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! …

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! …

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 …

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. …

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. …

I have just been informed by Brent that there are some big Dedicated Server promotions going on right now, and I thought this would be a great time to start letting you guys know about these things!

As seen on http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml there are a few changes!

First, starting today any new BASIC server will receive two free months of service on top of the first month of payment. That is three months of service, for the price of one!

That means if you sign up for a BASIC dedicated server today, you would not have to pay again until August 4th of 2007. That is three months of service, for the price of one. If you can find any other host in the industry that would offer something like this please let me know.

* Note that this is applicable to new servers only. Existing customers must sign up for a new server for this offer to apply. This offer does not apply to upgrades. This offer expires on 5/10/07. This offer has expired!

Second, our PRO server now comes with a choice of two configurations at signup. This will apply to all new servers, or servers that have not yet been set up and turned online. Your two options are;

At signup you can choose which setup you want in the server details. If you specify neither, you will be given 4 gigs of RAM and 4x500GIG Hard Drives by default.

This is a really great chance for any of you who are on the edge about getting a Dedicated Server, and should give you plenty of time to get things running smooth and bring in enough income to cover the cost. If you already have a Dedicated Server with us, you may want to look into moving to one of our powerhouse PRO’s. They’ll likely last you a very long time!

Hope you all enjoy the new setups, feel free to comment here or see our discussion at… the HostGator Forums. …