HawkHost Review

HawkHost is a Canadian web hosting company that started out in 2004 providing shared hosting plans. Ten plus years later they now offer reseller, semi-dedicated, and virtual private servers. They also have five different server locations: Dallas, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Singapore. I’ve been using HawkHost’s shared hosting for over three years now (since April 2012) so this review is over due. I like that they are upfront about resources on their shared plans (1 CPU Core, 1GB Memory, 5MB/sec/IO, 100 Processes, 20 concurrent connections, and 25 MySQL Connections) and having 5 different server locations to choose from is a plus. HawkHost has reasonable prices and the quality of their service is worth well more than the low rates they charge.

Responsive Support

I've opened up a handful of support tickets over the years and HawkHost has always been fast, courteous, and  knowledgeable with their replies.

• April 2012: Restore cPanel backups to new hosting accounts.
• August 2012: Contacted them about server being down. It was a large DDoS attack on the shared IP so they changed it and was resolved quickly.
• May 2013: Contacted them about downtime. Discovered I was hitting CPU and process limits on my vBulletin forum. I figured out the cause and it was all good after that.
• July 2013: PHP version issue/question - resolved with 3 replies from staff in about an hour.
• October 2013: Slow loading on a WordPress site - discovered I was hitting resource limits and throttling was the cause of the slowness. I was getting hundreds of hits/minute from one IP address to xmlrpc.php so blocked the IP address and disabled xmlrpc.php since I didn't use it for remote posting to WordPress. Resolved with 2 replies from staff in about an hour.

Since that last ticket I haven't used their support in almost two years. HawkHost has a nice server status system setup (http://www.hawkhoststatus.com/) so if there's maintenance, unscheduled downtime, or a problem I've checked there first to see what's up. Overall they are on the ball and quick to resolve things.

Speed Test Result

Here's a Pingdom speed test result (1.08 seconds - not bad at all) for one of my sites hosted on a HawkHost Washington, DC server.

Great Uptime on Average

March 2015 - 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
April 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2015 - 99.72% Uptime (125 minutes of downtime)

August 2015 through September 2016 - *14 Months of 100% Uptime!* (0 minutes of downtime)

October 2016 - 99.97% Uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
November 2016 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 - 99.96% Uptime (15 minutes of downtime)
July 2017 - 99.91% Uptime (37 minutes of downtime)
August 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2017 - 99.82% Uptime (78 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2018 - 99.61% Uptime (169 minutes of downtime) - My hosting account was migrated from wdc005 (Washington DC) to the new nyc005 (New York City) server on 1/25/18. Four days after the migration for a couple of hours there was issues with MySQL database access.
February 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2018 - 99.998% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
June 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2018 - 99.80% Uptime (90 minutes of downtime)
October 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2018 - 99.05% Uptime (412 minutes of downtime) - Scheduled maintenance to expand existing network and datacenter infrastructure to allow for continued growth and expansion in New York City location.
December 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
April 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2019 - 99.57% Uptime (184 minutes of downtime)
July 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
September 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
January 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2020- 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2020 - 99.96% Uptime (15 minutes of downtime)
January 2021 - 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
February 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2021- 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2021 - 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
September 2021 - 99.98% Uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
October 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2022- 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2022 - 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
May 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2022 - 99.97% Uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
September 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2023 - 99.8% Uptime (89 minutes of downtime)
August 2023 - 99.97% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2023 - 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
October 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2023 - 99.91% Uptime (37 minutes of downtime)
December 2023 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2024 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2024 - 99.96% Uptime (16 minutes of downtime)
March 2024 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2024 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2024 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2024 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)

I don't have any uptime monitoring data prior to February 2015, but I do remember experiencing at least a few notably bad months with downtime like this July in years past. Overall though, HawkHost has great uptime and when there are problems they are on it fast.

Final Verdict

HawkHost has a great reputation because they are reliable and have consistently grown and improved over the years. In my experience there hasn't been any big problems and HawkHost's small team of 15 or so employees are very devoted and knowledgeable. I've stayed with them for over 3 years now and will keep on renewing if they remain on this track. For the quality of service you get their prices are very affordable. Like it or not, as apart of their marketing strategy they seem to always have recurring coupons available to lower their prices even more.