Snappy here with an important announcement!

HostGator.com has sent me a company memo this morning confirming that they are once again participating in National Breast Cancer Awareness Month this October and I wanted to pass the good news along to you.

Memo:
“In 1985, the search for a cure for Breast Cancer was gaining headway and AstraZeneca founded National Breast Cancer Awareness Month to raise awareness of this growing cause. Thanks to the establishment of NBCAM, in October of each year, organizations across the nation focus on the fight, helping to promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the race against breast cancer. HostGator.com is proud to join these organizations in their support for a cure.

So it looks like I’m going pink for October! For those of you who have loved ones who have experienced or are going through this, please give them a Snappyrific hug for me.

Have a great day and think pink.

We have all known someone in our lives, either close friends, or family who has suffered from some form of cancer. AstraZeneca, which manufactures breast cancer drugs Arimidex and Tamoxifen, founded the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985. The aim of the NBCAM from the start has been to promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the fight against breast cancer.

HostGator.com is proud to announce it will be participating in Breast Cancer Awareness Month this year by turning “Snappy The Gator” pink on our website. We have also setup a special coupon code “PINK”, the coupon code will allow 20% off the first month of any hosting account we offer and we will donate the first month from every signup that uses this code to breast cancer research.

We have also created a few banners for our clients who wish to let the world know that their web host cares and for our affiliates.
Click Here to view the banners

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.

After a lunch discussion with one of our vendors we devised a solution. Construction began immediately upon our return and soon enough we had a beautiful recreation of his natural environment:

If you watch the discovery channel or if you’ve ever visited a male friends one-bedroom hovel you’ll most likely deduce that this particular manimal is of the hairy brown backed variety (Troglodyte Capillus Fuscus). Hairy brown backed manimals are native to southeast Texas (and anywhere else natty light is readily found).

Troglodyte Capillus Fuscus (like all manimals) are very territorial and require a very specific diet. Thus, we were sure to provide him with some nutritional items (half empty dr pepper cans, hot pockets & bananas) to properly recreate his natural environment.

When dealing with Manimals it’s very important to ensure their habitats are kept clean. Our in-house habitat engineers work daily to resolve any odor or otherwise undesirable which may ‘accumulate’ inside the manimals living quarters:

With the clients, employees, on-site manimals and various other wonders, working at HostGator is a unique experience. It’s definitely unlike any other office I’ve ever been a part of.

Hopefully it always remains that way.

Chances are that you have almost certainly heard of the recent and very tragic earthquake that has nearly devastated the Caribbean nation of Haiti. In the wake of such a sudden and severe tragedy, it can be hard to see hope.

The American Red Cross, along with thousands of other support and aid organizations, has been making a huge effort to get things as close to normal for people in Haiti. To support that relief effort, HostGator is making a $100,000 donation to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development fund.

The press release announcing the donation is below:

HOUSTON – Shared, reseller, and dedicated web hosting company HostGator announced on Monday that it has donated $100,000 to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development fund.

The donation, which is the fourth six digit charitable donation HostGator has made in its eight year history, will help the American Red Cross provide support for the relief efforts in Haiti, which will likely include mobilizing additional aid workers, sending supplies, and providing financial resources for what is certain to be a long recovery for the government and people of Haiti.

“What happened in Haiti is a tragedy,” said Brent Oxley, HostGator’s founder and CEO. “I’m glad to be in a position where we’re able to help those in need. It’d be wrong to do nothing in light of what happened to the people. Their lives are going to be forever changed in a way that most Americans can barely fathom.”

HostGator is participating in the Hosting for Haiti alliance, an effort in which a number of major web hosting companies united to provide financial and public resources for relief in Haiti. In addition to its financial donation, HostGator will continue to encourage its customers and employees to donate to the efforts in Haiti through Twitter and other company communication channels.

On January 12, a number of earthquakes ranging from 6.5 to 7.3 on the Richter scale, devastated the poor Caribbean nation. Figures released by the Haitian government estimate the death toll to be approximately 200,000, with 80,000 people already buried in mass graves around the country.

If you’re financially able, we encourage you to make a donation to help the people of Haiti as well. Whether you donate, $10 or $100,000, your donation will help people who are truly in need. Check out the Hosting for Haiti website for more information on how to get involved. If you aren’t financially able (or if you just want to do more), consider Tweeting, blogging, or telling others about the cause and how they can help.

And to the other hosting companies out there: we encourage you to outdo us with your own donations. In this competition, everyone wins.

HostGator has a history and tradition of giving back. In the last year, we’ve donated over $125,000 to charity, actively worked towards offsetting and reversing our environmental impact, and given free or
discounted web hosting to a countless number of web sites.

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.

That’s right, the folding@home hostgator.com team is a reality and we’ve broken into the top 1,000 ranked teams!

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

Recently we had another HostGator fun day. Just another one of the perks of working for HostGator. Everyone got together to go bowling, play pool and watch the bartender do some cool tricks. All company paid with free food and beer. You can’t beat that. So we took some pictures, and I wanted to post them for everyone who might like to see. One of the amazing things caught with a Camera, compliments of Lance, was these detailed images of liquid in action. I hope you enjoy them.

Make sure to click on the first 3 images to see greater detail.