We are fortunate enough to have some very loyal followers who like to show their appreciation in unusual and creative ways.  This goes all the way back to the early days of HostGator, when none other than crunk rapper Lil Jon offered to introduce Brent to some ladies at his show in Florida, in appreciation for Brent having personally assisted him with some technical issues.  Another random caller once offered to send Brent some weed, via the US Postal Service for the same reason.  For the record, both of these offers were respectfully declined.  These days, it’s not terribly unusual to receive the occasional gift basket at the office, but please no more offers of groupies or drugs. Here’s a couple examples of the art we’ve received: ? ? This Snappy was done by a child of one of our Customers. Back when we sponsored the Joe Nemecheck NASCAR, we received a few racing-themed comic strips starring Snappy. Please click on the image to see the whole series. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? More recently, a Customer named Richard called us up for some assistance on his account and ended up singing us a song he wrote by the name of “GatorBill Me.”  The recording of the call is posted below along with the lyrics. ...

We’ve been having a lot of fun with our blog lately, and we promise to continue to do so.  However, we need to address some serious business once again.  Back in December, we posted about SOPA.  That beast has changed forms, returned and is now attacking more forcefully.  CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, aka H.R. 3523) was passed by the United Stated House of Representatives on April 26th, by a vote of 248 to 168. Ostensibly, CISPA exists to “help the U.S Government investigate cyber threats and ensure the security of networks against cyber attack.”  However, this wolf in sheep’s clothing also allows complete, unfettered access to your online activities without regard to existing privacy laws, provided the government suspects you of having committed some type of cyber crime.  Criminals should absolutely be investigated, prosecuted and punished if found guilty.  However, the scope of this bill is far too broad to be an effective piece of legislation and lacks any clear parameters as to what would constitute a justifiable suspicion, or when and how the government can monitor your internet browsing information; basically making all of us potential suspects, guilty until proven innocent. Representative Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and ...

Recently, HostGator began our transition into a new building in Houston.  Presently, we occupy two floors while the remaining floors continue to be built out.  Our Houston buildings are only a short distance apart, in fact you can see each from the other.  The geography makes it convenient to dispatch teams from one building to the other, as needed.  Though we’ve been executing practice drills of this nature for many years, some of us veterans had grown complacent, thinking there would never be any true need to exercise our finely-honed emergency-response skills. As explained in the recent Internet Speak post, one of the primary means of inter-office communication is via instant message and conference rooms.  The story told here will be best conveyed via excerpts from these conference rooms, for historical accuracy. Saturday April 21st, 2012 was a day not unlike any other. Until the late afternoon brought with it a distress call received from HTX2: (04:59:18 PM) Sundeep: we have a situation at the new building. The years of training immediately roused the team from their aforementioned complacency and they began gathering the necessary data in order to spring into action, like a… spring… that goes… into action!  The situation was explained further: (05:00:18 ...

Toilet paper is serious business. It’s genuinely a severely overlooked and under-appreciated medium of information distribution; believe that! Fortunately, http://www.getshitter.com can assist in elevating toilet paper to a more appropriate level of respect, by taking your twitter feed and turning it into toilet paper. What you subsequently do with said toilet paper would then be completely up to you. As we all learned from the classic Pauly Shore cinematic masterpiece Bio-Dome, the most effective means of instituting change, or raising awareness, is to think globally and act locally. The month of April contains both Earth Day (April 22nd) and Arbor Day (April 27th).  As you may already know, back in 2008 HostGator took the initiative of becoming a Green webhost, which you can read even more about here.  With environmentalism in the air this month, we thought it would be appropriate to discuss toilet paper and the trees that make toilet paper possible. Because like toilet paper, trees are also serious business. I’m going to stop beating around the bush, not because a bush could potentially make for decent TP, but because toilet paper conservation is something that deserves significantly more attention than it presently receives.  At least once per day, you ...

The lack of Newsletters for the past several months has been palpable; we do apologize.  Ideally, this circumstance will not occur again.  It is true that things have been very busy in the Gator’hood, but maintaining  a proper level of direct contact with you fine folks is a priority to us and we genuinely care about presenting information directly to you and interacting with you via this medium. Historically speaking, our monthly Newsletters have occasionally displayed a tendency to place the proverbial cart before the horse, by announcing some things a tad bit pre-maturely, *cough*LaunchPad*cough*!  The fact is that we love what we do and we get excited about new technologies or services and we naturally want to share them with you.  Being more conscious of the potentiality for unexpected delays to occur, from this point forward we intend to not bait you with any “Coming Soon!” things.  Rather, we’re going to utilize this time to inform you about what is already available to you and try our best to keep you up on any new happenings around the Company each month. ? GatorDesk Mobile: A New Way to Get Support! GatorDesk Mobile is now live, in beta!  You can fully manage your HostGator support ...

Once upon a time, people communicated with each other in complete sentences.  Or at least, I assume people used to communicate with each other in complete sentences.  Then along came the technology that spawned the phenomenon of communicating via text.  This effectively butchered the English language.  At least we thought so, at the time.  Then along came IRC and Instant Messaging which thus took language into depths of fail that were never before imaginable.  OMG, LOL! Instant Messaging is one of the primary means of communication within, and between, HostGator offices.  This leads to much butchering of the English language internally, whilst (hopefully) maintaining proper grammar within the LiveChats with Customers; this occurs simultaneously, behind the scenes.  I’m not going to reveal too much of the inter-office shenanigans, but there are various conference rooms utilized by various departments to effectively communicate as a group with one another.  This is a snippet of a conversation that took place in one of these conference rooms: (05:38:01 AM) Preston: bacon are desireable (05:38:06 AM) Preston: i want some bacon (05:38:43 AM) Adam: proper spelling is desirable. (05:38:49 AM) Adam: i want some proper spelling. (05:38:53 AM) Adam: wrapped in bacon. (05:38:56 AM) Preston: then read a book (05:38:58 AM) Preston: this ...

All hard drives will crash; there is no such thing as a crash-proof hard drive.  When (not if) this happens, how much data will be lost is a flip of the coin.  It could be 0%, or it could be 100%.  World Backup Day is March 31st. and encourages you to maintain current backups of your data: financial information or other important documents, digital media collection (music/movies/ebooks), and perhaps most importantly your memories (pictures/home movies). One in ten laptops will be stolen in their lifetime; one is stolen every 53 seconds.  Fifty percent of all hard drives will crash within five years.  Couple those statistics with the fact that 89.1% of PC users do not perform regular backups.  This is essentially a recipe for massive data loss.  A recent study found that 90 percent of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years, with 70% of companies going out of business following a major data loss.  These are significant numbers. Are you able to place a dollar amount on your data?  Exactly how much value does it have?  For many people, their data is priceless.  If the only pictures of your children that you have are on a ...

The simple truth is that the web hosting industry is the target of, and host (pun intended?) to, a large percentage of individuals who attempt to perpetrate identity theft. This is an unfortunate situation, but sadly people often attempt to purchase web-hosting with fraudulent credit cards and other stolen credentials. Generally the motivating factor in using a stolen identity to purchase hosting involve things like warez or other copyrighted materials such as music and movies, or for spamming or phishing purposes; none of which HostGator tolerates on our network. The efforts of our Pending Department prevent upwards of 6,000 fraudulent sign-ups each month. One of the means used to prevent such sign-ups is a request to provide us with a copy of a government-issued identification card. In that we are a global company with Customers in virtually every non-embargoed nation in the world, we are dealing with countless types of identification cards. Sometimes, they are genuine. Other times, not so much. Below are a few of the more interesting responses we’ve received to our request for the aforementioned identification cards. These images are exactly as we received then, save for the black boxes covering the personal information of those who did ...

Imagine if you were able to genetically combine Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Darth Vader and Barbara Streisand into one horrifically terrifying being. Now imagine that being is actually a piece of proposed legislature — the terrifying creation in your midst would then be the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which is currently being considered by the House. ? SOPA, aka H.R. 3261 is a bill right now in the House sponsored by R-TX Lamar Smith. It’s not just any bill though, it’s a bill that would allow the USDOJ, RIAA, MPAA and anyone else who lobbies for the entertainment industry to effectively censor the internet to suit their needs. ? James Allworth recently wrote “Is this really what we want to do to the internet? Shut it down every time it doesn’t fit someone’s business model?” and I couldn’t agree more. Censorship is a slippery slope. Not only that but it also creates an absurd amount of bureaucratic busy work. Here at HostGator we already spend a HUGE amount of time answering DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requests. If we allow our representatives to begin deciding what is and what isn’t ok for you to view on the internet then where will it ...

Snappy here with an important announcement! HostGator.com has sent me a company memo this morning confirming that they are once again participating in National Breast Cancer Awareness Month this October and I wanted to pass the good news along to you. Memo: “In 1985, the search for a cure for Breast Cancer was gaining headway and AstraZeneca founded National Breast Cancer Awareness Month to raise awareness of this growing cause. Thanks to the establishment of NBCAM, in October of each year, organizations across the nation focus on the fight, helping to promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the race against breast cancer. HostGator.com is proud to join these organizations in their support for a cure.This year, in honor of NBCAM, HostGator.com has turned Snappy the Gator pink on the website. We have also set up a special coupon code “PINK” which will allow 20% off the first month of any hosting account we offer. We will be donating the proceeds from the first month of every sign-up that uses this code to breast cancer research. We have also created a few banners for our clients who wish to let the world know that their web host cares ...

I receive hundreds of emails a month from customer’s thanking me for the great service we provide and even a few letters utilizing the old fashion snail mail method. The majority of snail mail reviews I receive our complaints about the hosting services my company has provided. The only problem is that more times then not they get my name correct and the company I own wrong. The Letter:I decided to have a little fun with my response to them…………Dear Customer, I’m emailing you in regards to a letter I received in the mail from you today. In this letter you described a few recent negative support experiences you had with Inmotion hosting. I wish I could say I’m sorry for these negative experiences you had but unfortunately I’m not. In fact It pleases me slightly to hear about your poor experience with Inmotion. I highly recommend you take your business to hostgator.com immediately. As owner of Hostgator I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you receive 99.9% uptime along with 24/7 quality support. If you’re interested in signing up with us I’ll be happy to give you the first 6 months of service free to try us out. I’ll also do my ...

Greetings, Domains, Domains, Domains Everyone is interested in an update on our domain registrar launch. We hear you, loud and clear! While we can’t nail down an exact launch date quite yet, this is a top priority and it’s something that we are working on every day. We have greatly expanded our development team (over 10 members now) to launch this and other HostGator products as quickly as possible. So without making any false promises, we can tell you it is coming “soon.” HostGator Biggest Loser:HostGator held its own biggest loser 2.0 recently. It was a great success with many of our employees losing lots of weight! There was also a friendly competition between the Austin and Houston offices for who would lose the largest percentage of body weight. Austin won! Tim B. was the overall winner, losing nearly 14% of his body weight! Great work. With the win, the Austin office was treated to a great “Grill Fest” on July 1st. We were busy in June We thought we handled a lot of support inquiries in May (roughly 520,000), however we blew that away in June. We answered: 193,708 Chats 105,000 Calls And 252,693 Tickets Over 551,400 chats, calls and tickets were answered in June. Accept credit card payments online!Are you looking to sell products ...

Greetings, Gators, Another month already!? We know we’re a little behind on this month’s newsletter, sorry about that! We once again have some great announcements for you this month though. We Launched Unlimited Shared Windows Hosting:We are excited to announce that we launched Windows shared hosting services last month. More information can be seen at www.hostgator.com/windows-hosting.shtml We’re offering unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, Parallels Plesk control panel, ASP/ASP.net Support, Microsoft SQL 2008 (R2) and many more features! Simply check out the new windows hosting page for more information. New SiteBuilder! Beautiful Designs coming soon! After MONTHS of searching and testing out more site builders than I originally thought were even available, we have found the best – and our clients deserve nothing but the best! We will be introducing BaseKit, FREE to all of our clients within the next 60 days (at most). Why BaseKit? Here are just a couple of the reasons we chose BaseKit: - Extremely easy to use - Completely Drag and Drop - Huge List of beautifully designed templates that you can customize - Tons of additional widgets for you to implement (Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps, RSS, Flickr, forms, YouTube, PayPal, calendar, and many more)! - Supports multiple Languages - Can add/edit your own HTML and CSS - Can import PSD designs - ...

If you’ve ever been on the HostGator official blog before, you may have noticed a few things. Actually you may have noticed that something was missing. Where’s Snappy? We decided that it’s time to bring Snappy back to his natural habitat, the swamp. You’ll notice Snappy with a new modern look as he enjoys gazing at the breezy clouds and wading through the swampy waters. We want to make it easier for you to connect with us, so we put our RSS feed, Facebook, Twitter, and hiring icons above for easy access. You can now also get updates via Email to enjoy at your convenience, in addition to being able to easily share and comment in posts with Facebook and Twitter. We’re making greater efforts to roll out more blog posts, use our Flickr account actively, and upload more videos, so don’t forget to sign up for updates on the latest HostGator news! What do you think about the new design? Chime in!

Greetings, Gators, We have some exciting news and several fun HostGator happenings to share with you this month. Bandwidth Increased to 10TB on ALL Dedicated Servers! All dedicated servers now include 10TB of Bandwidth standard (an increase of as much as 8.5TB FREE!). This includes ALL current/past dedicated server clients as well as new dedicated...

Greetings, Gators! We have another exciting newsletter in store for you. A lot has been going on this month, and there are a couple of big announcements to make! ? We’ve outgrown our swamp! We’re expanding! With so much growth over the last few years, we’re now outgrowing our headquarters office in Houston, Texas. So...

Greetings Gators, Another wonderful month has passed here at HostGator. February was a busy, cold month for HostGator and we have some exciting events coming soon. South By Southwest: SXSW is an annual music, film and technology festival in Austin, TX. In recent years, SXSW has been a large promotion and launching ground for new...

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...

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...

Greetings, We have some exciting news and updates for you this month about our new domain registry service, a sneak peek at our new upcoming domain management control panel, our billing system migration and a tour of our new HostGator Austin Office (now fully loaded, HostGator style). Our billing system migration is nearly complete! With...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

One of our long time employees, Dwayne St. John had a birthday today. Check out the cake: Now THATS dedication!  Happy Birthday Dwayne!

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 9th, 2010 myself and other members of our management team arrived at our new home. Walking around we saw really...

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...

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...