It’s amazing how many web sites with no business model or profitability sunk during the .com internet bubble. Internet businesses, like any other company, aren’t immune from the age old philosophy of “you need to make money to stay in business”. Now there are a few exceptions to this rule. It’s still possible to come up with a great idea for a web site and receive funding from a venture capital firm (read: Twitter), but for the everyday web business owner, they understand the need to make a profit.

Many GeoCities refugees have migrated over to HostGator, and we want to welcome you all with open arms. We can assure you that HostGator won’t have the same fate as GeoCities because well, we’re a profitable company.

If you have a site with GeoCities and need a new home, post a comment and we’ll try to throw you some free months worth of Hosting at HostGator.

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.

After the paid to surf venture failed, I decided to create real web sites and sell my own advertising inventory. The network that I created was called The Freak Network and consisted of scfreak.com, dfreak.com, and wcfreak.com, all of which were named after best selling Blizzard Entertainment games (Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, respectively).

My network was making me about $40 a day, which was impressive given that all of my pimple covered friends had to get real jobs and make less money. Everything was going great until the .com bubble bursted and my advertisers began to cheat me out of money. I was left with no choice but to find alternative sources of income and that’s when I had the epiphany to start selling web hosting on the side. My network of websites was receiving tens of thousands of page views per day and I already had the servers, so selling web hosting seemed like the perfect plan. Freakwebhosting.com was born. My plan was to use the traffic from my gaming websites to gain customers.

Freak Web Hosting

I built Freak Web Hosting to just shy of a hundred customers that consisted mostly of gaming sites. The problem was that I wasn’t a system administrator and that I wasn’t that technical. This resulted in poor security which lead to hackings, horrible uptime, and a never ending series of technical issues that kept me from running a successful business. I hated being a webhost at the time! I was able to get the business but no matter how hard I searched I couldn’t find someone to take care of the technical issues at a price I could afford.

I spent years trying to make my network a viable business and another year trying to get my web hosting venture running smoothly . The final straw was when the Data Center claimed that my server was “compromised and outgoing malicious traffic.” To alleviate this problem, they ordered OS reload after reload, which drove me to a point just short of insanity and a state in which I felt life was over. (In hindsight, I believe the datacenter lied to me about the malicious traffic in order to get me to leave due to the amount bandwidth my sites were using. The deal they gave me at the time was too good to be true and that’s exactly what it ended up being.)

I could have kept on fighting, but it would have been a futile effort. I was left with no choice but to scale down operations. I did the right thing by refunding everyone’s last month of hosting and even refunded those that prepaid for a year in advance. At the time there were three annual customers that I didn’t have enough money to repay, so I contacted them to let them know my intentions and eventually paid them back a few months later.

By the time The Freak Network and Freak Web Hosting failed, high school was coming to an end. I didn’t have much time before I would have to decide what to do with my life. I felt like a complete failure and had nothing to show for all my years of work.

I wanted to be a success and make some type of difference in the world and I felt as if I couldn’t accomplish this by going to college. I was very close to joining the army and even went to see a recruiter. I believed that if I joined the army, I’d have purpose in my life and be able to make some type of difference. Just days before enlisting, my dad talked me out of joining the army and helped me get into Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

I spent a few months living on campus and attending classes without deviating too much from the life of a regular student. That’s when an old friend contacted me telling me that he started a server company. He knew that if we went into business together I’d have no problem getting the customers. He begged me for a week to get back into hosting and eventually convinced me to partner with him and try hosting again. After failing the first time around, I was against the idea and didn’t want to try again unless I was confident I had someone with technical abilities to keep the servers up and running.

The deal we came to orally was that I’d run my own business and I’d give him half the proceeds for keeping the servers secure and up and running. I quickly revived the old Freakwebhosting.com brand and reached out to all my old customers. I managed to convince a majority of them to sign up very quickly and within days, I was once again a web host and once again in the hosting industry.

It only took a couple of months for reality to set in . Servers began having multi-hour outages on a daily basis as a result of the datacenter going offline. I was bringing the business in while my partner was failing to uphold his end of the bargain. The servers weren’t up and running; they were failing.

I decided to break the partnership and venture off on my own. I ended up purchasing a few servers from Dedicatednow.com and managed to find a system administrator who would help me as I needed and bill me by the hour. The combination of the new Data Center and system administrator made Freak Web Hosting more stable than ever.

With things running so well and the old Freak Website Network being dead, I knew the company needed a new design and a new name. I searched for days and tried hundreds of domain name combinations before I narrowed it down to two names: HostGator and GatorHost. I was torn on which domain to choose. I didn’t know which one sounded better and couldn’t afford both domain names. HostGator may sound like a much better name now, but at the time and without all of our branding, they both sounded the same.

Original Web Site for HostGator

Business was booming and my freshman year of college was coming to an end. By this time, every second of my life was spent in class, doing homework, or taking chats and answering emails on the computer.

I was a 24/7 one-man operation. I was being woken up numerous times a night with phone calls and there wasn’t a single class I would make it through without having to leave at least a few times to take a business call. I knew I was on path to be making more than the average college graduate in about six months. I also knew it would have been impossible to finish another year of college while running HostGator, so I decided to drop out of school and follow my dream of growing HostGator into the world’s largest hosting company.

Understandably, my family and friends were all very much against my decision to dropout. I had many businesses that failed to pan out and the chances of HostGator succeeding were slim. In the end, everyone expressed their thoughts strongly, but supported me in my decision. To me, it was a no-brainer. If things didn’t work out, I’d just go back to school and be miserable. If they worked out, I’d be pursuing my dream.

Things continued to go well for the Gator at the expense of living life, having friends, and never being able to leave the computer. Within minutes of leaving the computer there would always be some type of emergency with a service going offline that would require a restart and I’d have to run back to my computer. More times than not, I’d make it half way to my wherever I was going before getting a phone call or an alert and being forced to turn back to resolve the issue. This was before the iPhone, smartphones, air cards, or any other type of mobile tool. What amazed me is the fact that I was not that technical, but was still able to help most of my customers by simply taking their question and applying common sense or finding a work around.

When HostGator had just started, I hated resellers because they required a large amount of relatively technical service. What’s ironic is that as we grew, I saw how easy it was to obtain reseller customers. Before long, obtaining reseller customers is where most of my focus and advertising money went. Ideal timing allowed us to fill the reseller niche while the competition focused primarily on shared hosting. Today, shared hosting is the source of most of our new business, but we continue to remain the worlds’ largest reseller hosting company.

If a major issue ever came up, I’d be helpless when it came to actually solving the problem. I was at the mercy of an hourly system administrator who usually had something more important to do than fix my servers. In the early days, HostGator was inadequately prepared for drives failures and similar large-scale issues. When one happened, there would usually be data loss and days of little to no sleep while I helped customers recover. I continued life in my apartment prison for another year before the company grew beyond what I could handle myself and I hired my first full time employee, Ben Welch.

Ben would arrive at my house while I was sleeping and immediately get to work taking calls, chats, and tickets. When I woke up, I’d head over to bedroom and get to work with him. At approximately the same time, I hired an Indian outsourced support company. The support volume was more than Ben and me could handle alone and it was impossible for us to man all of the stations all of the time.

I don’t believe in outsourcing, but at that point, outsourcing was the only way I could have 24/7 coverage of email and chat support that I could afford.

In hindsight, outsourcing was a big mistake. Choosing to outsource our supported resulted in the loss of customers, a damaged reputation, and low caliber support. As soon as we could afford an office, we rented a 1,600 square foot office in Boca Raton, Florida and began replacing our outsourced employees with in-house employees. We learned our lesson with outsourcing and have had 100% in-house support for several years now. There’s absolutely no chance of us switching to outsourced support in the future – it just isn’t worth whatever we’d save in the short run.

When we first moved into our first office, I thought that it was overkill and I wasn’t sure how (or if) we’d ever fill it. In no time, sales and growth caught fire. We had people working in closets, hallways, and I had to share my office with another employee. The office wasn’t that bad of a place, but there was one major problem. We had a single stall co-ed restroom for over 24 employees to share and nobody to clean it. If you had to go, you’d usually end up holding it or driving home.

I continued to wake up numerous times a night to take support calls and contribute to our service and support as much as possible. This took a toll on me, though. At the ripe old age of 22, I began to develop a very serious case of carpel tunnel syndrome. It slowly progressed until I was at the point where tapping any finger on either hand would feel like needles piercing me to the bone. I ended up trying a few alternatives to typing, including holding pencils in the palms of my fists and hiring someone to type and move the mouse for me. Typing with pencils only helped so much and hiring someone to communicate what to do ended up being a nightmare.

Eventually, the pain worsened to the point where it affected everything I did. If I went to a movie, all I could think about was my hands hurting. If I drove home, the pain would be so intolerable that I would have to alternate sitting on my hands so they would fall sleep to allow the pain to temporarily go away. Technology began to improve and I soon learned of Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software. This was a lifesaver for me and while it wasn’t perfect, it did allow me to continue to perform my duties, just less effectively. I ended up using Dragon for a few years before my hands recovered to a point where I’m no longer in pain and I’m able to type without any discomfort. I’m sure if my old lack of sleep and constant typing routine came back, my problems would as well.

Eventually, we ran out of closets in our Boca Raton office and had to find a new location. We were also severely understaffed and couldn’t find the people we needed to keep up with our rapid growth. Boca Raton is where people go to retire not find a job. It’s so bad that the locals would always joke that Boca was “Heaven’s waiting room.”

We initially searched for office space in South Florida, but found the prices to be astronomical for the size we needed to maintain growth. We began looking in Dallas, Texas for a new office and somehow ended up looking in Houston. Soon after, we found and purchased the 30,000 square feet office building that we’re currently located in. The office was perfect for us since 16,000 square feet was available for use and the rest was leased out. We currently occupy around 18,000 square feet of the building and I anticipate that we’ll be filling the rest in a little over a year .

When we first moved into the new building, me and a few other employees took up residency throughout the building. There was very few employees at first and nothing but empty space. Many people that I met had no idea what web hosting was and were convinced that I was a drug dealer. They believed this because I was so young, successful, and living in an empty building with a bunch of young adults in what resembled a frat house. It also didn’t help at the time I had just gotten back from Brazil to open HostGator Brazil.

The Future of HostGator:

I still haven’t reached my goal of HostGator becoming the world’s largest hosting company, but as one of the world’s largest and with how well things have been going, I can definitely see it happening within the next eight years. In order to achieve this, we’ll need to go more mainstream. This includes launching a brand to compete with GoDaddy, more billboards, starting TV commercials, and hiring many, many more high quality employees to continue supporting our customers.

HostGator has been a real blessing in my life and I couldn’t have gotten us to where we are today alone. I owe much of HostGator’s success to our customers as well as to each and every employee who has put their heart and sweat into this company. If it weren’t for all of you, I would most likely have to return to college. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Thank you!

The Inc. 500|5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2005 through 2008. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by the first week of 2005, and therefore able to show four full calendar years of sales. Additionally, they have to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent — not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies — as of December 31, 2008 (a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired since that date). Revenue in 2005 must have been at least $200,000, and revenue in 2008 must have been at least $2 million.

Additionally, HostGator ranked #6 in all Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX (Greater Houston area) companies, and #20 out of all companies in our category—Business Products & Services.
HostGator has managed to grow over 896% within the measured 3 year time period. We’ve nearly doubled in revenue from 2007 to 2008.

In 2008, HostGator was ranked at #21 overall. Although 2009’s rank was lower than the previous year’s, we’ve nearly doubled our revenue between the two periods. Despite the job market shrinking across the U.S., HostGator has also created 100 positions for highly qualified technicians and systems’ administrators in the Houston area over the last year.

I think I speak for everyone at HostGator, when I say we’re all really proud to be a part of this company and what we’ve been able to accomplish. The growth simply comes from doing what we’ve always done: providing our clients with reliable web hosting service, 24/7 support, and by offering as many features as possible.

Huge thanks goes to our clients and employees for our continued success.

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.

As the makeshift offices were being setup in our managers’ homes, chats were being taken, servers were being monitored, and updates were being provided. Within an hour of the surge, HostGator’s support operations were almost fully functional, albeit delayed (with the exception of phone support).

By 11:30 PM, employees were starting to work at the office again. The phones were turned on shortly afterwards and average email response times went back down to 45 minutes or less.

Much of this expensive and inconvenient damage would have been prevented had the building’s generator worked as planned. If it did, the building would have only lost power for a minute or so instead of multiple hours. The cause was the generator maintenance done less than a week before (by an outsourced company) was done improperly. The company put the wrong fuel filter on the generator, which caused the generator to immediately fail on start up.

The outage could have obviously been much worse. No customer servers or accounts were affected in any way (we don’t house any customer servers in our office building) and we were able to get back up and running relatively quickly.

Regardless of the relative severity of the event, though, HostGator did learn a lot.

• Most notably, the fact the immediate communication is essential was reaffirmed. We first learned about the importance of immediate communication during a datacenter outage at The Planet. In this situation, a Twitter update went out less than 15 minutes after the power surge occurred. Updates continued to be provided across Twitter, the forums, and our support site until the situation was completely resolved. We were even lucky enough to get comments from customers praising us for our handling of the situation.
• We also learned that it’s critical to have systems tested and maintained by companies we know are getting the job done properly. We are obviously looking into a new generator maintenance company and looking at our other vendors to ensure they’re prepared to deal with issues if they occur.

During the entire occurrence, our customers were patient and understanding and we sincerely appreciate that. Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus fame is credited with saying “The road to success is paved with well handled mistakes” and we couldn’t agree more.

Things happen (the web hosting business and the act of running a business are never dull) and Wednesday’s events were just one of the many examples of things that no one could have ever predicted happening.

Click on the images below to see a larger version with a caption.

]]> http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/08/10/anatomy-of-an-outage/feed/ 23 http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/07/29/free-iphone-3gs-contest/ http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/07/29/free-iphone-3gs-contest/#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:22:19 +0000 Chad Bean http://blog.hostgator.com/?p=750 **CONTEST HAS EXPIRED** Follow us on twitter @hostgator for future contests.

HostGator has teamed up with one of our customers, BlogertizeWorld.com, to give away 30 free iPhone 3GS’s in the form of a Twitter contest.

The rules are simple and this contest is open to everyone. Click here to re-tweet the details with the hashtag #HGBW, and get entered for a chance to win. There’s no limit on the number of tweets you can submit with this hashtag, so the more submissions, the better your odds.

Don’t forget to follow @hostgator on Twitter!

]]> http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/07/29/free-iphone-3gs-contest/feed/ 11 http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/07/15/hostgator-open-session-july29/ http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/07/15/hostgator-open-session-july29/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:39:59 +0000 Douglas Hanna http://blog.hostgator.com/?p=736 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.

Some of the things we’ll be discussing include:

• Tips and suggestions on how to get the most out of your HostGator account from senior system administrators
• Discussion of HostGator’s upcoming Windows Shared Hosting launch, including questions and answers with the person in charge of Windows hosting here at HostGator
• Questions and answers about anything related to HostGator, ranging from what our servers support to what we eat for lunch in the office
• Discounts and/or free hosting to some participants who ask great questions.

Like last time, we’re planning on having our Deputy CTO, Chief Marketing Officer, and Customer Service Manager lead this Open Session. These three people are able to answer just about any question you can think of related to HostGator. There will also be senior support people available to answer more general questions and help out as needed.

Logistics:
TalkShoe worked well for us last time and we’ll be using it again for this Open Session. If you live outside of the US central timezone, check out this site for a list of corresponding times around the world. Right before 8 PM CT on Wednesday, head over to this page for instructions on how to join the session (it’s very simple).

Overview:
What: HostGator Open Session
When: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 8 PM CT
Where: HostGator on TalkShoe

]]> http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/07/15/hostgator-open-session-july29/feed/ 15 http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/06/30/chat-with-hostgator-this-thursday-at-5-pm-ct/ http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/06/30/chat-with-hostgator-this-thursday-at-5-pm-ct/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:13:24 +0000 Douglas Hanna http://blog.hostgator.com/?p=721 Update: This took place and was a big success. HostGator employees answered a ton of questions about backups, VPS solutions, Windows hosting, affiliates, and more. We appreciate people taking the time to come by and ask questions.

This upcoming Thursday (July 2, 2009) at 5 PM CT (Houston-time), HostGator is going to be hosting an Open Session where potential and existing customers alike can come chat with HostGator employees and each other.

The Open Session is going to be pretty informal, but for some context, some things we do want to do include:

• Question and answer session with HostGator employees
• Tips and suggestions on how to get the most out of your HostGator account and website from our best support people
• Suggestions from customers about how HostGator can improve (customer service, Terms of Service, procedures and policies, etc.)

This is the first time HostGator has done something like this, but we think it will serve as a great opportunity to talk to our customers and hear their questions, opinions, and suggestions. If you have any particular items you’d like us to discuss or research, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Oh, and we’re also going to be giving out some free hosting during the session for both attending and participating.

Logistics:
We’re going to try hosting this session with TalkShoe, which allows us and other folks to call in using the phone and/or chat or listen online. If it works, we’ll continue to use TalkShoe. If not, we’ll explore other options. If you live outside of the US central timezone, check out this site for a list of corresponding times around the world. When Thursday at 5 PM CT rolls around, head over to this page for instructions on how to join the session (it’s very simple).

Overview:
What: HostGator Open Session
When: Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 5 PM CT
Where: HostGator on TalkShoe

]]> http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/06/30/chat-with-hostgator-this-thursday-at-5-pm-ct/feed/ 1 http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/06/22/domain-sponsor-review-parking-and-tasting/ http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/06/22/domain-sponsor-review-parking-and-tasting/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:32:34 +0000 Chad Bean http://blog.hostgator.com/?p=707 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.

Overall, we’re very happy with DomainSponsor. As you can see from the above image you can easily group domains into portfolios and track advanced statistics to the exact day. Getting started with domain parking is super easy, simply sign up, and start adding your domains that are currently doing nothing to your portfolio at DomainSponsor.

]]> http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/06/22/domain-sponsor-review-parking-and-tasting/feed/ 16 http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/05/22/billy-the-human-billboard/ http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/05/22/billy-the-human-billboard/#comments Sat, 23 May 2009 00:45:04 +0000 Brent Oxley http://blog.hostgator.com/?p=689 I’m going to share some quick facts about our business with you. HostGator currently spends:

• More than $30,000 per month advertising with Google Adwords
• More than $350,000 per month on affiliate commissions
• And $100,000’s more per year on random advertising.

When you spend as much as we do on advertising, you start to run out of places to advertise online. This has left us with no other choice but to become a lot more creative and a lot crazier with our choice of advertising venues and locations. I present to you Billy the Billboard.

Billy proudly wears the first ever permanent HostGator Tattoo on the back of his neck. Billy, an accomplished boxer and entrepreneur who is currently located in Anchorage, Alaska, sold the first chunk of his body to Goldenpalace.com. The funds were used to purchase a flight to San Diego, where he donated his kidney to a complete stranger that he met off of MatchingDonors.com. Billy has even tried to donate part of his liver to patients in need (he was denied due to having already donated a kidney).

Billy’s current goal in life is to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most advertisements tattooed on him. He currently has six tattoos and won’t be stopping until every inch of his body is sold. “I guess I’m like a male prostitute; I sell my body,” he told me when we were talking one day.

So what does branding someone’s neck for the rest of their life go for?

We paid $3,000 for what will most likely be one of the best investments we’ve made to date. If we get one sale a year we break even. Plus, with all the media attention this will generate, we should easily be able to make back ten or even a hundred times our investment in Billy’s lifetime.

Billy still has plenty of prime locations available. In fact, he’s currently taking bids to sell his forehead! If you are interested you can reach him at BoxingChampAK-at-aol.com or at his blog: Billy The Human Billboard

I believe in the potential of tattoo advertising so much I had this awesome plan to pay the first 200 people willing to get a HostGator tattoo more than $300,000 combined. Within 24 hours of the word getting around our office, I had over a dozen employees offering to sell their skin. The plan was going to be huge and the media attention was going to be even bigger!

Everything was going great until we pitched the idea to our lawyers. They basically said that it would have been impossible to protect ourselves from lawsuits, no matter what contract we came up with. They went on to say that the fact that Billy is an entertainer is completely different than the average person in need of quick cash by getting a tattoo with our logo on it.

Since the HostGator Tattoo Stimulus plan had to be killed, we are just going to have to find other ways to get our name out to the public. In the spirit of more traditional advertising, we recently signed a deal for ten billboards on some of Houston’s busiest freeways.

And even more recently we bought some air time on The High-Tech Texan Show with radio personality Michael Garfield. You can listen to his show online if you’re not in Houston, and you can hear an audio clip from our advertisement here: HostGator’s Radio Ad. on High Tech Texan

We don’t want to stop here though. If you have a creative way for us to get our name out there, please let us know.

]]> http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/05/22/billy-the-human-billboard/feed/ 37 http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/04/09/ranksense-review-and-coupon/ http://blog.hostgator.com/2009/04/09/ranksense-review-and-coupon/#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:54:41 +0000 Chad Bean http://blog.hostgator.com/?p=665 HostGator has partnered with RankSense SEO Tools to give away a free 30-day trial for RankSense and a recurring 20% OFF discount, all with a 90-day money back guarantee. Use coupon code: hostgator and sign up now for the special offer. This offer is valid for all HostGator Web Hosting customers and blog readers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all the rage these days. There’s a whole market that has developed around SEO services and tools and a lot of hype and fluff that tends to confuse and complicate things for the average web site owner.

Simply put, SEO is the process of ranking higher in the search engines (Google, MSN Live, Yahoo) to increase traffic. For most websites, increased traffic translates into higher sales, so there is no disputing the importance of practicing good SEO techniques.

Since search engines have secret algorithms that determine where a website ranks in their search results, there are tons of myths and piles of misinformation out there on the ‘net. Time after time, I’ve spoken with customers who are angry and feel misled because an SEO firm or consulting company promised that the customer’s site would rank on page one in Google. Unfortunately, most of the time, this is just not possible, and the majority of these offers and promises should be quickly dismissed.

Even with all of the myths and wrong information out there, there are still some generally accepted rules and tips on how to best optimize your website to rank well. On our SEO Blog, you’ll find many articles discussing some of these proven techniques.

Not everyone can afford a reputable SEO consultant, especially for smaller websites, so most web site owners resort to the DIY methods.

One method that comes in the form of a tool and caught our attention recently is RankSense. RankSense is a piece of software that has gained a lot of popularity recently (and for good reason). This software is able to cover just about every aspect of SEO and will save you, as a site owner, tons of time.

SEO Tools included with RankSense:
• Discover Site Rankings – See which keywords bring users to your web site and see how many conversions they get for your site.
• Search Engine Coverage – Analyze your site’s search engine visibility.
• Detect Problem Pages – Detects, follows, and checks all links and shows broken links, dynamic pages, denials in robots.txt, and other errors that may be hurting your site.
• Sitemap Builder – Creates and submits an XML sitemap for search engines to discover.
• Keyword Selection – Identify and test potential keywords.
• Keyword Appraisals – See which keywords are better based on traffic, value, search volume, and conversions.
• Competitive Intelligence – Discover your top competitors for each and every keyword.
• Analyze Competitors – Analyze competitor web sites and learn what is working for the competition.
• Analyze My Site – Understand how search engines view the keywords on your site.
• On-Page Optimization Editor – Optimize your pages to maximize search engine leads.
• Link Structure Analysis – Learn from the structure of your competitors’ backlinks.
• My Link Structure Analysis – Understand the structure of your site’s backlinks.
• Link Text Analysis – See what anchor texts link to your competitors.
• My Link Text Analysis – Analyze the anchor texts linking to your site.
• Link Research – Find the URLs that to target for link exchange, sub-categorized by type (blog, directory, article, etc).
• Task Scheduler – Allows you to schedule and automate tasks.
• Search Analytics & SEO Progress Reports – Powerful, data rich reports providing detailed filtered report providing data on every aspect of your site’s optimization including search engines, rankings, landing pages, keywords, on-page metrics, off-page metrics, keyword, competitors and much, much more.
• Advanced Preferences –Identify preferred search engines, search the API, access market analysis keywords and competitor metrics, on-page keyword analysis metrics, common words, HMTL tags weight, keyword groups, human emulation filters, report header and footer and more.

Even if you’re not sure exactly what every feature listed above does, RankSense makes it simple by offering two modes: Smart Mode (easier) and Classic mode (advanced) and it’s great at walking novices through the wizard step-by-step.

Sign up today for your free trial, and if you decide to stay, use coupon: hostgator at sign up for a 20% recurring discount, and good luck on your rankings!

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