Anyone who has ever watched the discovery channel for an extended period of time can tell you that if there’s one thing a gator is ill prepared to handle, it’s an ice storm. Due to the recent arctic cold fronts arrival here in Houston the HG staff got to experience first hand what a Texas ice storm is all about.

Leading up to the storm the mood around southeast Texas was very lively at the prospect of ultra-rare snowfall. Kids & parents alike were giddy with the notion of baking sheet sled rides, snow angels and of course the always highly anticipated snowball warfare. Unfortunately, that’s not what the residents of Houston received.

Instead, Houston got a nice healthy dose of Black Ice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_ice). Anyone who has ever driven on or around a Houston freeway can tell you that the fearless army of amateur demolition derby drivers that regularly patrol the cities roads need no help in creating a hazardous mess on a daily basis. The heavy coat of ice on all the overpasses and onramps that morning greatly increased their effectiveness.

Here’s a view of Houston’s transtar traffic map from 2/4/11. The red exclamation mark diamonds indicate either hazardous ice or wrecks:

Needless to say the management here at HostGator were shaking in our boots at the prospect of our entire Houston support staff being quarantined to their neighborhoods by ice slicked roads. Fortuntely the Houston gators sheer determination along with fairer weather conditions at our Austin location allowed us to keep our support volumes manageable. …

Gator Happenings

Greetings Gators,

2010 was a big year for HostGator. We have some exciting announcements in store for you in 2011, and a recap of some of the great events of 2010.

2010 Recap:

HostGator saw Record Growth:

In 2010, we grew by 2 MILLION Domains! We grew from 2.9 Million Domains Hosted in the beginning of 2010 to 4.9 Million+ Domains Hosted at the end of 2010!

We have grown to over 500 employees, and we’re growing every day! We had our largest training class ever start on Monday January 24^th, 2011 with 64 new HostGator support reps! This means much quicker response times for you, our valued clients.

Here are some of our Houston Office Employees!

We opened a new HostGator office in Austin, TX:

We sponsored a NASCAR Team: …

Greetings,

Back in 2007 we leaked a company email from Brent Oxley, then HostGator CEO, to our blog. Since that time we’ve grown by leaps and bounds (to the tune of 610%), became the 21st fastest growing company on the Inc. 5000, added a new office location in Austin, TX, and are over 450 employees strong. With those feats, we’ve had our fair share of challenges along the way, however we’re all ready to bring HostGator to the next level. Below is the bulk of an internal e-mail from Brent Oxley sent on Nov. 18th, showcasing some big changes going on at HostGator.

Hello Fellow Gators,

I want everyone to read this so I’m going to start off with some fireworks…

Every single Gator in the Houston office is getting a 10% raise starting immediately.

This raise will be reflected on your next paycheck and will not take the place of any upcoming reviews, bonuses or other compensation you have coming. A while ago I sent a news email stating that once we had more automaton in place every employee would receive a raise. We don’t have the automation yet, but we are nearly there with the new billing system so I’ve decided to give part of it in advance. I believe through automation we will become 22%-30% more efficient with staffing. I’m really hoping this 10% raise is just the start and I hope to pass along every penny we save from automation to all of you. While remaining understaffed, HostGator is completely bloated at the same time. What very few of you understand is that some of our most underpaid employees are making over $100,000 a year while some of our most overpaid employees are making $30,000 a year. There are a few of us that perform on such a low level that if everyone did likewise the company would end up bankrupt. Likewise there are other employees that do the equivalent work of four or more of their peers. At HostGator, the sky really is the limit to what you can make, but in order for this to be the case you must always be learning and growing. You truly do create your own destiny at HostGator.

Free Lunch for Everybody

…

Gator Happenings

Hello everyone,

We’ve been very busy around here lately, implementing new and exciting features and services that will provide our customers with an even better webhosting experience. Our domain registrar service is nearing completion, and we are also looking into other technologies and services that may be implemented as well. One of the services that we are pretty excited about it CloudFlare, so let’s dive right in and see what it’s all about.

Gators and ninjas protecting your sites!

We are proud to announce a new partnership with Cloudflare, Inc. to offer their Cloudflare protection to our customers. Cloudflare acts a transparent filtering proxy, sitting between your site and it’s visitors. Cloudflare blocks hackers and spammers from attacking your site, and also speeds up load times by acting as a content delivery network and serving cached copies of your static files from a proxy which is closer to your customers. On average, Cloudflare customers have seen a 30% improvement in page load times. In it’s basic mode, Cloudflare is free. We are the first host to integrate Cloudflare protection into our control panel. If you are a shared customer, you can enable Cloudflare protection for your domains by clicking on the orange Cloudflare icon in your control panel. We are working on a non-branded version for reseller, vps, and dedicated customers as well, but in the mean time our admins have a script to enable protection for any domain you would like. Simply open a ticket and let us know!

Front Row Joe is spotted at HostGator!

…

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!

We have all known someone in our lives, either close friends, or family who has suffered from some form of cancer. AstraZeneca, which manufactures breast cancer drugs Arimidex and Tamoxifen, founded the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985. The aim of the NBCAM from the start has been to promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the fight against breast cancer.

HostGator.com is proud to announce it will be participating in Breast Cancer Awareness Month this year by turning “Snappy The Gator” pink on our website. We have also setup a special coupon code “PINK”, the coupon code will allow 20% off the first month of any hosting account we offer and we will donate the first month from every signup that uses this code to breast cancer research. …