Well, it seems like Brent was pretty happy about the feedback on my previous entry Company Email, and as you can tell I still have my job! But not only was he happy about it, he asked me to leak 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! …

Recently I read a review of the new HostGator blog. One of the comments in that entry really stood out to me.

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. …

As some of you may or may not know, back in September of 2006 HostGator made the big move from a small 2000 square-foot office in Boca Raton, Florida, to a four-story 25,000 square-foot building in Houston, Texas. With it went 40 of the 50 HostGator employees, including myself! This was a huge change for HostGator and since then we’ve expanded to over 100 employees in-house. Imagine only 2 and a half years ago, HostGator had 6 in-house employees and an outsourced support team!

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. …