HostGator recently reached 200,000 active customers and we are on pace to break 300,000 within a year.

I remember when I’d be out celebrating if HostGator managed to get two signups in a week. Now, we’re seeing thousands of signups a week. Back in the day, my celebrating consisted of nothing more than dropping the Ramen noodles or the tuna can I had in my hands and grabbing some sushi for an hour before scrambling back to work. At the time, I was a poor college student who invested every penny I had back into the business I was building.

The HostGator.com domain was registered on October 10, 2002 and here are some statistics about how many active customers we’ve had at a few points since then.

• 2/1/2003: 112 active customers
• 2/1/2004: 1,031 active customers
• 2/1/2005: 6,892 active customers
• 2/1/2006: 21,434 active customers
• 2/1/2007: 50,213 active customers
• 2/1/2008: 92,752 active customers
• 2/1/2009: 157,432 active customers
• Today: 200,000+

How HostGator Came To Be:

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a kid. In sixth grade, I sold candy at school and had all the kids in my neighborhood working for me. When I was 14, my cousins and I had a business where we sold watermelons from a truck on the side of a road. The deal we offered was simple, but effective: “2 for $5.”

Ain't no Glory in Selling Watermelons

It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in high school that I got hooked on trying to make money on the Internet. What sucked me in was the paid to surf programs such as AllAdvantage, Bepaid.com, Cashfiesta, and the like. These companies claimed they would pay you to surf the Internet while looking at ads. I created my first website on a service much like GeoCities and was able to generate over 50,000 referrals between all the programs I was enrolled in. One by one, I learned that all of the programs were a scam. I made $65 when I was entitled to over a million. …

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.

…

Update: Thanks to all of those who participated! Our second Open Session was a success. A recording of the session is available on this page.

Due to the success of the first Open Session we hosted a couple of weeks ago, we’re hosting another one soon. This Open Session will be held on Wednesday, July 29 at 8 PM CT.

Just like last time, this Open Session will be a chance for both potential and existing HostGator customers to come into a live chat with other customers and HostGator employees and get tips, information, and have a chance to ask questions and get answers from the people who make the decisions at HostGator. Participants can either call in or just listen on their computers. There is also a text chat for people who would prefer to type their questions. …

It seems like no matter what business industry you’re looking at, there’s always room for shady activities. Web hosting and the domain industry are no exceptions. However, most people are totally unaware of one such practice known as domain tasting. Domain Tasting is essentially when a someone buys a domain name for the sole purpose of seeing whether or not it can generate ad income. The domain registrant puts ads on the domain, and if the ads don’t make any money, the registrant has five days to request a refund.

There have been many big companies involved with Domain Tasting, and since they can pull off the above example on a much larger scale, they have been able to reap insane amounts of profits. This had affected us and our clients because millions of domains were getting tied up by ‘tasters’ and would appear unavailable when someone actually went to register their domain name.

To help curb this problem, since April of this year, ICANN has made their $.20 domain transaction fee non-refundable. So if a company wants to sample 50,000 domain names, for instance, then they’ll have to shell out $10,000 in registration fees even if they get a refund for the domains within the five day grace period. This change hasn’t eliminated the problem altogether, but it’s certainly helped.

Obviously domain tasting wouldn’t have gotten as out of control as it did, had it not been for the huge profits that people were reaping in. At HostGator, we don’t have that many domain registrations, since we specialize in web hosting. However, it’s still evident that there are major profits to be earned with a decent domain portfolio. One such way to monetize domain names, that we’ve explored recently, is via domain parking.

When you first buy a domain, the domain will be using the default name servers of the registrar generally. The default page you see, usually with ads all over it, is a good example of a parked page. What most people don’t realize though, is that even if they aren’t going to develop the domain right away, they can still make money from the domain while it waits to be developed.

The company we’ve been using for domain parking is DomainSponsor. Basically we use their name servers on inactive domain names in our account, and all traffic gets pointed to a domain parking page where relevant ads are displayed, giving us a percentage of the revenue made from the ads.

So just how much money can you make with Domain Parking? We were pleasantly surprised with the results.

The above check was for the month of May. We’ve been using Domain Sponsor for the last 3 months, and are consistently getting over $25,000/monthly with the domains that we have. Now these results may be unique since we do have roughly 12,000 domain names in our DomainSponsor portfolio, but many domainers have much more domains than this and can stand to make much more money. …

At HostGator, one of the most popular web sites created on our servers these days are blogs. People use blogs not just as a diary, but as a quick way to publish information and articles. The most popular blogging software is WordPress, which happens to be the platform of choice for Gator Crossing (this blog) and can be installed with a couple clicks directly from the HostGator Control Panel.

We had a custom HostGator inspired WordPress theme drawn up recently and would like to make it available for free to our customers and non-customers alike. Below you can view and download the theme made available in four different color schemes:

View Free Theme 1	View Free Theme 2
Download Theme	Download Theme
View Free Theme 3	View Free Theme 4
Download Theme	Download Theme

You can see our Gator Crossing blog viewed in the different themes by the theme switcher plugin on the upper right side of the blog. Enjoy! …

Here’s something you may not know: the IT sector has a huge climate impact. At present, between 3 and 4 percent of all electricity (and the associated carbon emissions) used in the world goes to running data centers. If you’re one of the four and a half million registered users of Second Life, consider this: the average Second Life avatar consumes 1,752 kWh of electricity per year, or about two thirds that of an actual person (globally averaged). One server alone has roughly the same climate impact as a 15mpg SUV!

Climate change is real, it’s happening now, and we as a planet desperately need to reduce our IT emissions. And if we wait for the government to solve the problem, we’ll be waiting for a long, long, LONG time.

We’re thrilled to announce that HostGator has joined the ranks of many progressive companies including: Starbucks, IBM, and UPS to take action on addressing climate change right now.

HostGator has gone green, and it’s gone green in a BIG way.
We at Integrated Ecosystem Market Services are very proud to have worked with HostGator to develop a sector-leading program.

What makes HostGator’s program so special?
If you’re thinking about switching to green hosting, good for you! Green hosting is an important step in dealing with climate change. But be aware- once you start asking some questions you’ll find that not all of the .green. hosting options out there are nearly as green as they claim to be. HostGator’s program stands out from the pack for a number of reasons . . .

One, HostGator is using renewable energy to both power and cool their servers, whereas a number of green hosts only offset the electricity used to power their servers. That represents a big difference, because servers generate a lot of heat. For every watt of electricity that a server uses, 1-2 watts of electricity are typically required to cool it. What that means is that HostGator is investing in about twice as much renewable energy, on a per server basis, as those green hosts only using renewable energy to power their servers.

…

Inc. Magazine compiles an annual list of the top 5,000 fastest-growing companies in America. They rank each of the top 5,000 companies depending on their revenue growth for the past three years.
Inc. 5000 announced yesterday that HostGator made their list of the top 5000 fastest growing private companies in America. Turns out, that not only did HostGator make the list, but we ranked in at #21 overall. In our industry, business services, we ranked #2, and in Texas we’re the #1 ranked fastest growing company. For our specific industry–web hosting–HostGator is the fastest growing web host out there, period.

This is quite a feat for a company that started out of a college dorm room with literally no budget.

According to Inc.’s analysis, the reason for our growth is:

Because support is key in the Web-hosting business, the company never outsources support and keeps technical support staff available 24/7, with an average wait time of one minute for inbound calls. It also provides developed templates and specialized software licensing to clients for free to enhance the company’s service offering.

I agree with the analysis, but I’d also like to share a few other points to explain why HostGator is not only floating but thriving.

• We’re a transparent company. Before potential customers sign up with us, they can check out real HostGator reviews right on our public forums from current customers.
• We truly care about our clients. It doesn’t matter whether you pay us $5 a month for web hosting or if you buy your own dedicated server through us. Every client at HG receives priority attention and 24/7 support.
• Our affiliates contribute in a large way to the success by bringing in new sales. Anyone can join our hosting affiliate program. Whether you are a client of HostGator or not, we will pay you up to $125 per sale for referring people to our service.
• Definitely the biggest asset at HostGator is our people. To offer 24/7 support, it means that we have people here for our customers at 3 AM answering calls and taking care of issues before they become problems. They keep the servers running, making sure millions of web sites and businesses stay online. HostGator would instantly become more profitable if we cut corners and outsourced support, but in doing so we wouldn’t be able to keep the quality where it is. So that’s why we continue our hiring frenzy, to keep up with the growth. The only thing that has kept us from growing faster is making sure we have enough people to support our current and future customers. We’re in this for the long haul, and we want our customers to be with us just as long.

It’s an accomplishment and something that we’re all proud of, because every employee at HG helped to make this happen. In three years time we’ve grown over 5,000%, let us know what it will take to make the most of the next three. …