It’s amazing how many web sites with no business model or profitability sunk during the .com internet bubble. Internet businesses, like any other company, aren’t immune from the age old philosophy of “you need to make money to stay in business”. Now there are a few exceptions to this rule. It’s still possible to come up with a great idea for a web site and receive funding from a venture capital firm (read: Twitter), but for the everyday web business owner, they understand the need to make a profit.

Many GeoCities refugees have migrated over to HostGator, and we want to welcome you all with open arms. We can assure you that HostGator won’t have the same fate as GeoCities because well, we’re a profitable company.

If you have a site with GeoCities and need a new home, post a comment and we’ll try to throw you some free months worth of Hosting at HostGator.

Due to the success of the first Open Session we hosted a couple of weeks ago, we’re hosting another one soon. This Open Session will be held on Wednesday, July 29 at 8 PM CT.

Just like last time, this Open Session will be a chance for both potential and existing HostGator customers to come into a live chat with other customers and HostGator employees and get tips, information, and have a chance to ask questions and get answers from the people who make the decisions at HostGator. Participants can either call in or just listen on their computers. There is also a text chat for people who would prefer to type their questions.

Some of the things we’ll be discussing include:

• Tips and suggestions on how to get the most out of your HostGator account from senior system administrators
• Discussion of HostGator’s upcoming Windows Shared Hosting launch, including questions and answers with the person in charge of Windows hosting here at HostGator
• Questions and answers about anything related to HostGator, ranging from what our servers support to what we eat for lunch in the office
• Discounts and/or free hosting to some participants who ask great questions.

Like last time, we’re planning on having our Deputy CTO, Chief Marketing Officer, and Customer Service Manager lead this Open Session. These three people are able to answer just about any question you can think of related to HostGator. There will also be senior support people available to answer more general questions and help out as needed.

Logistics:
TalkShoe worked well for us last time and we’ll be using it again for this Open Session. If you live outside of the US central timezone, check out this site for a list of corresponding times around the world. Right before 8 PM CT on Wednesday, head over to this page for instructions on how to join the session (it’s very simple).

Overview:
What: HostGator Open Session
When: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 8 PM CT
Where: HostGator on TalkShoe

This upcoming Thursday (July 2, 2009) at 5 PM CT (Houston-time), HostGator is going to be hosting an Open Session where potential and existing customers alike can come chat with HostGator employees and each other.

The Open Session is going to be pretty informal, but for some context, some things we do want to do include:

• Question and answer session with HostGator employees
• Tips and suggestions on how to get the most out of your HostGator account and website from our best support people
• Suggestions from customers about how HostGator can improve (customer service, Terms of Service, procedures and policies, etc.)

This is the first time HostGator has done something like this, but we think it will serve as a great opportunity to talk to our customers and hear their questions, opinions, and suggestions. If you have any particular items you’d like us to discuss or research, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Oh, and we’re also going to be giving out some free hosting during the session for both attending and participating.

Logistics:
We’re going to try hosting this session with TalkShoe, which allows us and other folks to call in using the phone and/or chat or listen online. If it works, we’ll continue to use TalkShoe. If not, we’ll explore other options. If you live outside of the US central timezone, check out this site for a list of corresponding times around the world. When Thursday at 5 PM CT rolls around, head over to this page for instructions on how to join the session (it’s very simple).

Overview:
What: HostGator Open Session
When: Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 5 PM CT
Where: HostGator on TalkShoe

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all the rage these days. There’s a whole market that has developed around SEO services and tools and a lot of hype and fluff that tends to confuse and complicate things for the average web site owner.

Simply put, SEO is the process of ranking higher in the search engines (Google, MSN Live, Yahoo) to increase traffic. For most websites, increased traffic translates into higher sales, so there is no disputing the importance of practicing good SEO techniques.

Since search engines have secret algorithms that determine where a website ranks in their search results, there are tons of myths and piles of misinformation out there on the ‘net. Time after time, I’ve spoken with customers who are angry and feel misled because an SEO firm or consulting company promised that the customer’s site would rank on page one in Google. Unfortunately, most of the time, this is just not possible, and the majority of these offers and promises should be quickly dismissed.

Even with all of the myths and wrong information out there, there are still some generally accepted rules and tips on how to best optimize your website to rank well. On our SEO Blog, you’ll find many articles discussing some of these proven techniques.

Not everyone can afford a reputable SEO consultant, especially for smaller websites, so most web site owners resort to the DIY methods.

One method that comes in the form of a tool and caught our attention recently is RankSense. RankSense is a piece of software that has gained a lot of popularity recently (and for good reason). This software is able to cover just about every aspect of SEO and will save you, as a site owner, tons of time.

SEO Tools included with RankSense:
• Discover Site Rankings – See which keywords bring users to your web site and see how many conversions they get for your site.
• Search Engine Coverage – Analyze your site’s search engine visibility.
• Detect Problem Pages – Detects, follows, and checks all links and shows broken links, dynamic pages, denials in robots.txt, and other errors that may be hurting your site.
• Sitemap Builder – Creates and submits an XML sitemap for search engines to discover.
• Keyword Selection – Identify and test potential keywords.
• Keyword Appraisals – See which keywords are better based on traffic, value, search volume, and conversions.
• Competitive Intelligence – Discover your top competitors for each and every keyword.
• Analyze Competitors – Analyze competitor web sites and learn what is working for the competition.
• Analyze My Site – Understand how search engines view the keywords on your site.
• On-Page Optimization Editor – Optimize your pages to maximize search engine leads.
• Link Structure Analysis – Learn from the structure of your competitors’ backlinks.
• My Link Structure Analysis – Understand the structure of your site’s backlinks.
• Link Text Analysis – See what anchor texts link to your competitors.
• My Link Text Analysis – Analyze the anchor texts linking to your site.
• Link Research – Find the URLs that to target for link exchange, sub-categorized by type (blog, directory, article, etc).
• Task Scheduler – Allows you to schedule and automate tasks.
• Search Analytics & SEO Progress Reports – Powerful, data rich reports providing detailed filtered report providing data on every aspect of your site’s optimization including search engines, rankings, landing pages, keywords, on-page metrics, off-page metrics, keyword, competitors and much, much more.
• Advanced Preferences –Identify preferred search engines, search the API, access market analysis keywords and competitor metrics, on-page keyword analysis metrics, common words, HMTL tags weight, keyword groups, human emulation filters, report header and footer and more.

Even if you’re not sure exactly what every feature listed above does, RankSense makes it simple by offering two modes: Smart Mode (easier) and Classic mode (advanced) and it’s great at walking novices through the wizard step-by-step.

Sign up today for your free trial, and if you decide to stay, use coupon: hostgator at sign up for a 20% recurring discount, and good luck on your rankings!

Ever run a Google search and notice the “sponsored listings” around the search results? Ever click one of those sponsored links? It’s likely that you have already visited a link that was advertised through the Google AdWords program and now HostGator is giving its shared web hosting customers the opportunity get started with Google AdWords by giving them $25 $50 in free marketing credits*.

HostGator has partnered up with the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program and is now offering an AdWords Coupon voucher good for $25 $50 in credit with all Hatchling, Baby, and Business shared web hosting plans.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising program by Google. With AdWords, advertisers can promote their website’s products and services on Google.com’s search results in the “sponsored links” section. Quality ad text and relevant keyword buys will give you an edge over your competitors. And with AdWords, you can set your own budget and change your campaigns at any time – there are no commitments or spending requirements of any kind.

We at HostGator currently use Google AdWords for our own internal marketing efforts, and we truly believe that most businesses can benefit from the highly targeted traffic that this program can yield.

Great, how do I sign up?

New and old HostGator customers on qualifying plans can redeem the coupon code by visiting their HostGator control panel, navigating to the “Google AdWords Offer” link on the left hand side and clicking the “redeem now” link. It’s as simple as that.

If you don’t already have a HostGator web hosting account, take a look at our Shared Web Hosting plans, sign up today, and get started promoting your site!

* (the fine print our lawyers asked us to include): To read the terms and conditions as well as to learn more, visit the HostGator Google AdWords Coupon page.

HostGator Web Hosting is now offering UNLIMITED DISK SPACE, UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH, and UNLIMITED DOMAINS for less than ten bucks a month.

I should be telling you this is a limited time offer and to sign-up while supplies last, but I’m not going to. If you decide to wait a few months, the plan just might change to unlimited bazillion-trillion everything. If you happen to sign up before the unlimited bazillion-trillion plans are released, we’ll be happy to upgrade you free of charge. If you think this all sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is! The “new” unlimited plan is the same plan we were offering a year ago, but now we label it as unlimited.

I wanted to call the plans unlimited last time around. However, due to staffing constraints, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the expected growth. A year later, we are finally OVERSTAFFED and ready to change the plan. Up until now, I’ve been slowing sales down on purpose in order for our support to catch up. If history repeats itself, renaming the plan from essentially unlimited to actually “unlimited” will increase our sales by at least 30%.

It’s really that simple.

We change an unlimited plan to say “unlimited” and bam — sales increase 30%, if not more. Many people will argue that “overselling” is evil and that it’s the cause of poor hosting service. This is not the case when it’s managed correctly and the proper staffing is in place. When a hosting company hops on the overselling bandwagon, their sales usually increase exponentially. Since very few companies actually have the capacity to handle a major surge in growth, their quality of service is almost guaranteed to deteriorate.

The support problems HostGator has had in the past weren’t from “overselling.” The problems were actually a result of growing faster than we could hire and train employees.

In the last year, we have been spending more money on recruiting employees than we have on advertising! It has taken us years of hiring and training to get us to the point where we are now. We’ve gone from begging employees to work overtime to asking who wants to go home. HostGator will always have the occasional scheduling gap, but for now, we’re sending over a dozen employees home a day.

I’m very confident that we’ll be able to handle the surge in growth that we will see as a result of going “unlimited.” Greed is what kills most overselling hosting companies, not their plans.

In other news, we have changed the name of our Swamp Web Hosting Plan to the slightly more professional hosting plan called “Business Web Hosting Plan“. The Business plan now includes both a free dedicated IP address and a free Private SSL. We will be updating these plans very soon with some additional and very cool e-commerce features.

I’m not going to spill the beans just yet, but I will say it’s something I’ve never seen included on shared hosting before, and I believe it will redefine what a business hosting plan is.

Today, we’re moving forward with our commitment to the communities and the people we serve with the launch of the HostGator Technology Grant.

Recipients of the HostGator Technology Grant will receive one year of completely free web hosting with our Swamp Plan, which offers 1,000 GB of space and unlimited bandwidth. If the Swamp plan does not fit the needs of the particular recipient, they can opt to take the grant as a $180 service credit to any other HostGator product or service. After the one year of free service, grant recipients can re-apply and if accepted again, continue to use HostGator web hosting completely free.

The HostGator Technology Grant’s goal is simple and straightforward: provide free web hosting to organizations and projects that serve the greater good.

Obtaining legitimately free web hosting for nonprofits can be an arduous process. Organizations should be spending their time doing what they believe in and what they set out to do, not hunting for
affordable and quality web hosting.

The wide scope of the grant is intentional – we wanted it so all types of organizations that serve the greater good could take advantage of free HostGator web hosting. Whether your organization is nonprofit community center or a cutting edge open source project, we want to hear from you.

The application process for the HostGator Technology Grant is simple. There are just a few questions and it shouldn’t take an organization longer than 15 or 20 minutes to complete the short application. Click Here to APPLY

Once you’re all setup, then you can do your actual job and get back to doing what you love. We want to make the web hosting experience less troublesome and more convenient for everyone, including those who are seeking to better society through their organizations and projects.

If you have any questions about HostGator’s Technology Grant program, please go to http://www.hostgator.com/nonprofit-web-hosting.shtml or email techgrant@hostgator.com. We’re more than happy to help.

Because support is key in the Web-hosting business, the company never outsources support and keeps technical support staff available 24/7, with an average wait time of one minute for inbound calls. It also provides developed templates and specialized software licensing to clients for free to enhance the company’s service offering.

I agree with the analysis, but I’d also like to share a few other points to explain why HostGator is not only floating but thriving.

It’s an accomplishment and something that we’re all proud of, because every employee at HG helped to make this happen. In three years time we’ve grown over 5,000%, let us know what it will take to make the most of the next three.

Use Protection
Although most good hosting companies will protect their servers (and usually your site to some degree) it’s important to understand that you are responsible for your own site.

Take this analogy: You can use the strongest safe in the world, but if you leave the door open and someone empties it, you can’t blame the safe manufacturer.

Hacked Huh?
Before we offer you some simple tips, it’s worth understanding a few basics about the different kinds of hacks, their purpose and how they can affect you.

We won’t go into detail at this stage, but the number of exploits and the number of different types are increasing. Some of the most common include: XSS, SQL Injections and defacing

Staying up to date is a full time job, but like most types of crime, being prepared and protecting yourself should give you a better chance of weathering a storm should it happen.

So without further ado, here’s a basic primer on protecting your site from being hacked when it’s on shared hosting.

Simple Security Tips

1. Keeping Software Up to Date
If you are running old versions of software chances are it’s insecure, make sure you upgrade to the latest release. Most updates to software are security or functionality related, which means if you aren’t running the latest version you are likely to have missed a few security fixes.

2. 3rd Party Scripts and Code
Plugins, widgets or any other code (including free templates and themes) you install are written by other people under unknown circumstances. Some may be great, some may be full of holes. Be sure to research any code you want to use that you didn’t write yourself. Even a few Google searches should help you find out how secure the code you are using is.

3. Your Own Fault
One of the biggest causes of Identity theft and an easy way for someone to get details to your site(s). Your own computer is likely to be a weak link in the chain. Whether it be from poisoned powerpoint files or someone phishing your account details, the vulnerabilities are limitless. No matter how secure your site is, if the machine you access it from (including logging in and editing etc.) is not secure you stand a good risk of being compromised and it may affect more than just your site.

Use virus scans, clear histories, secure your passwords and be aware of general security issues (try not to let your shiny new MacBook air be stolen). Open and Public wifi spots are an obvious security risk. If you give everyone access to your PIN number for your bank account, expect to be robbed.

4. Secure Passwords
A secure password goes a long way to slowing down a potential infiltrator (real ‘hackers’ do not tend to be people that destroy sites, but ethically search for security holes in technology). Put simply passwords should always be a combination of letters and numbers, uppercase and lowercase. The longer the password, the better (though conversely the longer it is the harder it is to remember).

No dictionary words, no family names and no easily guess-able information either.

You can also generate a random password which is even more secure.

5. Checking Your Logs Regularly
Without watching who is visiting your site, what you are ranking for and similar you could be compromised and never even know it.

If you spot any unusual traffic (ranking for gambling, pharmaceuticals and sex terms is a common one) try working out where it is coming from / going to. From there if you are sure it is a hack you can get some quick help. (Send us a message, we’ll do what we can).

6. Outsource a Little Prevention
Using high quality software, a good coder (one who is security aware), hiring a professional security agency or using an automated method like the Firewall script or Hacker safe will help to reduce your risk. What you outsource depends on your needs (and resources of course).

7. Backup, Backup, Backup and Then Backup Some More
While this tip won’t protect you from being hacked, it will be very beneficial to you should it happen.

Send copies of your backup to your gmail, and auto forward them to your yahoo mail. Download copies to tape, your MP3 player or Iphone, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that in the case of a hack there will be a couple of things you want.
a. Records of IPs accessing your site.
b. A clean (pre hack) backup of your site (hopefully, including the latest updates)

Here is an easy DIY way to back up your whole site with cPanel.

If you use Hostgator then you’ve already got weekly offsite backups and they will restore your site(s) at no charge should it does become compromised or “cracked/ hacked”.

8. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Site hacking, Search engine rankings, DOS, account closures, viruses, there are a whole list of reasons your site may suffer in some way. With hosting being so cheap, grab yourself a multiple site (reseller) account and spread that risk. You can even have your sites hosted on different C Class IPs.

9. Learn MORE
Nothing beats knowledge. The more you know the easier it becomes to spot problems (not just hacks) and resolve them. So, kick back, grab a soda and start reading (it could be worth more in the end than all of the search news and blogging tips you have in your RSS feed).

Here’s a couple of useful starting points and interesting articles to checkout.
Trend Micro
Apache Security
MySQL Security
Security Focus
ha.ckers.org
Tips to Protect Your Wordpress Installation
How Wordpress Blogs are Hacked

10. Find Yourself a Gator
We take our security very seriously, there is nothing worse than seeing all of your hard work being destroyed. If your site is hosted with us and you think you may have been hacked, click the chat link (top of the page), and contact us anytime to let us know. Not only will you be looking out for the other sites sharing your server, but you give us a better chance to recover your site. Even if your site is not hosted with us, we’ll do what we can to help, we’re just like that.

11. Bonus – Be Careful of the Company You Keep
Anyone with enough time, an Internet connection and some intelligence can find ways to cause you problems online.

Revealing too much, boasting or insulting others online is a good way to attract the wrong kind of attention. In the real world, having fewer enemies just makes life easier.

Until Next Time…
This is the first in a series of posts that should help your site sing even on the darkest of days, there’s nothing we want more than for you to wake up safe and decide to build another new site.

The least we can do is try and make that as easy as possible.

Although we’ve kept this fairly low profile on our forum post here , we do have a large amount of users starting to come on board, so I’d like to present something a hosting company is doing to better the world.

The Folding@Home project by Stanford University is a distributed computing project used to create one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The client has long been used used as both a metric to measure processors and machines efficiency and also to help the cause. The project is distributed much in the way Seti@Home was, however, with a more direct human goal.

Just in case you’re wondering, “what is protein folding and why does this matter to me?”; the Folding@Home project simulates complex mathematical formulas about how these proteins fold, unfold, and misfold with the goal to hopefully one day learn better how many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes actually work and occur. Results? Darn right! The project has already come up with a number of notable scientific results, and is with our help and yours, continues to go somewhere tangible as you can see at Stanford’s whitepage papers

As for how this all came about; I was first introduced to the project when I was looking for something better to do with my Spare CPU cycles than let them idle. A lot of people are worried that clients like this will hog CPU, but the beauty of this software is it scales and re-nices it self so well, so you can be running it and it will use a defined amount of CPU at all times, but when any other process needs the CPU it will throttle itself. You can literally play high end games with the client running, as it will just scale back.

I really began to get involved in the project when I picked up a PS3. I wanted to put the powerful Cell processor through it’s paces so I immediately downloaded the client and started running work units. Now, as an administrator here I began thinking how helpful it could be if some of the machines we have that idle certain days of the week at HostGator were to fold in the background while the machine was not in use. NAS boxes were the perfect solution, and now we’re about to break the 1,000,000 point milestone.

So, do you want to help humanity and have a chance at free hosting? Well help us out and we’ll help you! Here’s what to do :

1. Go to http://folding.stanford.edu/ and download the appropriate client for your operating system, and if you have a dual or quad core make sure you get the High Performance SMP client. (If you have a PS3 you can install it directly from the PS3 crossbar interface)
2. Install folding@home and use team number 122600 , you can enter anything for your Donor name but we would prefer you use either your forum name so we can better contact you for your prize(or your wordpress login name)
3. Start folding and leave it running. Don’t be surprised if it takes a while for you to start getting work units (these things are huge), the more machines you have it running on and the faster the machines, the quicker you will break milestones.

Prize Details
Prizes will be calculated by contributions to the team based on performance. Dead line to see who can get the most milestones will be on 07/01/2008. At that time winner will need to claim prize by emailing sales@hostgator.com with their donor name.

1. GRAND PRIZE (1 winner)
The top contributor who contributes the most points to the team will get a free year of hosting on our Aluminum reseller plan or equivalent in credit to existing HostGator plan if already a customer.

2. FIRST PRIZE (1 winner)
Runner up will receive a free year of hosting on our Swamp hosting plan (or equivalent).

3. SECOND PRIZES (8 winners)
Following 8 runners up will receive 6 months of free hosting on the Baby hosting plan (or equivalent)

I’d like to extend a special thanks to every team member both from our employee pool and some of our very active forum members and customers currently active (over 345 active CPU’s) and especially to both our owner Brent Oxley and our CTO David Collins for allowing me to run this on each and every one of our network backup servers to create a huge grid.

Statistics links :

Python Driven Stats

Quick stats

Kakao Stats