HostGator Blog | Gator Crossing

Live Chat Numbers

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!

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!

If you have any questions or need assistance with HostGator services be sure to check out Live Chat!

Ping!Zine Free Subscription Coupon

About two weeks ago at the cPanel Seminar I was lucky enough to meet Keith Duncan, the Publisher of the Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine. I’ve personally have been a subscriber to Ping! Zine for over a year, and have enjoyed their articles and opinions on the industry for quite some time.

Coupon: hostgator

I hope you enjoy the magazine as much as I do, and hey, nothing beats free right? Props to Keith for getting us this great deal!

Wordpress Plugin Competition

I was reading over the Wordpress news clips and came across a contest at

Is everyone ready for another Wordpress Plugin Competition? I know I am, especially with all the cool stuff going on around Wordpress development, this would be a good time to get the ball rolling again. This time I have some help (thanks Ajay), more readers, maybe some more sponsors, more prizes and we hope to see lots of good code, fun projects, meet lots of nice people and help the Wordpress community along the way… read more

Well, I love plugins. Whether they are for Wordpress, vBulletin, or Joomla, I hook up my scripts with plugins until they can barely function. I also know that we at HostGator are new to the blogging world, and this wouldn’t be a bad way for us to get our name out there. So after contacting Mark Ghosh, who runs Weblog Tools Collection, we decided to sponsor a few prizes for the Plugin Competition. He was thrilled to get more sponsors, and we were happy to be listed on such a big and influential Wordpress community.

To First Place: A Basic Dedicated Server for 6 months (Valued at $1,059) Pentium 4 2.8Ghz, CentOS, 1024mb Memory, 80gb SATA Hard Drive, 1500 Gigs of Bandwith per month, Cpanel/WHM Included, One free domain name for one year

To Second Place: A Swamp Hosting Plan for 1 year (Valued at $194.40), 200gb of Space, 2000gb of Bandwith, Unlimited Domains, Email, FTP Cpanel/WHM, MySQL, PHP4&5, Ruby on Rails, One free domain name for one year

To Third Place: A Baby Hosting Plan for 1 year (Valued at $134.40), 100gb of Space, 1000gb of Bandwith, Unlimited Domains, Email, FTP, Cpanel/WHM, MySQL, PHP4&5, Ruby on Rails, One free domain name for one year

Anyone who can develop a Wordpress plugin is eligible to win one of these prizes, even existing customers of HostGator. If you have something you would like to contribute, just head over to the Plugin Competition Blog.

Good luck! We can’t wait to see what kind of plugins and addons come out of this!

HostGator is Hiring

If you read my recent post, Company Email then you may have noticed we’ve had a recent cut in employees. What does this mean for you? Well, if you are a customer, this means that we are now left with the high performing employees that really care about keeping your sites up and running. And if you are looking for a job in the web hosting industry, then this may be your chance to get on board the Gator!

No, not literally!

Previous web hosting experience is a requirement for all positions, and knowledge of cPanel and WHM is a big plus. We need people who can communicate clearly to customers, express themselves well through livechat and trouble tickets, and are able to work in a fast paced, fast growing, team environment.

Please note that these positions are only available at our HOUSTON, TEXAS location. We are not looking for remote employees at this time; we prefer to yell at you in person! ;-)

We are currently looking for employees in the following fields:

Live Chat & Phone Technicians.
This is a great way to start on the ground floor of HostGator. If you have experience with web hosting, web design, or general troubleshooting, and enjoy helping others with solutions to their problems, then this may be the position for you. Our Chat & Phone techs are the backbone of HostGator. This position leaves plenty of room for you to move up in the company and is a great way to get your foot in the door.

Level I-III Technical Support.
If you have a strong Linux or Windows hosting background, we’d love to hear from you. Our Level I-III Technical Support is responsible for monitoring services and ensuring each and every server is up and running smoothly. Other responsibilities include interacting directly with clients through a trouble ticket environment and troubleshooting more advanced, escalated issues.

Linux System Administration.
Know everything there is to know about Linux? Recompile kernels in your sleep? Do you dream in bash? Love Red Bull and Caffeine Pills? This may be the job for you. We are looking for extremely talented individuals who can not only solve highly technical problems, but learn, create, and automate solutions on the fly. If you are currently working for another Web Hosting company in the industry, or are just looking for a new job and have the skills, we will provide relocation assistance from anywhere in the USA. Think you are qualified to tackle HostGator’s most difficult and extreme situations? Send your resume below to schedule an interview.

Our offices are staffed 24/7, and immediate openings are available for all shifts. I’m sure you would love to know that we pay very competitively. Not only that, we are a relaxed environment! T-shirts and jeans will likely do just as well for you as a suit and tie. It’s all about what you know, and what you are willing to learn. Big degrees and nice shoes will rarely impress us. We offer flexible scheduling, and a full benefits package is available. As seen on the Office Tour we have a Fitness Gym, Game Room and a large screen TV available to all employees. All system admins receive triple monitor work stations, and we order Pizza for all shifts on Fridays!

Salary is based on experience.

If you have what it takes to be a Gator, then
Click Here to Apply Now
and get started on the path to Web Hosting glory.

We can’t wait to hear from you!


Edit: I know this is really big for most of you looking for jobs in the hosting industry, and I have some huge news. HostGator now offers free PIZZA on mondays and fridays! In fact I gotta go cause I got a few slices right now. :)

Company Email

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.

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!