Here at HostGator, we are all about our clients. We continually strive to provide the very best support and newest hardware and technologies available, as well as provide informative and entertaining content  to our blog readers and forum members. With that being said, we would like your input.

How are we doing? What would you like to see more of? What type of content are you most interested in seeing in our blog? As most of you may already know, our blog is filled with mostly entertaining and comical posts. We would like your input so that we may continue to evolve and gravitate even closer to our customers. Would you like to see more informative/technology related posts? Do you prefer the more tongue in cheek posts? Are you happy with how things are currently?

We would like our customers to become more involved and active in our continued growth and evolution as a company, so here is your chance to speak out and voice your opinion on things. We welcome any and all input, and your opinions of our current social media content, as well as where you would like to see it in the future. So go ahead and leave us your opinions and suggestions, they just might be implemented!

Ready, set, go!

A HostGator office is not exactly your run of the mill workplace. On any given day a normal HostGator employee usually encounters several things a normal office might consider ‘out of the ordinary’.

A prime example of such an instance are the elevators HG employees use on a daily basis. Both our Houston & Austin locations are very nice offices, however both locations feature elevators which we’re fairly sure were originally assembled in Da Vinci’s workshop out of spare legos a few million years ago.

Usually when you step into the elevator in Houston you make it to work on time. Usually…

Getting a new office branch up and running is a lot of hard work. So much work in fact that founder Brent Oxley & customer service guru Daniel Collette have decided to bunk down on site. Here’s a quick tour of Daniel’s original HostGator Austin digs:

Upon watching this video, founder Brent Oxley and I became concerned. Daniel is actually a personal friend of ours (you might recognize him and his tattoo), so naturally we were worried about his general health & happiness.

It didn’t seem to us that Daniel was providing himself with an adequate den to thrive in. This was unacceptable. …

Here at HostGator we service an extremely diverse group of clientele and as such we get to interact with many different interesting people. These interactions encompass everything from angry clients seeking retribution to happy clients showering praises. Also included are some of the most absurd and downright strange communications imaginable.

In this post I’d like to focus on those absurd communications I just mentioned. I mean after all, they definitely help keep the job interesting.

Let’s start with one of the linux administration teams all-time favorite tickets: (Ticket is read from bottom to top)

The Dress shirts ticket, or should I say, dressshirts ticket, is one of the most (in)famous tickets here at HostGator. There has been much speculation as to the actual meaning of the cryptic message delivered to us on March 13th. Were we supposed to buy dress shirts? Is it some type of code we’re supposed to crack? Does he have a problem with our thinkgeek gotroot t-shirts?  We can only speculate since the mysterious client never returned our follow-up question. …

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.

…

Update: Thanks to all of those who participated! Our second Open Session was a success. A recording of the session is available on this page.

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. …

Update: This took place and was a big success. HostGator employees answered a ton of questions about backups, VPS solutions, Windows hosting, affiliates, and more. We appreciate people taking the time to come by and ask questions.

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. …

If you’ve ever seen Office Space, you most likely know that all TPS reports (that’s “Test Procedure Specification” for the uninformed) require cover sheets. The painfully ridiculous incident in the movie has become both a critical fixture of anti-corporate culture and a quintessential example of the eccentricities of bureaucracies of corporate America.

At HostGator, there are no TPS reports and cover sheets aren’t required to be put on anything. However, we do keep track of quite a few numbers and metrics and one of the metrics we do watch closely is chat volume.

The graph below is an average of the number of chats we completed per hour on any given day and at any given time throughout the month of March. The numbers are averaged, meaning that every Monday at 1 PM was averaged together to create a collective Monday at 1 PM metric. Our week-to-week variation is usually pretty negligible, so what you see on the graph is a fairly good representation of our chat volume for a given day. Note that the Y-axis starts at 30, meaning we never average less than 30 chats completed per hour. …