denney - MDDHosting.com - Proudly hosting more than 37,700 websites since 2007.
    Ultra-Fast Cloud Shared and Pay-By-Use Reseller Hosting Powered by LiteSpeed!
    cPanel • Free SSL • 100% Uptime SLA • 24/7 Support
    Class-leading support that responds in minutes, not days.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    237
    That also didn't work :/

    They did the A rule, but cPanel doesn't recognize this domain and sends to its default page.

    To not mix topics, I created another one to discuss this matter: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...89#post5000789

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
    Location
    Canada
    Posts
    3,785
    I'm glad your experience with us has overall been a good one thus far.

    To address a few things:

    You've only talked to me but I think that's just luck. In fact I believe you talked to someone else today about something.

    The DNS configuration, well we run cPanel and it does not give you the option to edit your domains dns zone. So we really don't have an easy way around that.

    The unused subdomains what you're asking for is wildcards. This requires a DNS entry as well as modifications to the web server configuration as well. Any time we rebuild that configuration you're going to end up losing the customizations put in place. We avoid doing custom things like this due to that exact reason of the fact it isn't a feature of our panel and it would be something we'd add that could break at any time.
    Tony B. - Chief Executive Officer
    Hawk Host Inc. Proudly serving websites since 2004
    Quality Shared and Cloud Hosting
    PHP 5.2.x - PHP 8.1.X Support!

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    237
    Quote Originally Posted by TonyB View Post
    You've only talked to me but I think that's just luck. In fact I believe you talked to someone else today about something.
    Yeah I talked to Code today. You guys keep track of all support requests you receive!

    The unused subdomains what you're asking for is wildcards. This requires a DNS entry as well as modifications to the web server configuration as well. Any time we rebuild that configuration you're going to end up losing the customizations put in place. We avoid doing custom things like this due to that exact reason of the fact it isn't a feature of our panel and it would be something we'd add that could break at any time.
    Yeah you told me it wasn't possible, but since ppl said it may could work... Let's hope cPanel adds this feature.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Posts
    875
    Using HawkHost since start of January.
    Great support, and great servers.
    hosted by HawkHost
    I Recommend: LimeStone Networks!
    The OverSeller Defender!

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    237
    Now I can redirect unused subdomains to root domain, so that's not a problem anymore. And also everytime I asked them to edit DNS they did it to me, I just can't do it automatically.

  13. #13
    glad to see more positive reviews about hawkhost.

    (been using them myself since nov and they've been great)

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