Back in 2007 we leaked a company email from Brent Oxley, then HostGator CEO, to our blog. Since that time we’ve grown by leaps and bounds (to the tune of 610%), became the 21st fastest growing company on the Inc. 5000, added a new office location in Austin, TX, and are over 450 employees strong. With those feats, we’ve had our fair share of challenges along the way, however we’re all ready to bring HostGator to the next level. Below is the bulk of an internal e-mail from Brent Oxley sent on Nov. 18th, showcasing some big changes going on at HostGator.

Hello Fellow Gators,

I want everyone to read this so I’m going to start off with some fireworks…

Every single Gator in the Houston office is getting a 10% raise starting immediately.

This raise will be reflected on your next paycheck and will not take the place of any upcoming reviews, bonuses or other compensation you have coming. A while ago I sent a news email stating that once we had more automaton in place every employee would receive a raise. We don’t have the automation yet, but we are nearly there with the new billing system so I’ve decided to give part of it in advance. I believe through automation we will become 22%-30% more efficient with staffing. I’m really hoping this 10% raise is just the start and I hope to pass along every penny we save from automation to all of you. While remaining understaffed, HostGator is completely bloated at the same time. What very few of you understand is that some of our most underpaid employees are making over $100,000 a year while some of our most overpaid employees are making $30,000 a year. There are a few of us that perform on such a low level that if everyone did likewise the company would end up bankrupt. Likewise there are other employees that do the equivalent work of four or more of their peers. At HostGator, the sky really is the limit to what you can make, but in order for this to be the case you must always be learning and growing. You truly do create your own destiny at HostGator.

Free Lunch for Everybody

…

Being a nerd has it perks, Nerds can pickup mad chicks in Second Life, Photoshop acne out of pictures, and if they’re truly 1337, even have a real life girlfriend one day. I know being a nerd sounds glamorous and all, but there are a few major drawbacks. When you’re a nerd, you usually develop a serious case of Big Bonedinitis.

In college, everyone talks about the Freshmen 15, but here at the Gator, we have what’s known as the Hatchling 40. If you come to work at the Gator, it’s usually not a question of whether or not you will gain weight, but instead a question of how much weight you’ll gain and if you’ll ever stop gaining weight. The more Linux you learn, the more weight you’re going to end up packing on.

Big Bonedinitis is no joke. It’s a real disease that destroys lives and is hitting us nerds especially hard. In fact, one of our biggest expenses here at the Gator is replacing furniture that Big Bonedinitis leaves behind in its wake. We’ve broken over 40 leather chairs in the last year alone. We go through so many chairs we now have a room designated as the chair graveyard.

A few of our wall-mounted toilets have even broken off the wall forcing us to reinforce the remaining with stacked bricks. We’ve gone through so many benches that we finally decided to upgrade to a custom built concrete bench reinforced with re-bar. …

HostGator recently reached 200,000 active customers and we are on pace to break 300,000 within a year.

I remember when I’d be out celebrating if HostGator managed to get two signups in a week. Now, we’re seeing thousands of signups a week. Back in the day, my celebrating consisted of nothing more than dropping the Ramen noodles or the tuna can I had in my hands and grabbing some sushi for an hour before scrambling back to work. At the time, I was a poor college student who invested every penny I had back into the business I was building.

The HostGator.com domain was registered on October 10, 2002 and here are some statistics about how many active customers we’ve had at a few points since then.

• 2/1/2003: 112 active customers
• 2/1/2004: 1,031 active customers
• 2/1/2005: 6,892 active customers
• 2/1/2006: 21,434 active customers
• 2/1/2007: 50,213 active customers
• 2/1/2008: 92,752 active customers
• 2/1/2009: 157,432 active customers
• Today: 200,000+

How HostGator Came To Be:

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a kid. In sixth grade, I sold candy at school and had all the kids in my neighborhood working for me. When I was 14, my cousins and I had a business where we sold watermelons from a truck on the side of a road. The deal we offered was simple, but effective: “2 for $5.”

Ain't no Glory in Selling Watermelons

It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in high school that I got hooked on trying to make money on the Internet. What sucked me in was the paid to surf programs such as AllAdvantage, Bepaid.com, Cashfiesta, and the like. These companies claimed they would pay you to surf the Internet while looking at ads. I created my first website on a service much like GeoCities and was able to generate over 50,000 referrals between all the programs I was enrolled in. One by one, I learned that all of the programs were a scam. I made $65 when I was entitled to over a million. …

Many of us at HostGator were curious what the ‘nerd vote’ looked like so we went ahead and ran our own poll amongst employees. We limited the choices to either Mccain or Obama in order to keep the results realistic.

Here’s a breakdown of the results:

98 Texas employees participated
55 nerds voted for Barack Hussein Obama II
34 nerds voted for John Sidney McCain

The remaining 9 votes were disqualified for failing to follow the strict directions of selecting one candidate or the other. For the sake of being democratic, here are the results of the 9 votes that were neither McCain nor Obama:

1 vote for “in your moms box” – Whatever this means….
3 votes for “neither”
1 vote for “ray” – Ray, you’re a loser if you voted for yourself.
1 vote for “Ron Paul”
1 vote for “cocktail party” – If you voted this, please come see me for psychiatric help.
1 vote for “Brent Oxley” – Your vote may have been disqualified, but you will still be getting a raise for having such wisdom.
1 vote for “Cbar” – I think this vote was an attempt to spell “brent”, but got mixed up on the spelling.

Obama dominated with 62% of the votes versus McCain’s 38%. This nerd vote took place at the HostGator office in Houston, Texas which is one of McCain’s strongest states! I can only imagine what these results would have looked like had HostGator employees been from somewhere more liberal, like San Francicso.

I personally voted for McCain with the belief that he is the lesser of two evils. I disagree with McCain on a few key issues such as withdrawing from Iraq, and having preconditions before meeting with foreign leaders. This, of course, seems much better to me than Obama’s relying on the United Nations and resolving issues in a “diplomatic” way. The U.N. is a joke, which is why major atrocities and genocide are happening in places like Darfur and Burma. The diplomatic route is the best way to go, but you can only talk so long until action is necessary if the talks are fruitless.

The Iraq war is costing Americans roughly 147 billion a year. This is a ton of money, but when you consider our current deficit is at $438 billion, you can quickly understand the war isn’t the main or only problem in America. …

HostGator has been growing in record numbers lately, and hiring employees just as fast. We thought it might be interesting to go around and harass some of the new trainees. Without further ado, meet our new employees as recorded by Justin…

The first few people we interviewed for the video started saying how much we sucked, but after canning them the morale suddenly increased as you can see in the above video.

The employee culture at HG has generally stayed the same over the years. I started at the company when there were just 4 of us in a small office in Florida, and now we’re closing in on 200 employees in our Houston office.

One of the cool things about the company is you’ll see the owner, Brent Oxley, at the office every day working more hours than just about any other employee. Many new hires would never expect him to be the owner of the company, which reminds me of a prank we pulled on Vincent when he first started. …

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? …

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. …