HawkHost.com review

First impression

Hawk Host is a privately held Canadian company that was founded in 2004 by Tony Baird and Cody Robertson in the town of Fergus, Ontario. What started small, mainly to provide quality hosting to friends and family, quickly grew, and today they are one of the most trusted and reliable hosting providers in Canada. This award-winning company offers Shared Hosting, Semi-Dedicated Cloud Hosting, and VPS hosting solutions, and operates several data centers that are located in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, Amsterdam NL, Singapore SG, Hong Kong China, and Toronto CA.

Trial Period

Hawk Host, like most hosting providers, doesn’t offer a free trial on their plans. They do, however, have a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you sign up and find you're unhappy with their hosting or service, or simply no longer wish to make use of it, you can submit a cancellation request anytime in the first 30 days and get a full refund.

Billing Cycle

Their Shared and Semi-Dedicated plans offer users the option of signing up on a monthly basis, annually, or for 24 months at a time, with the cost reducing slightly the longer you commit, whilst VPS plans are either billed monthly or annually. 

They currently accept all major Credit Cards (Visa, Mastercard, and American Express), PayPal, Alipay, Bitcoin, Apple Pay, Ethereum, XRP, and WeChat Pay as valid forms of payment.

Payment types that are not accepted include Check Payments, Cash, Money Orders, and Bank Transfers.

Control Panel

Their Shared Hosting and Semi-Dedicated Server hosting plans make use of cPanel. This reliable and intuitive server and site management platform comes with a rich feature set and enables customers to focus on managing their websites, databases, and files easily, through an automated and configurable platform.

Memcached (an object caching system), and Redis (a memory data structure store, used as a database cache and message broker), are included free of charge, and Hawk Host even offers full cPanel migrations for new clients to ease the transfer process.

VPS plans offer cPanel and DirectAdmin, but one should note that they come at an additional monthly cost.

Limits

Their Shared Hosting plans, named the Primary and Professional Plan respectively, run on LiteSpeed Web Servers. This Apache replacement is up to 900% faster when serving static content and up to 50% faster when serving PHP requests. The Primary plan comes with 10GB SSD space whilst the Professional plan has no limit on the amount of space you can use. Both plans include 1 CPU Core and 1GB RAM as standard.

Semi-dedicated hosting also comes in two options, the Nestling and Talon, and as with the Shared Hosting plans, these two are only set apart by the amount of disc space allocated. Nestling features 20GB SSD space and Talon unlimited SSD space. 

All their plans, whether it be Shared Hosting or Semi-Dedicated Hosting, feature unlimited bandwidth, MariaDB/MySQL databases, POP/IMAP email accounts, SSL Certificates, Domain redirects, and more, as well as CloudFlare CDN (Content Delivery Network) to improve your speed, reduce latency and help to keep your site secure.

VPS plans, all running on Enterprise Grade SSD/NVMe drives with Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC Processors, have various options, with the entry-level plan starting with 30GB disc space, 1GB RAM, 2TB bandwidth, and 1 Core CPU, whilst the top plan boasts 650GB SSD space, 32GB RAM, 16TB bandwidth and 8 Core CPUs.

Website Builder

Hawk Host includes the Weebly Website Builder free of charge in their Shared Hosting and Semi-Dedicated Cloud Hosting packages. This beginner-friendly builder allows users to create professional websites quickly with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.

Security

Security is a big priority for Hawk Host, and they have implemented multiple proactive measures to defend against exploits and attacks. 

All accounts are isolated from each other by CageFS (a CloudLinux technology) to protect your files even if other accounts are hacked or have malicious items, and includes SecureLink, an OS-level security feature that protects against symbolic link (symlink) attacks, which is especially problematic in a cPanel/WHM based environment.

Malware protection comes in the form of Imunify360. This software program offers proactive scanning, cleaning,  and quarantining of detected malicious files or scripts and runs web traffic inspections to block requests from known bad actors or potentially malicious traffic. This is further complimented by DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks) protection, as well as ModSecurity, a tool that looks for known commands or requests that are often used to exploit a website's software.

Internet connections are secured by a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on all plans.

OS

All their Shared Hosting and Semi-Dedicated Hosting plans run on the CloudLinux Operating System, whilst their VPS plans offer a wide array to choose from, like CentOS (version 6 & 7), AlmaLinux (version 8 & 9), Ubuntu (version 18.04 – 22.04), CloudLinux (version 7 & 8), Debian (version 10 & 11), and Fedora (version 27 & 31).

If your website still runs on older versions of PHP you are in luck, as they support all versions from 5.2 upwards.

Support

They offer 24/7 expert support from well-trained, friendly, and knowledgeable staff, via Email, a Support Ticketing System, and Live Chat. There is also a community forum and a comprehensive knowledge base available should you want to troubleshoot your errors yourself.

One should note though that support tickets are prioritized over Live Chat, so you may not see an agent as available depending on their ticket queue volumes, should they be online however, you can expect response times that are near instant. On email, their agents usually reply within an hour. 

Conclusion

Overall Hawk Host leaves a good impression. Their plans are affordable and reliable and they have invested heavily on security and their infrastructure in general. The only downside for me personally is that their dedicated server options are only semi-dedicated, and this might create a headache for customers with high-traffic needs or unique hosting requirements.