It has been quite a while since our last official Newsletter.  The truth is that although we’ve been incredibly busy, and constantly growing, there hasn’t been much news to share; its just been nose to the grindstone around the offices.

Having said that, we wanted to take a moment to share with you some account security tips, news about our ever-growing social media presence, and first-up the fact that we’re now hiring!

HostGator is Hiring!

The truth is that HostGator virtually never stops hiring.  We are a constantly-growing company in an ever-expanding industry; we are always on the look out for qualified individuals to join us in our myriad of available positions.  From front-line Technical Support, to System Administrators, Billing Administrators, Account Managers, and Verifications Agents… entry-level through industry veterans, we are now hiring for all positions!  To apply, please visit http://hostgator.com/jobs or email us, jobs@hostgator.com.

HostGator also has an employee referral program that is open to anyone and everyone; we will pay you up to $2,500 to refer qualified candidates to us for employment!  Full information about the employee referral program is available at http://www.hostgator.com/employee-referral

Account Security:

Did you know that one of the most common causes for a hosting account to become hacked, or otherwise compromised, is also the most easily preventable cause as well?  If you use WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or any other PHP-script, database-driven CMS then it is vitally important that you keep these scripts up-to-date.  Failure to do so is literally an open door inviting hackers to gain access to your account.  Updating these scripts is as simple as logging into the back-end and clicking on any “update” notification that appears therein.

If you install any of these scripts via HostGator’s QuickInstall tool within cPanel, it will make this even easier for you by automatically updating your scripts!

HostGator on Social Media:

HostGator is active on virtually every social media platform in existence today, from Facebook and Twitter to Google+, Instagram,  Pinterest, and more!  See the entire list, and follow us on your preferred platforms at this link.

New Domain Pricing!

Now is an excellent time to register that new domain name you’ve had in mind! We’ve lowered the price to only $12.95 for all new .com/.net/.org/.biz/.info domain registration.  This price is good for multi-year registrations as well, however renewals will remain at the standard price.  Register your new domain now at http://register.hostgator.com!

I have the distinct honor this month of officially introducing a couple of new features designed specifically to assist you in receiving support in a more efficient and secure manner. We have been testing these for quite some time and are very pleased with the results.  Allow me to introduce you to our new Chat Verification System and Ticket Submission Form.

 Chat Verification System:

If we’ve had the pleasure of assisting you in LiveChat recently, it is likely that you’ve noticed a few changes therein.  One of which is a Chat Verification System, designed for you to conveniently and securely verify yourself as the account owner.

Account verification has always been taken very seriously by us, but has unfortunately often been experienced as an inconvenience by our Customers.  There is now a small button at the lower right-hand corner of the chat window that says “Verify Acct.”  You may click this at any time in order to automatically provide your billing account credentials and thus verify yourself as the account owner.  Conversely, if the chat conversation reaches a point such that account verification is required in order to continue, the Jr. Administrator handling the chat has a similar button on their end which will then request you provide verification credentials in order to continue with the chat.

Moving forward, we will be expanding this to include additional forms of verification as well.  As it stands, approximately 25% of chats are auto-verifying via this utility, resulting in overall shorter chat times and increased security.  As we expand the functionality of this tool, we look forward to serving you faster and more securely than ever before.

Ticket Submission Form:

Earlier this month, we silently launched our new support ticket submission form; visible by clicking on “Create a Ticket” at http://support.hostgator.com.  This form is designed not only for ease of use, but also to greatly reduce the amount of time involved in resolving any given issue.  Traditionally, if you emailed us directly for support and neglected to provide  account verification information, then we often had no choice but to reply back requesting said information.  This extra step, though absolutely necessary, could add hours onto the total resolution time for any given issue.  The new form takes care of this vital step right up front, ensuring that each request for support that we receive does come from the actual owner of the specified account.

Another great thing about the form is that it ensures each request lands in the correct queue from the outset.  In the past, if you happened to email support@hostgator.com with a request to migrate your data to another hosting plan, that ticket would wait in the support queue and then when it reaches a Support Admin, that Admin would have to change the queue of the ticket over to Migrations where the ticket would then await a Migrations Admin to work on it.  Now, this form ensures not only that the request is verified, but also that it appears in the absolute correct queue.  These two improvements, combined, will drastically improve our response time to your support requests.

Since the form launched, around 9am CST on Friday, June 9th we have received 1,696 tickets.  Of those, 1,589 were already verified before hitting the queue.  That’s almost 1,600 requests within just nine days that didn’t require any additional time or responses due to lack of verification.  In other words, 93% of the requests we received for support this week were pre-verified and in the correct queues.  Clearly, this form is going to streamline our ability to assist you more efficiently.

We hope you enjoy these new features and find them as fundamentally use-able as they were designed to be.  If you experience any troubles with these, or anything pertaining to your HostGator account, you can always email feedback@hostgator.com and we will be happy to assist you.

Some Numbers:

Our Support statistics for the month of May, 2012 are as follows:

142,159 Chats

76,409 Calls

179,990 Tickets

Until next month!  Remember: We Are Hiring!

As promised, we are back with another Newsletter this month.  It was a great month here at Gator Headquarters; we’ve been hiring like mad in order to continue to provide you with top-notch support.  We’re also very close to the release of some additional new features.  Some things are in beta testing right now, but in keeping with our other promise (to not bait you with any “coming soon” things), we’re going to refrain from identifying the specifics of these features at this time.  However, the feedback we have received from the beta-testers has been nothing but positive.  Hopefully, we can officially speak on these by next month.  We realize this is arguably similar to saying something is “coming soon,” but we digress.  In the meantime, we’ve been up to some good deeds and some good eats this month.  Here is what we can speak on at this moment:

The 2012 Tour du Rouge:

HostGator are proud to have once again presented the Tour du Rouge, benefiting the Gulf Coast American Red Cross!  The bicycle ride, which covers the 526 miles between Houston and New Orleans, took place between May 6-11, 2012.  Please be sure to keep an eye on http://blog.hostgator.com for an up-coming post that will cover this event in more depth, including a first-hand account from a HostGator Admin that participated in the ride this year.

Gators Gonna Clean:

Texas has some beautiful landscapes and rivers.  Unfortunately, these often become sullied with litter and other refuse.  Our Austin office has been organizing and executing cleaning details for the area rivers, and we are shortly expanding this operation to our Houston office as well.  Gators enjoy clean habitats, please think twice before littering.  Here’s some pictures from the most recent cleanup:

Gators Gonna Eat:

We celebrated crawfish season with a massive crawfish boil at our new building, or more specifically in the parking garage of our new building.  Gators and families alike came out to enjoy some delicious mudbugs:

Some Numbers:

It looks like this month we had more calls and chats than last month, but fewer tickets. Here’s our Support statistics for the month of April, 2012:

141,992 Chats

75,611 Calls

198,385 Tickets

Until next month!  Remember: We Are Hiring!

The lack of Newsletters for the past several months has been palpable; we do apologize.  Ideally, this circumstance will not occur again.  It is true that things have been very busy in the Gator’hood, but maintaining  a proper level of direct contact with you fine folks is a priority to us and we genuinely care about presenting information directly to you and interacting with you via this medium.

Historically speaking, our monthly Newsletters have occasionally displayed a tendency to place the proverbial cart before the horse, by announcing some things a tad bit pre-maturely, *cough*LaunchPad*cough*!  The fact is that we love what we do and we get excited about new technologies or services and we naturally want to share them with you.  Being more conscious of the potentiality for unexpected delays to occur, from this point forward we intend to not bait you with any “Coming Soon!” things.  Rather, we’re going to utilize this time to inform you about what is already available to you and try our best to keep you up on any new happenings around the Company each month.

GatorDesk Mobile: A New Way to Get Support!

GatorDesk Mobile is now live, in beta!  You can fully manage your HostGator support tickets (read, update, create and even add attachments!), completely via your mobile device, at http://mgatordesk.hostgator.com.  This is the first of a series of mobile solutions to better assist you with your HostGator account.  Should you encounter any issues at all while using this new tool, please email us at feedback@hostgator.com so that we can take immediate action to resolve any issues you may experience.

Sale on Windows Dedicated Servers!

We are very pleased to now be offering $100 off your first month with a new Windows Dedicated Server.  Every Windows Dedicated Server includes Microsoft WebMatrix, an excellent tool for creating, customizing and publishing websites!  Visit http://www.hostgator.com/windows-dedicated-servers.shtml to get started today!

BaseKit: Have You Used it Yet?

We are pretty excited about BaseKit!  Many of us have been testing it out around the office, and many Customers have created some impressive sites already as well.  BaseKit’s primarily drag-n-drop functionality is super easy to use and includes many powerful widgets and app integration: Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, YouTube and many more!  Also, enjoy the variety of professional templates, customizable designs and full HTML/CSS control for you more savvy web designers, or those desiring to learn more about design!

BaseKit is presently available on all Hatchling, Baby, Business & Reseller accounts.

Some Numbers:

Back in December, we announced that on November 29th, 2011 at 9:21:23 CST, we hit our 5,000,000th LiveChat.  That was a milestone of which we were fairly proud.  Here are some of our Support statistics for the month of March, 2012:

139,012 Chats

68,362 Calls

265,572 Tickets

We will return next month with a new Newsletter, we promise!  Until then, remember: We are always hiring!  For more information, please visit http://hostgator.com/jobs.shtml

Greetings,

Domains, Domains, Domains

Everyone is interested in an update on our domain registrar launch. We hear you, loud and clear!

While we can’t nail down an exact launch date quite yet, this is a top priority and it’s something that we are working on every day.

We have greatly expanded our development team (over 10 members now) to launch this and other HostGator products as quickly as possible.

So without making any false promises, we can tell you it is coming “soon.”

HostGator Biggest Loser:

HostGator held its own biggest loser 2.0 recently. It was a great success with many of our employees losing lots of weight! There was also a friendly competition between the Austin and Houston offices for who would lose the largest percentage of body weight.

Austin won! Tim B. was the overall winner, losing nearly 14% of his body weight! Great work.

With the win, the Austin office was treated to a great “Grill Fest” on July 1st.

We were busy in June

We thought we handled a lot of support inquiries in May (roughly 520,000), however we blew that away in June.

We answered:

193,708 Chats
105,000 Calls
And 252,693 Tickets

Over 551,400 chats, calls and tickets were answered in June.

Accept credit card payments online!

Are you looking to sell products online? If so, you’re in luck as we have the perfect solution for you to accept credit card payments on your website.

We are proud to announce that we are now working with iPayment Inc., one of the largest payment processing companies in the world to bring HostGator clients the guaranteed lowest merchant account rates and fees available.

Already have a merchant account and are selling products online? iPayment will give you a better rate, guaranteed.

You will receive:

• The lowest rates (beating most competitors by an entire 1% PER transaction!)
• FREE Setup
• No Contract terms
• No Processing Minimums
• FREE Gateway, Virtual Terminal AND Fraud Detection Suite (Over $494 Value, FREE!)

You simply need to be a US based business with a US bank account. Sign up today to start accepting payments online or start saving money on your merchant processing fees.

…

Greetings, Gators,

Another month already!? We know we’re a little behind on this month’s newsletter, sorry about that! We once again have some great announcements for you this month though.

We Launched Unlimited Shared Windows Hosting:

We are excited to announce that we launched Windows shared hosting services last month. More information can be seen at www.hostgator.com/windows-hosting.shtml

We’re offering unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, Parallels Plesk control panel, ASP/ASP.net Support, Microsoft SQL 2008 (R2) and many more features!

Simply check out the new windows hosting page for more information.

New SiteBuilder! Beautiful Designs coming soon!

After MONTHS of searching and testing out more site builders than I originally thought were even available, we have found the best – and our clients deserve nothing but the best!

We will be introducing BaseKit, FREE to all of our clients within the next 60 days (at most).

Why BaseKit? Here are just a couple of the reasons we chose BaseKit:

• Extremely easy to use
• Completely Drag and Drop
• Huge List of beautifully designed templates that you can customize
• Tons of additional widgets for you to implement (Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps, RSS, Flickr, forms, YouTube, PayPal, calendar, and many more)!
• Supports multiple Languages
• Can add/edit your own HTML and CSS
• Can import PSD designs
• Easy styling tools

And many, many more! …

Greetings, Gators,

We have some exciting news and several fun HostGator happenings to share with you this month.


Bandwidth Increased to 10TB on ALL Dedicated Servers!

All dedicated servers now include 10TB of Bandwidth standard (an increase of as much as 8.5TB FREE!). This includes ALL current/past dedicated server clients as well as new dedicated server orders. You don’t have to do anything to upgrade and it doesn’t cost any extra!

HostGator Loves Elephants!

By now, many of you have heard of the actions of a competitor of ours; GoDaddy’s CEO in the killing of an Elephant (An interview of his can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFsfchClBPk). We have welcomed a very large number of former GoDaddy clients over the last month due to outrage over his actions.

A client of ours recently showed us this video (it’s funny!). Check out the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rU_iegDCzs

We also had one of our clients and affiliates present us with a great HostGator “Elephant Safe Hosting” image below:

Feel free to share/use this image! …