HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing

200,000 Web Hosting Clients and Climbing

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.

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!

HostGator Ranks 239 on Inc. 5000

Inc. Magazine just ranked HostGator #239 overall on their prestigious Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing privately owned companies in America. Here’s how the companies that make Inc’s list are ranked:

The Inc. 500|5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2005 through 2008. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by the first week of 2005, and therefore able to show four full calendar years of sales. Additionally, they have to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent — not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies — as of December 31, 2008 (a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired since that date). Revenue in 2005 must have been at least $200,000, and revenue in 2008 must have been at least $2 million.

Additionally, HostGator ranked #6 in all Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX (Greater Houston area) companies, and #20 out of all companies in our category—Business Products & Services.
HostGator has managed to grow over 896% within the measured 3 year time period. We’ve nearly doubled in revenue from 2007 to 2008.

In 2008, HostGator was ranked at #21 overall. Although 2009’s rank was lower than the previous year’s, we’ve nearly doubled our revenue between the two periods. Despite the job market shrinking across the U.S., HostGator has also created 100 positions for highly qualified technicians and systems’ administrators in the Houston area over the last year.

I think I speak for everyone at HostGator, when I say we’re all really proud to be a part of this company and what we’ve been able to accomplish. The growth simply comes from doing what we’ve always done: providing our clients with reliable web hosting service, 24/7 support, and by offering as many features as possible.

Huge thanks goes to our clients and employees for our continued success.

All You Can Eat Hosting

We have some very exciting, disturbing, shocking, and electrifying news for you!

HostGator Web Hosting is now offering UNLIMITED DISK SPACE, UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH, and UNLIMITED DOMAINS for less than ten bucks a month.

I should be telling you this is a limited time offer and to sign-up while supplies last, but I’m not going to. If you decide to wait a few months, the plan just might change to unlimited bazillion-trillion everything. If you happen to sign up before the unlimited bazillion-trillion plans are released, we’ll be happy to upgrade you free of charge. If you think this all sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is! The “new” unlimited plan is the same plan we were offering a year ago, but now we label it as unlimited.

I wanted to call the plans unlimited last time around. However, due to staffing constraints, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the expected growth. A year later, we are finally OVERSTAFFED and ready to change the plan. Up until now, I’ve been slowing sales down on purpose in order for our support to catch up. If history repeats itself, renaming the plan from essentially unlimited to actually “unlimited” will increase our sales by at least 30%.

It’s really that simple.

We change an unlimited plan to say “unlimited” and bam — sales increase 30%, if not more. Many people will argue that “overselling” is evil and that it’s the cause of poor hosting service. This is not the case when it’s managed correctly and the proper staffing is in place. When a hosting company hops on the overselling bandwagon, their sales usually increase exponentially. Since very few companies actually have the capacity to handle a major surge in growth, their quality of service is almost guaranteed to deteriorate.

The support problems HostGator has had in the past weren’t from “overselling.” The problems were actually a result of growing faster than we could hire and train employees.

In the last year, we have been spending more money on recruiting employees than we have on advertising! It has taken us years of hiring and training to get us to the point where we are now. We’ve gone from begging employees to work overtime to asking who wants to go home. HostGator will always have the occasional scheduling gap, but for now, we’re sending over a dozen employees home a day.

I’m very confident that we’ll be able to handle the surge in growth that we will see as a result of going “unlimited.” Greed is what kills most overselling hosting companies, not their plans.

In other news, we have changed the name of our Swamp Web Hosting Plan to the slightly more professional hosting plan called “Business Web Hosting Plan“. The Business plan now includes both a free dedicated IP address and a free Private SSL. We will be updating these plans very soon with some additional and very cool e-commerce features.

I’m not going to spill the beans just yet, but I will say it’s something I’ve never seen included on shared hosting before, and I believe it will redefine what a business hosting plan is.

Giving back with completely free web hosting.

HostGator has a history and tradition of giving back. In the last year, we’ve donated over $125,000 to charity, actively worked towards offsetting and reversing our environmental impact, and given free or
discounted web hosting to a countless number of web sites.

Today, we’re moving forward with our commitment to the communities and the people we serve with the launch of the HostGator Technology Grant.

Recipients of the HostGator Technology Grant will receive one year of completely free web hosting with our Swamp Plan, which offers 1,000 GB of space and unlimited bandwidth. If the Swamp plan does not fit the needs of the particular recipient, they can opt to take the grant as a $180 service credit to any other HostGator product or service. After the one year of free service, grant recipients can re-apply and if accepted again, continue to use HostGator web hosting completely free.

The HostGator Technology Grant’s goal is simple and straightforward: provide free web hosting to organizations and projects that serve the greater good.

Obtaining legitimately free web hosting for nonprofits can be an arduous process. Organizations should be spending their time doing what they believe in and what they set out to do, not hunting for
affordable and quality web hosting.

The wide scope of the grant is intentional – we wanted it so all types of organizations that serve the greater good could take advantage of free HostGator web hosting. Whether your organization is nonprofit community center or a cutting edge open source project, we want to hear from you.

The application process for the HostGator Technology Grant is simple. There are just a few questions and it shouldn’t take an organization longer than 15 or 20 minutes to complete the short application. Click Here to APPLY

Once you’re all setup, then you can do your actual job and get back to doing what you love. We want to make the web hosting experience less troublesome and more convenient for everyone, including those who are seeking to better society through their organizations and projects.

If you have any questions about HostGator’s Technology Grant program, please go to http://www.hostgator.com/nonprofit-web-hosting.shtml or email techgrant@hostgator.com. We’re more than happy to help.

What’s Lean, Mean and (now) Green?

Here’s something you may not know: the IT sector has a huge climate impact. At present, between 3 and 4 percent of all electricity (and the associated carbon emissions) used in the world goes to running data centers. If you’re one of the four and a half million registered users of Second Life, consider this: the average Second Life avatar consumes 1,752 kWh of electricity per year, or about two thirds that of an actual person (globally averaged). One server alone has roughly the same climate impact as a 15mpg SUV!

Climate change is real, it’s happening now, and we as a planet desperately need to reduce our IT emissions. And if we wait for the government to solve the problem, we’ll be waiting for a long, long, LONG time.

We’re thrilled to announce that HostGator has joined the ranks of many progressive companies including: Starbucks, IBM, and UPS to take action on addressing climate change right now.

HostGator has gone green, and it’s gone green in a BIG way.
We at Integrated Ecosystem Market Services are very proud to have worked with HostGator to develop a sector-leading program.

What makes HostGator’s program so special?
If you’re thinking about switching to green hosting, good for you! Green hosting is an important step in dealing with climate change. But be aware- once you start asking some questions you’ll find that not all of the .green. hosting options out there are nearly as green as they claim to be. HostGator’s program stands out from the pack for a number of reasons . . .

One, HostGator is using renewable energy to both power and cool their servers, whereas a number of green hosts only offset the electricity used to power their servers. That represents a big difference, because servers generate a lot of heat. For every watt of electricity that a server uses, 1-2 watts of electricity are typically required to cool it. What that means is that HostGator is investing in about twice as much renewable energy, on a per server basis, as those green hosts only using renewable energy to power their servers.

Two, HostGator has invested in Green -e certified Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). That means that all of HostGator’s RECs are verified, tracked and monitored. Sure, there are cheaper carbon credits out there, but HostGator wanted to go green the right way. HostGator can’t very well build a windfarm in downtown Houston, so it’s doing the next best thing and greening its energy at the source with rock solid RECs.

What the heck’s a REC?
Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) are tradeable credits representing all the environmental benefits of 1 megawatt hour of renewable energy. So when HostGator purchases 4,009 Texas wind RECs, it’s basically paying a Texas windfarm to generate renewable energy on HostGator’s behalf. HostGator doesn’t own the windfarm, but for every REC purchased by HostGator, that windfarm generates 1 megawatt of Texas wind power and puts it into the grid. When HostGator draws power from the grid, it can then claim credit for that wind power generated on its behalf.

Three, HostGator has purchased RECs for 130% of the electricity used to power and cool its shared and reseller servers. Good luck finding another green host that has gone this far. Believe me- if they had, they’d let you know it.

Four, HostGator has invested entirely in wind RECs generated in their home state of Texas. Even those green hosts that have opted for certified RECs are generally sourcing them from wherever is cheapest.

HostGator, on the other hand, is thinking globally and acting locally. By insisting on 100% Texas wind RECs HostGator had to pay more for their credits, but they (and you) can rest easy knowing that they’re doing their part for the environment and the local green economy.

So how did we develop and implement the greening program?
First, we calculated the total amount of electricity used by HostGator’s shared and reseller servers. Based on the total number of servers and the average amount of electricity used in a year to power and cool them, we estimated that HostGator would need 4,009 MWh of electricity to offset 130% of the electricity used to power and cool all of HostGator’s shared and reseller servers

Second, we looked at HostGator’s carbon offsetting options. We considered RECs, Certified Emission Reductions and Verified Emission reductions, as well as a number of offset providers. Ultimately, HostGator chose to go with RECs, and to purchase them from one of the best REC providers around: 3Degrees.

Finally, I should emphasize that the purchase of Renewable Energy Credits only represents HostGator’s most recent step toward sustainability. Prior to the REC purchase, HostGator had already begun the process of reducing their environmental impact at the office (recycling, minimizing paper use, etc.), and recently switched to higher efficiency servers.

What can you do to minimize your impact on the climate?
Well, for one thing you can switch your hosting company to HostGator, if you’re not already a customer of theirs! You can choose from one of their great shared or reseller plans.

Beyond that, there are myriad ways to go green in your personal life. Most of them are totally painless, for example turning off your computer at night, rather than leaving it in sleep mode. Many of them will save you money in the long run, for example using compact fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescents.

For a quick start, check out CarbonTracker.com’s list of 11 simple steps you can take to minimize your impact on the climate. For even more information, the Environmental Protection Agency has a ton of info on the subject:
(http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/wycd/index.html)

Help us spread the word!
Show the world you are GREEN too! You can place any of the images on any of the sites hosted with HostGator.

Shared Customers

1.	2.	3.

Codes:

1.
<a href="http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml"> <img src="http://blog.hostgator.com/images/hostgator_green80_15.gif"></a>

2.
<a href="http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml"><img src="http://blog.hostgator.com/images/hostgator_green83_72b.gif"></a>

3.
<a href="http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml"> <img src="http://blog.hostgator.com/images/hostgator_green83_72.gif"></a>

Reseller Customers

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Codes:

1.
<a href="http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml"> <img src="http://blog.hostgator.com/images/250×90reseller.gif"></a>

2.
<a href="http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml"><img src="http://blog.hostgator.com/images/83×72reseller.gif"></a>

Directions:
1. Choose from one of the images above.
2. Highlight the code under the under number of the image you would like to use.
3. Right click the highlighted text.
4. Left click copy.
5. Paste the code inside of the html of your site.

Note about the author:

Matthew Collins is president and CEO of Integrated Ecosystem Market Services (http://www.iemarketservices.com), a carbon consulting firm based in Chicago, IL.