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.

After the paid to surf venture failed, I decided to create real web sites and sell my own advertising inventory. The network that I created was called The Freak Network and consisted of scfreak.com, dfreak.com, and wcfreak.com, all of which were named after best selling Blizzard Entertainment games (Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, respectively).

My network was making me about $40 a day, which was impressive given that all of my pimple covered friends had to get real jobs and make less money. Everything was going great until the .com bubble bursted and my advertisers began to cheat me out of money. I was left with no choice but to find alternative sources of income and that’s when I had the epiphany to start selling web hosting on the side. My network of websites was receiving tens of thousands of page views per day and I already had the servers, so selling web hosting seemed like the perfect plan. Freakwebhosting.com was born. My plan was to use the traffic from my gaming websites to gain customers.

Freak Web Hosting

I built Freak Web Hosting to just shy of a hundred customers that consisted mostly of gaming sites. The problem was that I wasn’t a system administrator and that I wasn’t that technical. This resulted in poor security which lead to hackings, horrible uptime, and a never ending series of technical issues that kept me from running a successful business. I hated being a webhost at the time! I was able to get the business but no matter how hard I searched I couldn’t find someone to take care of the technical issues at a price I could afford.

I spent years trying to make my network a viable business and another year trying to get my web hosting venture running smoothly . The final straw was when the Data Center claimed that my server was “compromised and outgoing malicious traffic.” To alleviate this problem, they ordered OS reload after reload, which drove me to a point just short of insanity and a state in which I felt life was over. (In hindsight, I believe the datacenter lied to me about the malicious traffic in order to get me to leave due to the amount bandwidth my sites were using. The deal they gave me at the time was too good to be true and that’s exactly what it ended up being.)

I could have kept on fighting, but it would have been a futile effort. I was left with no choice but to scale down operations. I did the right thing by refunding everyone’s last month of hosting and even refunded those that prepaid for a year in advance. At the time there were three annual customers that I didn’t have enough money to repay, so I contacted them to let them know my intentions and eventually paid them back a few months later.

By the time The Freak Network and Freak Web Hosting failed, high school was coming to an end. I didn’t have much time before I would have to decide what to do with my life. I felt like a complete failure and had nothing to show for all my years of work.

I wanted to be a success and make some type of difference in the world and I felt as if I couldn’t accomplish this by going to college. I was very close to joining the army and even went to see a recruiter. I believed that if I joined the army, I’d have purpose in my life and be able to make some type of difference. Just days before enlisting, my dad talked me out of joining the army and helped me get into Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

I spent a few months living on campus and attending classes without deviating too much from the life of a regular student. That’s when an old friend contacted me telling me that he started a server company. He knew that if we went into business together I’d have no problem getting the customers. He begged me for a week to get back into hosting and eventually convinced me to partner with him and try hosting again. After failing the first time around, I was against the idea and didn’t want to try again unless I was confident I had someone with technical abilities to keep the servers up and running.

The deal we came to orally was that I’d run my own business and I’d give him half the proceeds for keeping the servers secure and up and running. I quickly revived the old Freakwebhosting.com brand and reached out to all my old customers. I managed to convince a majority of them to sign up very quickly and within days, I was once again a web host and once again in the hosting industry.

It only took a couple of months for reality to set in . Servers began having multi-hour outages on a daily basis as a result of the datacenter going offline. I was bringing the business in while my partner was failing to uphold his end of the bargain. The servers weren’t up and running; they were failing.

I decided to break the partnership and venture off on my own. I ended up purchasing a few servers from Dedicatednow.com and managed to find a system administrator who would help me as I needed and bill me by the hour. The combination of the new Data Center and system administrator made Freak Web Hosting more stable than ever.

With things running so well and the old Freak Website Network being dead, I knew the company needed a new design and a new name. I searched for days and tried hundreds of domain name combinations before I narrowed it down to two names: HostGator and GatorHost. I was torn on which domain to choose. I didn’t know which one sounded better and couldn’t afford both domain names. HostGator may sound like a much better name now, but at the time and without all of our branding, they both sounded the same.

Original Web Site for HostGator

Business was booming and my freshman year of college was coming to an end. By this time, every second of my life was spent in class, doing homework, or taking chats and answering emails on the computer.

I was a 24/7 one-man operation. I was being woken up numerous times a night with phone calls and there wasn’t a single class I would make it through without having to leave at least a few times to take a business call. I knew I was on path to be making more than the average college graduate in about six months. I also knew it would have been impossible to finish another year of college while running HostGator, so I decided to drop out of school and follow my dream of growing HostGator into the world’s largest hosting company.

Understandably, my family and friends were all very much against my decision to dropout. I had many businesses that failed to pan out and the chances of HostGator succeeding were slim. In the end, everyone expressed their thoughts strongly, but supported me in my decision. To me, it was a no-brainer. If things didn’t work out, I’d just go back to school and be miserable. If they worked out, I’d be pursuing my dream.

Things continued to go well for the Gator at the expense of living life, having friends, and never being able to leave the computer. Within minutes of leaving the computer there would always be some type of emergency with a service going offline that would require a restart and I’d have to run back to my computer. More times than not, I’d make it half way to my wherever I was going before getting a phone call or an alert and being forced to turn back to resolve the issue. This was before the iPhone, smartphones, air cards, or any other type of mobile tool. What amazed me is the fact that I was not that technical, but was still able to help most of my customers by simply taking their question and applying common sense or finding a work around.

When HostGator had just started, I hated resellers because they required a large amount of relatively technical service. What’s ironic is that as we grew, I saw how easy it was to obtain reseller customers. Before long, obtaining reseller customers is where most of my focus and advertising money went. Ideal timing allowed us to fill the reseller niche while the competition focused primarily on shared hosting. Today, shared hosting is the source of most of our new business, but we continue to remain the worlds’ largest reseller hosting company.

If a major issue ever came up, I’d be helpless when it came to actually solving the problem. I was at the mercy of an hourly system administrator who usually had something more important to do than fix my servers. In the early days, HostGator was inadequately prepared for drives failures and similar large-scale issues. When one happened, there would usually be data loss and days of little to no sleep while I helped customers recover. I continued life in my apartment prison for another year before the company grew beyond what I could handle myself and I hired my first full time employee, Ben Welch.

Ben would arrive at my house while I was sleeping and immediately get to work taking calls, chats, and tickets. When I woke up, I’d head over to bedroom and get to work with him. At approximately the same time, I hired an Indian outsourced support company. The support volume was more than Ben and me could handle alone and it was impossible for us to man all of the stations all of the time.

I don’t believe in outsourcing, but at that point, outsourcing was the only way I could have 24/7 coverage of email and chat support that I could afford.

In hindsight, outsourcing was a big mistake. Choosing to outsource our supported resulted in the loss of customers, a damaged reputation, and low caliber support. As soon as we could afford an office, we rented a 1,600 square foot office in Boca Raton, Florida and began replacing our outsourced employees with in-house employees. We learned our lesson with outsourcing and have had 100% in-house support for several years now. There’s absolutely no chance of us switching to outsourced support in the future – it just isn’t worth whatever we’d save in the short run.

When we first moved into our first office, I thought that it was overkill and I wasn’t sure how (or if) we’d ever fill it. In no time, sales and growth caught fire. We had people working in closets, hallways, and I had to share my office with another employee. The office wasn’t that bad of a place, but there was one major problem. We had a single stall co-ed restroom for over 24 employees to share and nobody to clean it. If you had to go, you’d usually end up holding it or driving home.

I continued to wake up numerous times a night to take support calls and contribute to our service and support as much as possible. This took a toll on me, though. At the ripe old age of 22, I began to develop a very serious case of carpel tunnel syndrome. It slowly progressed until I was at the point where tapping any finger on either hand would feel like needles piercing me to the bone. I ended up trying a few alternatives to typing, including holding pencils in the palms of my fists and hiring someone to type and move the mouse for me. Typing with pencils only helped so much and hiring someone to communicate what to do ended up being a nightmare.

Eventually, the pain worsened to the point where it affected everything I did. If I went to a movie, all I could think about was my hands hurting. If I drove home, the pain would be so intolerable that I would have to alternate sitting on my hands so they would fall sleep to allow the pain to temporarily go away. Technology began to improve and I soon learned of Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software. This was a lifesaver for me and while it wasn’t perfect, it did allow me to continue to perform my duties, just less effectively. I ended up using Dragon for a few years before my hands recovered to a point where I’m no longer in pain and I’m able to type without any discomfort. I’m sure if my old lack of sleep and constant typing routine came back, my problems would as well.

Eventually, we ran out of closets in our Boca Raton office and had to find a new location. We were also severely understaffed and couldn’t find the people we needed to keep up with our rapid growth. Boca Raton is where people go to retire not find a job. It’s so bad that the locals would always joke that Boca was “Heaven’s waiting room.”

We initially searched for office space in South Florida, but found the prices to be astronomical for the size we needed to maintain growth. We began looking in Dallas, Texas for a new office and somehow ended up looking in Houston. Soon after, we found and purchased the 30,000 square feet office building that we’re currently located in. The office was perfect for us since 16,000 square feet was available for use and the rest was leased out. We currently occupy around 18,000 square feet of the building and I anticipate that we’ll be filling the rest in a little over a year .

When we first moved into the new building, me and a few other employees took up residency throughout the building. There was very few employees at first and nothing but empty space. Many people that I met had no idea what web hosting was and were convinced that I was a drug dealer. They believed this because I was so young, successful, and living in an empty building with a bunch of young adults in what resembled a frat house. It also didn’t help at the time I had just gotten back from Brazil to open HostGator Brazil.

The Future of HostGator:

I still haven’t reached my goal of HostGator becoming the world’s largest hosting company, but as one of the world’s largest and with how well things have been going, I can definitely see it happening within the next eight years. In order to achieve this, we’ll need to go more mainstream. This includes launching a brand to compete with GoDaddy, more billboards, starting TV commercials, and hiring many, many more high quality employees to continue supporting our customers.

HostGator has been a real blessing in my life and I couldn’t have gotten us to where we are today alone. I owe much of HostGator’s success to our customers as well as to each and every employee who has put their heart and sweat into this company. If it weren’t for all of you, I would most likely have to return to college. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Thank you!

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.

We have a few major problems in America right now. The consensus majority would have you believe that it’s the economy. I believe the biggest problem we have is our nation’s debt, which is about ten and half trillion dollars! To pay this off: every man, woman, child, and baby would need to pay about $35,000 in cash today. Even if our economy was going strong and we withdrew from Iraq our debt would still be increasing!

Both Mccain and Obama have the same plan to fix the economy by adding another trillion dollars if not trillions in further debt to America. To summarize the politics:

Mccains plan is to keep taxes the same
Obamas plan is to tax the rich further.

And here’s the problem…

In 2007, Forbes Magazine reported 946 billionaires in the entire world, with total accumulated wealth of $3.5 trillion. So even if somehow we said screw all you billionaires of the entire world we are now taking 100% of your money to help pay America’s debt it would still only put a small dent in the total $10.5 trillion America owes. This isn’t even taking into consideration that most of their wealth is in assets which means if everything was liquidated the market would be so flooded that the $3.5 trillion would probably be worth much less than half.

If you took 100% of the money and assets excluding real estate of every single person with one million dollars or more in both America and Canada this would still only be somewhere around 7 trillion dollars.

America needs to start being run like a business and Obama’s socialism is not the answer.

If a business is struggling would it be wise for them to raise the prices on its best customers?

No!

Your best customers would be the last ones to receive the price increase. You can’t penalize a customer for doing an increased volume of business with your company. If you do they’ll do less business or find someone else to do business with altogether.

If you raise the taxes of United States businesses they will become less competitive and the world is going to find someone else to do business. This will result in both fewer jobs and less government income. The middle class and the poor will suffer the most.

It’s a fact that the last time the capital gains tax was increased the government brought in less revenue. It’s a fact that the last time the capital gains tax was decreased by Bush the government’s revenue increased!

When Obama was asked about this he said: “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness“. Instead of looking at the capitals gains tax for what’s going to make America the most revenue, Obama is going to raise it due to what he calls “fairness”. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

The truth is that the rich and small businesses are America’s best customers who are already paying the highest percent in taxes.

The rich fall into the 35% tax bracket.
The average household falls into the 25% tax bracket.
And the poorest fall into the 10% tax bracket.

So, basically as a business owner that’s increasing wages and adding jobs to America I’m already paying about 50% more in taxes than the average citizen.

I honestly wouldn’t mind my taxes being increased if it meant decreasing our nation’s debt. However it’s upsetting that Obama wants to raise my taxes to add further debt to America. You can only tax the rich so much, or heck you can take 100% of their money, and it’s still not going to be enough to pay off the debt. It doesn’t take a genius to see that on our current course America is going to have no choice but to bankrupt itself if something doesn’t change and neither candidate seems up to taking on this challenge.

A democracy fails when everyone votes to give themselves money, and that’s what this election is about. The middle class and the poor far outnumber the rich and Obama is winning votes by promising more money at the expense of the horrible small businesses such as HostGator. It may not be what’s best for the country but it is a great way to win votes! I mean after all who cares if the tax revenue decreases when you raise the capital gains tax since it’s a matter of “fairness”.

According to the Wall Street Journal — 40% of income earners pay zero, zip, nada, in income taxes. Obama’s plan is to give people paying zero in income taxes $1,000 a year for nothing. I can’t seem to comprehend why Obama is going to use hard working American’s money to pay someone who isn’t working hard and not even paying a dime in income taxes. This money is coming from all three classes the poor, the middle and the rich. Is that what he calls “fairness”? Sounds more like welfare to me.

What we need right now is a president that says we have harsh times ahead, but shows that we’re going to make cuts and get through this together. If you have thousands in credit card debt you can either squeeze a few more lobster dinners out of it or you can suffer and start eating Ramen Noodles. America needs to start suffering and start eating Ramen. This isn’t the time we should be voting for our last lobster dinner.

Sources:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/06/comparison-of-t.html
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/11/pf/millionaire/millionaires/index.htm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121910303529751345.html?mod=most_emailed_day

photo credit: the_real_cjs

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.

Vince was heading home after his shift, when he ran into Brent. Not knowing that Brent was the owner, Brent was asking him how he liked it at the job. Of course Vince, like the other new fish you saw in the video, declared his love for the job. He was a bit surprised, however, when Brent started going off on how much he hated the company. Acting as though he was a disgruntled employee, Brent mentioned how he was going to come back the next day with a gun to shoot the place up.

Brent went on for a minute complaining about the “owner” of the company and how much of an @!^hole the owner was before he asked if Vince had met him yet. Vince had tried to reason with Brent not to shoot the place up, until Brent finally broke the news and introducing himself to him.

Good thing Vincent loved his job that day.

P.S. We’re looking for excellent System Administrators and Support Techs to join the fold. Apply today if you want to love your job too.

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.

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

As most of you are aware, we have our livechat staffed 24/7 for presales and basic support questions/issues. What most of you don’t know is just how many chats we get in a day! Here are some statistics, and some of our top chat techs. Give these guys a pat on the back, it can get rough out there on the front lines!

Big thanks to Angela R, our Day Shift Supervisor for compiling these stats.

June 1 to June 14, 2007

Total Number of Chats: 13,355
Total Surveys Returned: 4,170

Overall HostGator Experience
Excellent: 1,895
Very Good: 984
Good: 784
Fair: 378
Poor: 129

Chat Technician Rating
Awesome: 2,301
Good: 1,464
Needs Improvement: 396

Top Phone Score: Justyn S at 381 calls taken

Top Chat Score: Tin P at 891 chats taken

Top Ticket Score: Jason R at 230 tickets completed

Top Awesome Score: Kevin N at 141 awesome surveys returned

Top Score Overall: Tin P at 1011 Chats/Tickets/Phone calls completed

Keep up the great work guys!

Check out the total number of chats! 14,000 in a period of two weeks! Live Chat may not always be the best solutions to your problems, but from the surveys alone we can tell we are doing something right.

In the future we will have a team of employees who will contact anyone who has left a poor chat review, we hope this will help with issues that aren’t resolved in chat, and find out what we can do to improve our livechat service!

HostGator’s appears to be aimed at selling you their service. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s faceless, and damn boring.

At first I thought, “Well, of course they are wrong; our blog is perfect!” But after some further consideration I noticed they could be right. Although I did not consider the quote very fair based on us only having three posts so far, I know this blog could go two ways. The first way is how they say it, and the second way is how I vision it. Although we will be posting coupons and promotions often, I also want this to be a fun and personal look at HostGator, our employees, and even our customers! We’d be lying if we said part of the reason for having a blog was not to promote sales, and most of you would see right through that.

Now to the point! Recently Brent sent out a very important email to the company, this went to employees only and is a great look at the direction HostGator is moving. Im going to give you the unedited version of this email. This is the first time one of these has ever been released outside of the company, heck Brent doesn’t even know im posting it! I might get in trouble, but I promised inside information and i’m going to give it to you. ;) Here it goes!

Hello Gators,

Congratulations you have made it through boot camp!

I’m sure most of you are reading this not even realizing a boot camp was going on. Let me explain…

About two months ago hostgator was at about 50 employees. We’ve been on a rampage hiring everyone that came through the door with little or no screening.

This boosted our numbers to over 100 employees with our customer base increasing only by a few thousand. Since then we have over doubled the amount of employees while only increasing customers about 3%.

When you hire as many people as fast as we did there’s going to be slackers, slow learners, bad conduct, and a plethora of other issues bringing down the performance of everyone. We’ve been very hard on everyone in order to separate the weak from the strong. We made the final round of cuts today and believe we are now left with the best. If you are reading this you are either an amazing employee or we see potential in you.

Since most of you have been hired we have been putting the focus on numbers rather than quality and truly helping the customer. Part of our boot camp strategy was to boost everyone’s numbers, and focus at a later date on quality. I have great news that will be a huge relief to most of you! Ticket counts will not matter at ALL until July 1st, and when July 1st hits we will only be doing reviews going forward. I repeat we will not be looking at your counts.

Think of this as a time to learn and improve your abilities to become a better employee.

I want this company to be ran by you the employees for the next month and a half. I’m extremely curious to see what can be achieved without management breathing down your neck about numbers. The focus is going to be shifted to quality with stress being placed on every employee to help a customer as much as humanly possible. I want EVERYONE here to think of themselves as quality control. It’s time we take our level support up a few notches and amaze the hosting community!

How do we do this?

No more fluffing tickets and passing the buck. If you aren’t sure how to help the customer don’t rest until you find a person that can. If you can’t find anyone that better mean you knocked on my door as a last resort! If I’m not here get someone to call me. Find a way to help whether it’s a chat, phone call, or ticket.

No more asking a customer to check if something is working. You better have verified yourself that their problem is resolved. If you see this done in a previous response talk to the employee.

If a customer forgot to include a domain name you better have tried looking them up by their email or past ticket history. No more needless responses to boost ticket counts. If you see anyone doing this talk to them. If a customer is upset about something go the extra mile and call them to help them with their issue! I really want to be seeing this as it is non existent currently.

If you see that a fellow employee did not help the customer PERFECTLY in a previous response track them down to correct their mistake and teach them what to do next time. If they aren’t at work make a note to do it later. DO NOT FORGET. If an employee keeps making the same mistake address it with a manager or myself. If you see someone not putting fourth the extra effort that we are now requiring address it nicely with them and if they do not improve bring it to managements attention. You are no longer going to be expected to perform well yourself, you are going to be expected to perform as a team. One mistake is the mistake of all.

Now that boot camp is over we want this to become your dream job. I need everyone’s help and suggestions in order how to make this a great place to work. We have a few really cool ideas were tossing around but are two definite changes for you…

• Every Friday will now be free pizza day for all shifts.
• We are working out details for two 15 minute paid breaks on top of your hour every day. This will be announced in the next week until then stick to the current policy.

We will also be starting to do some activities outside of work. In the next week or two I’m going to organize a hostgator paintball outing paid for by the company, so until then build up the nerve to challenge me. =)

Congratulations everyone! Thank you for all the hard work and wonderful job that you have been doing.

–
Sincerely,
Brent Oxley

Look forward to more of this in the future, even pictures and videos of the office and our company events! I am always open to suggestions, so if any of you have good ideas for the blog please let me know! Just comment, email me directly, or post on our forums. I’d love to hear from you!

Unless you are currently in the Houston Area, you likely have not seen the office yet. So as I promised a hundred times on the forums, here are some pictures of the new office. (Finally!)

Pictures courtesy of our System Admin/Photographer extraordinaire Adam Dunin.

Yep, that is one BIG gator up there. The sign took days to assemble, and caused our ears much grief as they drilled and hammered. Of course, no office is complete without its fair share of cubicles. And we have that covered.

Not everything is about work, and after a hard day of keeping our servers from reaching meltdown status we head over to the game room to relax. Check out that pool table!

Hope you all enjoyed the tour, there is much more to come!