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!

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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We will update these videos with newer versions as they become out-of-date at no additional charge.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. …

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. …

Hello everyone, first and foremost welcome to the HostGator Company Blog. This blog is a work in progress, but we hope it can bring everyone closer to HostGator on a personal and professional level. We will be providing important news, updates, and even special offers through this blog. Our industry famous admins, will also be providing webhosting articles, tips, and tricks for all of our readers!

My name is Jay, and some of you may know me as the Team Lead on the Forums, or may have seen me in some of your sales tickets. I’ll be here to bring you some of the news from inside HostGator as soon as it happens, things like special offers, plan changes, and even office politics! I know you would all like an inside look at how HostGator operates, and I plan on bringing you that. You’ll also be hearing from names such as Chad Bean, our Affiliate Manager. Dave Collins, our highly acclaimed CTO. And even Brent Oxley, the owner of HostGator.

Again, the blog is a work in progress so many changes are planned. As always we would love to hear your feedback, feel free to register on the blog and make a comment. And stay tuned for some great things heading your way. (Maybe even some special offers and contests!) Be sure to subscribe to any of our feeds, or bookmark the page for future reference.

Thank you all, and welcome to Gator Crossing! Watch out for Crocs in the road! …