Here at HostGator, we are all about our clients. We continually strive to provide the very best support and newest hardware and technologies available, as well as provide informative and entertaining content  to our blog readers and forum members. With that being said, we would like your input.

How are we doing? What would you like to see more of? What type of content are you most interested in seeing in our blog? As most of you may already know, our blog is filled with mostly entertaining and comical posts. We would like your input so that we may continue to evolve and gravitate even closer to our customers. Would you like to see more informative/technology related posts? Do you prefer the more tongue in cheek posts? Are you happy with how things are currently?

We would like our customers to become more involved and active in our continued growth and evolution as a company, so here is your chance to speak out and voice your opinion on things. We welcome any and all input, and your opinions of our current social media content, as well as where you would like to see it in the future. So go ahead and leave us your opinions and suggestions, they just might be implemented!

Ready, set, go!

A HostGator office is not exactly your run of the mill workplace. On any given day a normal HostGator employee usually encounters several things a normal office might consider ‘out of the ordinary’.

A prime example of such an instance are the elevators HG employees use on a daily basis. Both our Houston & Austin locations are very nice offices, however both locations feature elevators which we’re fairly sure were originally assembled in Da Vinci’s workshop out of spare legos a few million years ago.

Usually when you step into the elevator in Houston you make it to work on time. Usually…

Getting a new office branch up and running is a lot of hard work. So much work in fact that founder Brent Oxley & customer service guru Daniel Collette have decided to bunk down on site. Here’s a quick tour of Daniel’s original HostGator Austin digs:

Upon watching this video, founder Brent Oxley and I became concerned. Daniel is actually a personal friend of ours (you might recognize him and his tattoo), so naturally we were worried about his general health & happiness.

It didn’t seem to us that Daniel was providing himself with an adequate den to thrive in. This was unacceptable. …

Wednesday, August 5, 2009 started out as a normal day at HostGator’s Houston headquarters. Around 4:00 PM CT, a major power surge that occurred as the result of a transformer near our office blowing up made the day anything but ordinary.

Lights flickered, battery backups beeped, fire alarms went off, and Internet signals all died down almost immediately. People began to wait for the building’s $200,000 hurricane-ready generator to start up, but it didn’t.

In the mean time, one of the three major “legs” of power that feeds the building with the power it needs to function was out because of exploded transformer. The building was underpowered and the higher voltage motors and equipment started burning out from the heat and stress of running without the adequate amounts of power. Expensive equipment continued to get damaged.

A compressor on the air conditioning burnt out (cost: $35,000), air handlers got destroyed (cost: $5,000), an elevator motor got fried (cost: $10,000) and lots of other equipment in the building’s mechanical room still isn’t working correctly (cost: unknown). The total cost of the damages is expected to be upwards of $60,000.

As the building’s systems started to go down and the people in charge of HostGator’s office began calling in electricians, power companies, and repairmen, the rest of the management team began going into what we refer to internally as “hurricane mode.”

• Twitter updates started to go out informing customers of a power problem in the building and possible service delays.
• Employees were rallied and were sent to the other employees’ homes.
• Our phone number was redirected (our VOIP system is housed in our office) and the message on our phone system was updated to inform customers of the outage.
• Our support site was updated with an emergency notice.
• A forum post was made with additional details.

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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. …

I’m sure if you read more than several blogs you may have seen the logo thats in the top right corner of this blog right now. The bloggers choice awards are given for the top blogs of multiple categories. The bloggers choice awards can give you some nice exposure as a blogger as well as give you something to gloat about if you win. Its pretty much the Oscar award of blogging so to speak.

Besides the Bloggers Choice awards, there are other awards for bloggers as well. I thought I might put together a few of the other prominent ones for those of you who not only read the HostGator blog, but blog yourself as well.

• Bloggers Choice Awards
• The Weblog Awards
• The Bloggies
• The Bloggy Award

Since I have started writing for the blog, I have gotten a chance to get to know some really cool people a bit better and read over others blogs that have great content. We always appreciate your support, and especially from you feed readers that are subscribed.  I thought it would be good to get involved with the Bloggers Choice awards now that things have gotten on a roll, and so I have added a nomination link for it as I mentioned earlier in the top right corner.

If you enjoy reading this blog then feel free to vote for it. Also, tell me what blog you have that might be nominated for a particular subject. I would be more than happy to check it out and vote for yours as well. We have a lot of fun things coming up to post about, so stay tuned, and if you haven’t joined our feed I would encourage you to. …

When Daniel and Julio (HostGator support) thought that it was going to be just an average day at work, they had no idea what was coming. After entering the Elevator of the HostGator Building on the first floor, and pushing the 4th floor button, to their surprise the elevator stopped halfway up. What do people do in a small elevator when its stuck? They call in late to work to start with, because if you get stuck in an elevator there is a chance you may be there for a long time. I think 2 hours was enough for them.

After enough standing around, they decide to sit down. Since it was the holidays and there was nobody really working on elevators, Julio and Daniel thought they might have to wait till the next day to get out, but they didn’t. Brent and Brian managed to prop open the doors to help them squeeze through to the next floor. Just before the rescue, Daniel managed to record their cramped experience with his phone. From the looks of it Julio is a little upset already, Daniel however just seems to be having fun with this whole thing. Check the video out that we put on Youtube below. …

I’m sure you might be expecting a USB drive made of Gold with inlay diamonds sparkling away, but all that glitters isn’t gold, and as a matter of fact, you won’t find anything at all that is absolutely stunning. We merely want to show you what you could expect if you were to lay down about 500 big ones for Google advertising. We received the annual gift from Google and just wanted to show you what its all about.

The presentation was nice and Google does a good job of customizing their gifts while incorporating a touch of advertising. The video below shows us opening the gift, and you can see by our excitement that when you get something from Google, it’s special. This is the video of what we like to call the $500,000 Google USB Drive.

You choose where it goes

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