Written by Chad Bean
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Many will remember “Billy the Human Billboard“, who we covered in our previous blog post after he received a HostGator tattoo on the back of his neck. Billy’s HostGator tattoo has sparked a range of responses from: people asking to get this done, outrage, and even proposed boycotts.
Someone even went as far as to compare HostGator with human traffickers as you can see in the video below:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXSJUu8-zkU
Billy has gone on to receive additional tattoos from other companies (27 and counting), moving him closer to his goal of having the most tattoo advertisements in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Since then, Billy is no longer “Billy the Human Billboard”, as he has legally changed his name to “Hostgator Dotcom”.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6R6O7uqPSc&feature=youtu.be&a
Hostgator Dotcom’s driver license:
Hostgator Dotcom’s certificate of name change: …
Written by Josh Loe
Friday, July 30th, 2010
QuickInstall
We are proud to announce the deployment of our new in house developed script installer, QuickInstall.
QuickInstall has been rolled out to all shared servers
at this time in its last test phase. To use QuickInstall, just login to your cPanel and click the QuickInstall icon.
QuickInstall is a HostGator designed auto installer, similar to Fantastico, that allows you to install common scripts with just a few clicks of your mouse! All programming for QuickInstall and the software library for QuickInstall is in house, which means faster updates and more flexibility. For example when WordPress 3.0 was released, it was updated and ready to be installed in our software library within a few hours compared to days with Fantastico. No longer do you have to wait weeks to get the latest versions, with QuickInstall you will have almost instant updates available at your fingertips!
If you are on one of our dedicated servers or have your own vps here at HostGator and would like QuickInstall, just submit a ticket at https://tickets.hostgator.com. One of our Administrators will be glad to install this for you, free of charge.
QuickInstall is still in a test phases, so if you see any issues please let us know by submitting a ticket.
WordCamp Houston
HostGator is proud to be a sponsor of the first WordCamp in Houston, TX. WordCamp is a conference that takes place in different cities around the globe, focusing on WordPress and all things related to WordPress. When it was announced that WordCamp would be coming to Houston for the first time we had to jump on board as a sponsor! The conference sold out almost instantly, however we were able to secure 10 tickets for our customers and have created a contest on twitter. All you need to do to enter is tweet this on twitter “@hostgator Sponsored WordCamp Houston (@wordcamphtx) August 7th, I want to be there! http://bit.ly/dl3gai #wchtx” and we will enter you into a drawing for the
passes. …
Written by Josh Loe
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
We are proud to announce our sponsorship of WordCamp Houston. The event is scheduled for August 7th at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
WordCamp is a conference exclusively about WordPress and all things related to WordPress. Conferences are held around the nation and this will be the first one of many to come in Houston TX. When we found out that WordCamp was coming to our backyard here in Houston we had to jump on board. We have been in attendance at WordCamp before and it is an amazing conference for WordPress users, developers, designers, and other enthusiasts!
WordCamp Houston was such a big deal, it sold out right away. However, I do have some good news… We have some passes, and we are giving them away! We are limited to the amount of passes that we have so we are going to be having a little contest.
All you will need to do is tweet this on twitter “@hostgator Sponsored WordCamp Houston (@wordcamphtx) August 7th, I want to be there! http://bit.ly/dl3gai #wchtx” and we will enter all participants into a drawing for the passes.
We will be doing a drawing each day for the next 10 days!
Please check out WordCamp Houston’s Website for more information on this great conference. …
Written by Chad Bean
Friday, July 9th, 2010
Our Reseller Hosting clients might be happy to hear they have a new feature awaiting them in the form of over 400 brandable, support video tutorials.
For awhile now, HostGator has been using similar video tutorials to assist us in supporting our clients. Now our resellers will be able to access these tutorials in their Web Host Manager (WHM) and be able to:
- Install the tutorial system on any subdomain.
- Brand all the tutorials with your own company logo.
- Choose from 7 different portal themes.
- Customize your settings easily from WHM.
- Voice narrated and non-voice versions of each video.
- Generate the code to embed each branded video in your existing website or knowledge base
The videos cover many different topics to assist your own web hosting clients including:
- cPanel (w/ multiple skins)
- Domain Management (Various registrars)
- SiteBuilder & SiteStudio
- FTP (Multiple FTP Clients)
- E-mail (Multiple clients) & Webmail
- MySQL /phpMyAdmin
- WordPress, Joomla, Shopping Carts, etc.
Whether you’re a new reseller hosting customer, or an existing one, you can take advantage of these tutorials for free, no charge whatsoever.
To get started, please login to your Web Host Manager, click “Plugins”, and then click “Client Tutorials”.
You can get more information on how this works from the following video:
We will update these videos with newer versions as they become out-of-date at no additional charge. Video updates will be automatic and will not require any effort from the reseller. In the future, we have plans to expand the library to include more topics, a female narration option for each video, and more themes. We also plan on releasing packages tailored for our VPS and dedicated customers as well within the upcoming months. …
Written by Josh Loe
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
As most of you know HostGator was founded in 2002 by Brent Oxley in his Florida Atlantic University dorm room. Since 2002 we have grown by leaps and bounds! We now host over 3.5 Million domains and have outgrown a 4 story building in Houston, Texas with our support and sales staff. Our growth has been so fast it is only natural that our advertising be on the same track (pun intended).
We are proud to announce that we have inked a deal with Joe Nemechek for our very own HostGator NASCAR Sprint Cup and Nationwide Teams! Our car’s debut will be at the Coca Cola 400 Nationwide race July 3rd at Daytona Motor Speedway! The driver of the HostGator.com Toyota, Joe Nemechek, will represent HostGator in one NASCAR Sprint Cup race and in four Nationwide races. Make sure you check out and root for The # 87 HostGator.com Chevrolet in the following races:
- July 2nd NASCAR Nationwide Subway Jalapeno 250
- July 3rd NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Coke Zero 400
- July 9th NASCAR Nationwide Dollar General 300
- July 17th NASCAR Nationwide Dodge Dealers 250
- July 24th NASCAR Nationwide Kroger 250
Reseller Tutorials
Over the past year our development and design departments have been working non stop on our new brandable support tutorials. With the new addon to our Reseller program you will be able, with one click, install custom branded video tutorials on a subdomain with your own logo!
If you have used our support system before you more than likely have came across some of our video tutorials. We have 400+ Tutorials, everything from adding a new email account to detailed instructions on installing common scripts via fantastico. These videos all have HostGator’s logo on them, which as a reseller would ruin your private branding. With this new addon you can use your own logo and it is completely private! …
Written by Patrick Pelanne
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
Here at HostGator we service an extremely diverse group of clientele and as such we get to interact with many different interesting people. These interactions encompass everything from angry clients seeking retribution to happy clients showering praises. Also included are some of the most absurd and downright strange communications imaginable.
In this post I’d like to focus on those absurd communications I just mentioned. I mean after all, they definitely help keep the job interesting.
Let’s start with one of the linux administration teams all-time favorite tickets: (Ticket is read from bottom to top)
The Dress shirts ticket, or should I say, dressshirts ticket, is one of the most (in)famous tickets here at HostGator. There has been much speculation as to the actual meaning of the cryptic message delivered to us on March 13th. Were we supposed to buy dress shirts? Is it some type of code we’re supposed to crack? Does he have a problem with our thinkgeek gotroot t-shirts? We can only speculate since the mysterious client never returned our follow-up question. …
Written by Josh Loe
Friday, May 28th, 2010
Gator Happenings
The Harbor has been secured.
HostGator is now Safe Harbor Certified. Safe Harbor is the name of a policy agreement established between the United States Department of Commerce and the European Union (E.U.) in November 2000 to regulate the way that U.S. companies export and handle the personal data (such as names and addresses) of European citizens. The agreement is a policy compromise set up in response to a European directive that differed from traditional business procedures for U.S. companies dealing with the E.U. In 1998, the E.U. established the European Commission Directive on Data Protection, which prohibited data transfer to non-European countries that did not adhere to stringent criteria. In effect, because the guidelines were very strict, they made it illegal to transfer most citizens’ personal data outside of Europe.
If you are still awake after reading that, let me summarize this for you. Basically this means that we follow strict privacy rules agreed upon by the EU(European Union) and US and allows personal data to be transferred. We figured our overseas customers would be interested to know that we are now certified. (This really is a big deal).
http://www.export.gov/safeharbor/
http://safeharbor.export.gov/companyinfo.aspx?id=9625
Desperate times, call for desperate measures.
I want to apologize for starting this month’s newsletter off with legal mumbo jumbo. There were some exciting things that happened here at HostGator this month besides the Safe Harbor certification. We have a new member to the HostGator tattoo club! Below is a picture of a tattoo that was received in Las Vegas, NV. The person in this picture received this tattoo for 2,000$ in gambling money and a trip to Vegas with Brent. Which raises the question, would you do this for the same price? Fill out our online poll here:
http://forums.hostgator.com/would-you-do-t71561.html
This is the second person to get a HostGator tattoo, the first was Billy the human billboard. You would be surprised how many people ask about getting our logo tattooed on their bodies. …
