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HostGator Ranks 239 on Inc. 5000

Inc. Magazine just ranked HostGator #239 overall on their prestigious Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing privately owned companies in America. Here’s how the companies that make Inc’s list are ranked:

The Inc. 500|5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2005 through 2008. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by the first week of 2005, and therefore able to show four full calendar years of sales. Additionally, they have to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent — not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies — as of December 31, 2008 (a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired since that date). Revenue in 2005 must have been at least $200,000, and revenue in 2008 must have been at least $2 million.

Additionally, HostGator ranked #6 in all Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX (Greater Houston area) companies, and #20 out of all companies in our category—Business Products & Services.
HostGator has managed to grow over 896% within the measured 3 year time period. We’ve nearly doubled in revenue from 2007 to 2008.

In 2008, HostGator was ranked at #21 overall. Although 2009’s rank was lower than the previous year’s, we’ve nearly doubled our revenue between the two periods. Despite the job market shrinking across the U.S., HostGator has also created 100 positions for highly qualified technicians and systems’ administrators in the Houston area over the last year.

I think I speak for everyone at HostGator, when I say we’re all really proud to be a part of this company and what we’ve been able to accomplish. The growth simply comes from doing what we’ve always done: providing our clients with reliable web hosting service, 24/7 support, and by offering as many features as possible.

Huge thanks goes to our clients and employees for our continued success.

Anatomy of an Outage

Wednesday, August 5, 2009 started out as a normal day at HostGator’s Houston headquarters. Around 4:00 PM CT, a major power surge that occurred as the result of a transformer near our office blowing up made the day anything but ordinary.

Lights flickered, battery backups beeped, fire alarms went off, and Internet signals all died down almost immediately. People began to wait for the building’s $200,000 hurricane-ready generator to start up, but it didn’t.

In the mean time, one of the three major “legs” of power that feeds the building with the power it needs to function was out because of exploded transformer. The building was underpowered and the higher voltage motors and equipment started burning out from the heat and stress of running without the adequate amounts of power. Expensive equipment continued to get damaged.

A compressor on the air conditioning burnt out (cost: $35,000), air handlers got destroyed (cost: $5,000), an elevator motor got fried (cost: $10,000) and lots of other equipment in the building’s mechanical room still isn’t working correctly (cost: unknown). The total cost of the damages is expected to be upwards of $60,000.

As the building’s systems started to go down and the people in charge of HostGator’s office began calling in electricians, power companies, and repairmen, the rest of the management team began going into what we refer to internally as “hurricane mode.”

• Twitter updates started to go out informing customers of a power problem in the building and possible service delays.
• Employees were rallied and were sent to the other employees’ homes.
• Our phone number was redirected (our VOIP system is housed in our office) and the message on our phone system was updated to inform customers of the outage.
• Our support site was updated with an emergency notice.
• A forum post was made with additional details.

As the makeshift offices were being setup in our managers’ homes, chats were being taken, servers were being monitored, and updates were being provided. Within an hour of the surge, HostGator’s support operations were almost fully functional, albeit delayed (with the exception of phone support).

By 11:30 PM, employees were starting to work at the office again. The phones were turned on shortly afterwards and average email response times went back down to 45 minutes or less.

Much of this expensive and inconvenient damage would have been prevented had the building’s generator worked as planned. If it did, the building would have only lost power for a minute or so instead of multiple hours. The cause was the generator maintenance done less than a week before (by an outsourced company) was done improperly. The company put the wrong fuel filter on the generator, which caused the generator to immediately fail on start up.

The outage could have obviously been much worse. No customer servers or accounts were affected in any way (we don’t house any customer servers in our office building) and we were able to get back up and running relatively quickly.

Regardless of the relative severity of the event, though, HostGator did learn a lot.

• Most notably, the fact the immediate communication is essential was reaffirmed. We first learned about the importance of immediate communication during a datacenter outage at The Planet. In this situation, a Twitter update went out less than 15 minutes after the power surge occurred. Updates continued to be provided across Twitter, the forums, and our support site until the situation was completely resolved. We were even lucky enough to get comments from customers praising us for our handling of the situation.
• We also learned that it’s critical to have systems tested and maintained by companies we know are getting the job done properly. We are obviously looking into a new generator maintenance company and looking at our other vendors to ensure they’re prepared to deal with issues if they occur.

During the entire occurrence, our customers were patient and understanding and we sincerely appreciate that. Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus fame is credited with saying “The road to success is paved with well handled mistakes” and we couldn’t agree more.

Things happen (the web hosting business and the act of running a business are never dull) and Wednesday’s events were just one of the many examples of things that no one could have ever predicted happening.

Click on the images below to see a larger version with a caption.

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