All You Can Eat Hosting
Written by Brent Oxley on October 20, 2008 – 10:45 am -We have some very exciting, disturbing, shocking, and electrifying news for you!
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.
Tags: overselling, updates
Posted in Brent Oxley, News Bites | 26 Comments »
One Laptop Per Child, They Will Fail…
Written by Brent Oxley on January 31, 2008 – 7:16 pm -
I’m very proud to announce that Hostgator has made a $100,000 donation to MD Anderson which is one of the world leaders in cancer treatments and research. They have truly been a pleasure to work with. Working with MD has given many of our employees that warm fuzzy feeling inside that you should have when you are helping people.
I would also like to announce that I feel used, abused, and completely violated on a $25,000 donation hostgator made to One laptop per child. OLPC has a mission to develop cheap laptops for children to educate and express themselves on.
Maybe I’m being a drama queen so please come to your own conclusion based on the following experience…….
It all started with a $25,000 donation being made on their site and the following email being sent shortly after:
“Hello,
I’m the owner of hostgator.com and I just wanted to shoot off an email
to let you know I have just donated $25,000 via google checkout on my
amex. We get dozens of fraud orders a day so the purpose of this email
is to let you know it’s legit. I’m currently on xmas vacation in the
bahamas in the wyndham so the ip isn’t going to match my american address.
Please let me know if you have any questions or if any further
verification is needed. Thank you, and keep up the good fight!!
Sincerely,
Brent Oxley ”
Their Response 11 days later January 11th 2008
“Dear Donor,
In order for me to locate and track your donation, can you please provide me
with your complete address, reference number and the name used at the time
of donation. This will allow me to access the correct donation and locate
your laptop.Thank you for your interest in One Laptop Per Child.
OLPC
Donor Services”
My Reply January 11th 2008
“Are you serious?
Our company name is hostgator.com
My name is Brent Oxley
How many $25,000 donations do you receive? Please spend the minute that
it would take to look up the donation. Thank you.”
(we received automated email back instantly confirming they did receive our email)
Twenty days later and we still have not had a follow up response or anyone in the company making any type of contact with us other then what’s listed above!!!
OPLC has been getting slammed recently after Intel left the group January 3rd of this year. There are many critics that argue the money can be spent better on libraries, food, water, etc. You can read up more on OLPC on wikipedia. Even with all the negative publicity I and many of our customers believed it to be a worthy cause that deserved our help.
Based on our experience it’s quite obvious OLPC is being mismanaged to the point of failure. I now feel our donation would have been put to better use had we mailed 25,000 one dollar bills for the children to use as toilet paper.
Posted in Brent Oxley | 28 Comments »
Lifestyles of the Rich and the Homeless
Written by Brent Oxley on November 28, 2007 – 1:51 am -Since moving into our new office located in Houston, we have had many experiences with the homeless. I personally had a homeless man charge at me screaming. “It was you, it was you, f*** the man!” I was ready to gator whoop him if necessary, but luckily it did not have to come to that. Just a few weeks ago we were so privileged to have an artistic bum use our restroom facilities. His medium of choice proved to be feces, with the canvas being the walls, mirrors, door, and even our ceiling!
The homeless problem isn’t just around the HostGator building. It seems that anywhere I travel to in Houston, there is a homeless man begging for money nearby.
Anytime I look out my window I can see at least one or two bums working the street. I’ve been watching the same faces work the same corner for over a year now. Being the business man that I am, it was impossible to look at them without wondering how much money they were making. I asked around… I read a bunch of websites… and all I could find was meaningless statistics without any real field testing being done.
So I did the only thing that any self respecting CEO would do. I became homeless myself.
The experiment was setup so that each day of the week a different popular homeless slogan would be advertised.
Here are the results of our study.
Bum deployed: Brent Oxley, CEO of HostGator
Day of week: Monday
Time in the field: 5:00pm-7:00pm
Slogan: “We need our flea shots anything helps”
Earnings for the day: $26.40
Hourly Wage: $13.20
Brent’s Experience: I prepared for being a bum by stealing my mom’s German Shepherd named Hawkmoon, not shaving for a week, and rolling us both around in dirt. I knew being a bum was serious business, and if I was going to compete with guys who were doing it for years, I would need to bring my game face. Upon stepping out onto the corner, I was instantly being evaluated by a homeless man the area knows as “dumpster dan”. He received this nick name after he took up residence in our building’s dumpster and started a fire. (Years before we owned the building)
I decided to ignore Dan and began to make my rounds. When the light turned red I walked along side the cars holding hawk moon, and my sign that read, “We need our flea shots anything helps.” Within minutes people began putting money in my trusty plastic cup. It seemed almost every person that gave me money said something about the money being for the dog and not me! I have never felt so unloved before. I had a lot of people asking me questions. Why don’t you go to this shelter… Why don’t you have a job. Etc. If only they knew I was the owner of a multi-million dollar company! I responded to one guy who asked, with “I do have a job” and he in turn responded with “so you’re out here hussling huh?” before driving off. I had about 15 middle aged women and one man roll down their window to give me money. Most of the people gave a buck and some change, with my highest payment being $3.00. It was pretty obvious that most of the people giving me money made less per hour then I was making bumming! I don’t believe I received money from a single car that would be considered worth more than average.
Being a bum was a very depressing experience for me! The highlight of my day was when a car with a few kids in the backseat were looking at Hawkmoon. I picked up her paw and started waiving at them, and they all started smiling and laughing. That concludes my bumming experience.
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Tuesday
Time in the field: 5:00pm-7:00pm
Slogan: “My Ex Wife had a better lawyer. Homeless now”
Earnings for the day: $6.60
Hourly Wage: $3.30
Chris’s Exprience: The dog day went pretty well with the women so we decided to try a sign that might appeal more to the men. If you’re a woman reading this please don’t be offended. The sign was a bad joke in an attempt to get the men to open their wallets. We were able to get 6 times more men to donate, but it was at the expense of losing 100% of the female demographic. The majority of the women who read Chris’s sign were PISSED, and instead of giving money all he got was death stares. Dumpster Dan was out in full force this day with one car actually giving both Chris and Dan two dollars to split.
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Wednesday
Time in the field: 5:10pm-6:50pm
Slogan: “Ninjas killed my family need money for kung fu lessons”
Earnings for the day: $22.75
Hourly Wage: $13.65
Chris’s Exprience: I’m sure most people have seen a picture of this homeless sign on the internet at some point or another. This sign had everyone laughing, and in exchange for the laughs the money rolled in. With $13.65 an hour being made, it turned out to be the second highest pay day of our experiment. It was about 50/50 split of middle aged men and women donating. A few people asked what happened to the family and Chris responded with, “We went on vacation to Thailand, took a private scuba driving trip and got ambushed by ninja pirates.”
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Thursday
Time in the field: 5:00pm-7:00pm
Slogan: “Why lie need a beer”
Earnings for the day: $20.30 in cash and 5 beers
Hourly Wage: $10.15
Chris’s Exprience: This was the only sign that got any teenagers / college kids to donate. No middle aged women donated, but their were two college girls that did. It was pretty evenly split between the older guys and the younger college crowd donating. The reaction was pretty much a, “hell yeh get drunk” response from everyone. On top of all the money made, five different cars gave a beer for a payment! A real homeless person that was in a wheelchair came up and took one of the donated beers from Chris’s pile
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Friday
Time in the field: 5:50pm-7:15pm
Prop: Wheelchair
Earnings for the day: $33.42
Hourly Wage: $23.59
Chris’s Exprience: Being in the wheelchair received the most sympathetic reactions. It was about a 50/50 split between men and women donations. There was an incident where a teenage boy caught HostGator Lance wheeling Chris into position. The teenage boy started screaming that it was all a fake setup!
Conclusion:
We made OVER DOUBLE the minimum wage of $5.85 almost every single day of the experiment, and best of all it was TAX FREE!
Summary of how much was made each day:
Dog day: $13.20/hr
Exwife day: $3.30/hr
Ninjas day: $13.65/hr
Beer day: $10.15/hr + 5 beers valued at say 72 cents beer = $11.95/hr
Wheelchair day: $23.59/hr
How much would that be a year working 40 hours a week:
Dog day: $27,456
Exwife day: $6,864
Ninjas day: $28,392
Beer day: $24,856
Wheelchair day: $49,067
Homeless people do not pay taxes. If they did pay taxes, this is what the above salaries would look like on what they’re taking home:
Dog day: $31,574.40
Exwife day: $7,550.40
Ninjas day: $32,650.80
Beer day: $28,584.40
Wheelchair day: $61,333.75
In 2006 the poverty line for a single person under 65 was $10,488 dollars. So we definitely wouldn’t be considered homeless based off of what we earned. In fact, we would be making more money then most college graduates!
According to money.cnn.com
The average college graduate made the below salary for each field:
Information sciences and systems: $47,182
Economics/finance: $44,588
Civil engineering: $46,084
Chemical engineering: $56,269
Accounting: $44,928
Business administration/management: $41,155
History: $33,071
Mechanical engineering: $51,732
Electrical engineering: $53,500
Psychology: $30,369
Computer science: $50,744
Political science and government: $33,094
English: $31,385
Sociology: $31,096
It’s no wonder we have so many homeless people in Houston! All you need to do is sit in a wheelchair and pretend to be homeless to make more than almost any college graduate! If anyone ever tells you you’re going to be homeless, just counter that with, “if I were, I would be making more than a college graduate!”
I’m sure many will argue since we only worked from 5 to 7 that the numbers are going to be inflated. Here’s a few facts to consider:
We picked the closest road to our office. Like most things in life bumming is all about location. This is what we made at our first and only location! I’d imagine with some road testing a bum could easily double the income we made.
The road we used receives most of the traffic in the morning due to people heading downtown to work. Our study took place during the evening which means the road wasn’t that busy due to most people heading home on the other side of the freeway.
About half the time we were bumming there was another bum working the same street corner. One bum on a corner = more money.
Neither Chris or I accepted any money from people we know.
I apologize if this blog post has offended you. It was meant to be educational and give you a better insight on the true financials of homeless people. There are a lot of sick people out there that will rip off your generosity as much as they can. If you truly want to help the homeless don’t give them cash or beer. Do you think they are making a daily deposit at their local bank? Unless they are a fake homeless person, I highly doubt they do this! If you feel they truly need help, get them food, water, or clothes. Heck get them a tent if you’re feeling like Santa Claus.
The only two legitimate reasons I can think of to be homeless are:
If you’re truly crazy the chance of finding a job is slim. Most of the homeless crazies have gone insane from drug abuse. If you give them money they’re most likely going to use it on more drugs.
You’re too sick to move in which case you wouldn’t be able to move to collect the money.
There are 10’s of thousands of hardworking Americans that work from wheelchairs every day. If you’re strong enough to push yourself around taking money all day you’re strong enough to work a desk job!
Bumming may sound like a pretty sweat deal but with the high income salary comes a few cons:
You can be seriously injured in a bum turf war.
You can be beat up by one of those psychos out there that prey on the homeless.
You could be hit by a car at any time.
A friend or family member could drive by and see you. This actually happened to Chris one day. A friend of his family said, “Chris are you homeless?”
You have to deal with yourself being a leech on society.
Not everybody is cut out to be a bum. Our first bum was our Chat Tech Sean. We had to fire him shortly after his first session. (Don’t worry, he’s still a chat tech) I gave Sean many tips on how to be a bum, but for whatever reason he could not follow my directions. I told him half a dozen times that he had to hold the signs towards the cars, unfortunately this proved to be too complicated for him. That, or he couldn’t handle the heat, because almost everytime I went to check on him he was sitting down in the shade somewhere. Our numbers could not be accurate if he wasn’t working the street, so we had no choice but to replace Sean. When I asked him about his experience, he said that dumpster Dan kept “mumbling gibberish at him”, which made him very nervous.
We were offered many jobs during the experiment. Sean received a strange one. A woman wanted to pay him to live in her shed, and be her gardener. Sean politely declined the position, but the woman would not take no for an answer. She circled around three different times, harrassing him to live in her shed.
I’m sure that many of you are going to be upset about us tricking people into giving us money. But before you get upset please be aware that all of the money we made, $109.47, is being donated to the local soup kitchen. On top of that we’re going to continue this experiment with a test. We are going to drive around town offering bums the choice between a one dollar bill and two beers. The first bum that chooses the dollar bill is going to be given an additional $109 dollars and 47 cents courtesy of HostGator. I’m curious to see how many stops we will make before the money is chosen. We’ll be sure to update this post with the results of the next test!
Posted in Brent Oxley | 61 Comments »
Selling Out
Written by Brent Oxley on October 6, 2007 – 1:14 am -Is HostGator “selling out”?
As many of you may already know, we have updated our shared hosting and reseller hosting plans yesterday. The plans went from crazy to just downright insane in terms of us adding HUGE amounts of disk space and bandwidth without increasing the price. I’m going to do my best to explain the whole situation and assure you that the new plans aren’t going to put HostGator out of business.
We have many customers who are going hysterical from being so happy about the plan increases. These are the same customers with whom the majority were using less then 1% of the old plan. It’s like going into an all you can eat buffet and being told you can eat more. I really don’t understand why everyone gets so excited because all we really did was go from unlimited to more unlimited.
Yes I said unlimited! The forbidden word we use to worn potential hosting customers to stay away from, and now HostGator has officially sold out and joined the competition with offering scam plans (we actually did this the last time when we increased our plans, but shhhh).
What exactly is unlimited? Well, I just got done going to the top 5 largest web hosting companies I could think of and the lowest plan I could find was for a few 100 gigs of disk space with thousands of gigs of bandwidth for less then $10 a month. These are all scam plans because like most hosts we have something called a Terms of Service that mentions CPU and memory limits. It is close to impossible to use what we are all selling you without being suspended for going over CPU and memory.
Of course many of you reading this will be shocked and rush off to one of our competitors to ask them if you can really use all the disk space and bandwidth without being suspended, and I’m positive they’ll tell you yes. In fact, my employees would have told you the same thing if they didn’t read this blog post.
Just ask yourself one thing…
How do all us shared web hosting companies sell more disk space and bandwidth for ten bucks then the dedicated server providers sell for hundreds?
It’s an easy concept really. Every web host has a terms of service with CPU and memory limits. If your website consumed too much of its share of CPU or memory then most web hosts will require you to upgrade. When you purchase a dedicated server you can’t get shut down for CPU or memory abuse so they have to sell you a plan based on what your site could use with less restrictions. At HostGator, we pretty much get an unlimited amount of bandwidth from our provider thanks to having thousands of servers. We also have 10,000’s of gigs disk space not being used. Giving away unlimited disk space and bandwidth doesn’t really cost us anything. It’s the CPU and memory that has a real value. A server will usually become extremely overloaded way before you ever get close to using the amount of disk quota and bandwidth it comes with.
If you plan on reading a hosting companies TOS to find out if they have CPU and memory limits it’s usually going to be a waste of time. We are all going to put some CPU and memory limit in there that can’t truly be tracked. However all us hosts have to provide a mystical usage number in order to answer a customers question which is… “how much CPU and memory can I use.” It really is as simple as if you crash a server or slow it down you will be suspended. At HostGator we put 200′ish customers per box and if the server load increases, it can generally be attributed to just one person on that server causing 90% of the problem. Sure, we have ways to track but in the end boils down to not wanting to sacrifice every other users’ experience on that same sever for just one or two websites using all the resources.
The number ends up being less then half a percent of customers per box that get suspended. I know this sounds terrible but if we didn’t suspend the .5% of customers that are a problem the other 99.5% would have many outages and slow load times. The .5% we suspend usually are the ones that even if they were on the server by them self they would still be crashing it. They are the ones that truly need dedicated servers.
Yeah I know how screwed up everything I just said is, but unfortunately this is the cut-throat marketplace that Hostgator is playing in. Take a look at our old hosting tips page written many years ago. Things have definitely changed since then. We’ve held out longer then any of the other larger hosts with offering these scam plans that I can think of, but in the end trying to educate potential customers has failed. It was either follow the trend to stay competitive or start shrinking as a company.
This is my plan for becoming so scummy…
Anyone we find crashing a server will be moved onto a server with only twenty accounts on it for the same monthly hosting price, instead of being suspended. Twenty customers will be paying us just shy of $200 a month on a server which at our cost has a $1,200 setup and about $250 a month leasing fee. You heard me… We are going to be giving abusers hosting below our cost. I’m not even factoring in merchant fees, support costs, or server administration time! If this isn’t good enough for the less then .5% of customers that crash our servers then there just isn’t any pleasing them.
I guarantee if HostGator starts sucking it’s not going to have anything to do with the crazy plans we are offering. Our new offering is no different then the last due to the TOS limiting the CPU and memory which is what truly affects performance. The reason most hosting companies start going downhill after a plan increase is a result from sales skyrocketing and the lack of man power to keep up with growth. If HostGator starts having this problem I’ll switch the site back to the old plans in a heartbeat. There’s no way I’m going to risk everything we built in exchange for a few more sales.
I could have lied as most hosting company blogs and CEO’s do by saying something along the lines of… “We are very excited that our growth has allowed us to negotiate better pricing which we are passing on to our customers in the form of larger plans.” HostGator is one of biggest hosting companies in the world so I know a statement like this is BS. I’m sure many of you will be upset with me writing this as the truth hurts, and I’m sure some of you would even prefer I lie to you, but really in the end honesty is the best way to go.
Posted in Brent Oxley, Gator Politics | 46 Comments »
My plan to save the housing market, the economy, and HostGator simultaneously…
Written by Brent Oxley on September 27, 2007 – 3:56 pm -First off HostGator is not in any kind of trouble so don’t let the title scare you.
One of the biggest issues plaguing HostGator from day one has been finding qualified system administrators. Getting business is the easy part for us! At times we purposely slow down sales in order to allow for the hiring of support techs to keep up with growth. The majority of job applicants we receive are from qualified system administrators with a great deal of experience in this industry, but they reside overseas. If they had a quick, easy, and legal way to come over to America, than we would be hiring them left and right. Unfortunately, this is not an option.
The plan:
I propose we allow any foreigner who purchases a home and lives in it, to become a US Citizen. What about their family? Allow them to stay on some type of visitor pass requiring them to live at the same house until they one day move out to purchase their own home. We could even charge a visitor tax that will contribute toward any costs that may come from their stay, such as schooling. The money generated from this program would result in billions of dollars a year in tax revenue.
The housing market currently has approximately 4.5 million unsold homes. I have no idea how many home sales something like this would generate, but I’m willing to bet it would be at least a million. HostGator alone would purchase a dozen plus homes if it meant a highly skilled admin from another country could come to America to work for us. This would be a major boost to the housing market, crashing home prices would stabilize and perhaps even start to rebound. If an immigrant is required to purchase a home before becoming a US citizen, than they are most likely either going to be making a very good living.
These people coming to the U.S. would be the system administrators, doctors, engineers, programmers, and would fill the void of many other specialized jobs that companies like HostGator are in dire need to fill. Do we need to worry about terrorists entering our country this way? Sure, but not anymore than we do about the 9 million illegal immigrants currently living in our country. Do we need to worry about American jobs being lost? They are already being lost due to the outsourcing that occurs. HostGator does not outsource and we actively seek employees that are local to our Houston office. However, with a field as specialized as web hosting, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the right talent.
We are paying our Chief Technology Officer $100,000’s of dollars a year through our Canadian office, yet he is not legally able to come work for us in America. We have spoken to several immigration lawyers, and no one can get him in. He has been denied at the border numerous times. Our CTO, David Collins has no criminal record and is by far the most honest person I have ever met.
Our government needs to stop bleeding money and start running a more like a business. Dave is begging to work for us in America, and would be paying taxes on his high salary income. He is the smartest administrator anyone in our company knows, and if it was not for him the 100+ HostGator employees would most likely be unemployed. We have a lot of businesses and people willing to pay big bucks in order to be allowed to live and work in America.
What makes a company great? Is it the pretty office, the cool name, or nifty business cards? No!
To be the best you have to have the best working for you. If our country keeps turning away the brightest such as Dave it’s only a matter of time before we are no longer the most powerful nation in the world. If you’re a part of the U.S. Government and are reading this please stop forcing American businesses to outsource to other countries. Allow us to bring in the talent we need to stay competitive with other nations. You can play it off and pretend it’s not a problem. After all HostGator, which is not that big, is the only company with this issue, right? It looks like Microsoft, is being forced to open a Canadian office to find the talent it needs.
“Microsoft Corp. plans to set up house in the Vancouver area this fall with a new software development centre that would attract talent without encountering U.S. immigration issues.” “The company said the new location will “allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by the immigration issues in the U.S.”
Source: http://www.thestar.com/article/232774
$50,000 Reward:
We our offering a $50,000 cash reward to anyone that can get our CTO
David Collins legally into America! If it’s a bribe we have to make, it’s a
bribe we shall. If you’re sure you can do it contact jobs@HostGator.com
We are also offering a $3,000 reward to anyone that can refer us a
system administrator that we hire. Please email jobs@HostGator.com for
more information
Posted in Brent Oxley, Gator Politics | 14 Comments »
