Gator Happenings

August proved to be a record setting month for us here at HostGator, with over 26,000 sign-ups! The best part of all this is that we are currently so overstaffed that many of our employees have been complaining that there is no work for them to do. In the business world, a company that is overstaffed is traditionally looked upon as being mismanaged and/or poorly run. We have a different philosophy here and believe that the more overstaffed we are, the better it is for business. Being overstaffed allows us to provide a much higher caliber of support which in turn increases our reputation, and ultimately leads to faster growth. Many of you reading this may be worried that we may have grown too large to value a single account, however this is not and never will be the case. Should you ever have an issue with our traditional support mediums, simply request that your ticket be assigned to our owner, Brent. He will be more than happy to provide you with the V.I.P. attention that you deserve.

HostGator Austin is still hiring!

As you may have concluded, we have no plans to slow our hiring process, and currently we are aggressively seeking out experienced Linux administrators who are well-versed in cPanel and WHM. If you feel you may be a good candidate, you can find more information on our jobs page here.

Not a computer guru? Not experienced in Linux administration? Not a problem! You can still get paid by HostGator for referring potential candidates that successfully complete 90 days of full-time employment. We are currently offering $2,500 for each qualified Admin you send us, and $500 for chat/phone techs. For more information on this, and to get started with your referrals, visit our referral page.

Watch out GoDaddy!

HostGator is mere weeks away from offering domain registration from our very own domain registrar service. Not only will the registration prices be significantly cheaper than GoDaddy, but you will also receive the legendary 24/7 around the clock support that you have come to know and love from HostGator.

HostGator Abound

You may have been seeing Snappy more and more lately. With our recent billboard placements, Nascar sponsorship, UFC fighter sponsorships, human inkings, and sponsorships of various other ventures, you may be asking, What’s next? Well, here it is: If you are a gamer, you will be seeing our hungry little gator on the trunks of a few fighters on the upcoming EA Sports: MMA! For more information on this game, and to pre-order, visit EA MMA’s page.

That’s all for this month folks, until next month, stay happy, stay safe!

– Daniel Collette and The HostGator team …

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. …

One of our long time employees, Dwayne St. John had a birthday today.

Check out the cake:

Now THATS dedication!  Happy Birthday Dwayne!

—-
Edit: The cake below was sent as a gift to our marketing director Chad for Christmas!

Welcome to Austin

We have arrived in Austin, TX!  A lot of our customers and employees at our Houston headquarters wanted to know more about the new office and, of course, see some pictures. August 9^th, 2010 myself and other members of our management team arrived at our new home. Walking around we saw really nice cubicles (not wired), no workstations, and a blow up mattress in Brent’s office. The date for our first training class was August 16^th, we had a total of 7 days to get everything setup for our first Austin employees . We needed at least 40 monitors, we have dual 23.6” monitors on each workstation, yes I am kind of bragging.  And we needed at least 20 extra workstations.  Monitors were rushed to the office and several trips, including one of my own, back to Houston to grab workstations ensued. All in all on August 16^th we had enough workstations setup for training to begin. It was a very hectic time here in Austin that first week, but I’m proud to say that everything is running smoothly now. The first group of gators we brought on here are working out great, and we are already setting up another training class. I have taken the liberty to post pictures of the office.  Here are a few features of our new Austin location:

• World Class 1100 sq ft Gym complete with lockers and showers (gators sweat a lot).
• Internet Cafe / LAN Party stations (gators game a lot, see sleeping quarters).
• Dual 23.6” Monitor setups.
• Game room complete with arcade games and full size pool table.  Also (2) 55″ Flat screen tvs.
• Outside deck connected to the game room, for BBQ’s and get togethers.
• Sleeping quarters, for when you just want to nap a bit. (gators are sleepy a lot, see Lan Party).
• Black and Decker Coffee pot, The 12 Cup kind (nothing but the best).
• Vending machines that take credit cards (Gators only carry 100s).
• Really cool lights that only turn on when you walk by!

These are just a few of the wonderful additions that we have made to our brand new office. It is a really big step for our company and all the hard work our Austin crew has put in to get things up and running definitely shows. If you are interested in coming to work for HostGator Austin, please submit your resume on our Jobs page. We are currently hiring for Linux Level 1 -3 System Administrators.

Dedicated/VPS Tutorials

We announced brandable tutorials for our reseller customers a few months back, and the feedback has been great!  We are now proud to announce that we are ready to deploy the tutorials for our Dedicated and VPS accounts!  If you would like to have this feature installed on your VPS or Dedicated server, please contact support. One of our technicians will be glad to add this to your WHM!  Our technicians will put the ticket in a special queue and enable this for you Friday morning. Please let us know of any feedback you have regarding the tutorials.

Go Joe! Go!

A few months back we announced a deal with Joe Nemechek and NEMCO sports for a sponsorship of their Nationwide car. After seeing what a huge hit we made in our NASCAR debut, beating out some of the competition and all, we decided to sponsor Joe for the remainder of the season! We will be sponsoring Joe’s #87 car for every remaining Nationwide race. We are also sponsoring the Talladega Sprint Cup race with Joe! Shake and Bake!  Joe is a great guy and very respected in the NASCAR community, We really could not think of a better driver to support then Mr. Nemechek. So make sure you tune in and watch Joe pass up the competition for the remainder of the Nationwide Series! Follow Joe on Twitter @joenemechek!

Till next month,
—  Josh Loe & The Team at HostGator …

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: …

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. …

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:

The videos cover many different topics to assist your own web hosting clients including:

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. …