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

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.

• 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.

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!

At HostGator, there are no TPS reports and cover sheets aren’t required to be put on anything. However, we do keep track of quite a few numbers and metrics and one of the metrics we do watch closely is chat volume.

The graph below is an average of the number of chats we completed per hour on any given day and at any given time throughout the month of March. The numbers are averaged, meaning that every Monday at 1 PM was averaged together to create a collective Monday at 1 PM metric. Our week-to-week variation is usually pretty negligible, so what you see on the graph is a fairly good representation of our chat volume for a given day. Note that the Y-axis starts at 30, meaning we never average less than 30 chats completed per hour.

(Click to see the full size version.)

The graph is a fairly normal distribution and makes it quite clear that we’re usually busiest right around noon central time on Mondays and Tuesdays. Our slowest times (on average) tend to be during the very early mornings on the weekends. 2 AM on Sunday is almost always dead and weekends in general tend to be fairly quiet when compared to the busy weekdays.

Keep in mind that all of these numbers are averages and they have to be taken as that. At the time of writing this post, things are actually slower than usual here. This morning was much busier than our typical Thursday morning and we only guess what tomorrow will be like. Our data indicates that it will be fairly busy for most of the day, but it could also end up being unusually quiet.

The hosting industry is an industry characterized by some amount of unpredictability. We do our best to staff our live chat and phone support departments according to the volume we’ve seen, but there are always going to be days when we’re overstaffed and days when we’re understaffed.

Unpredictability in a constantly changing industry like web hosting and at a constantly changing company like HostGator is a fact of life and much to the disappointment of the executives at Initech, not something that a cover sheet on a TPS report can mask.

Ever run a Google search and notice the “sponsored listings” around the search results? Ever click one of those sponsored links? It’s likely that you have already visited a link that was advertised through the Google AdWords program and now HostGator is giving its shared web hosting customers the opportunity get started with Google AdWords by giving them $25 in free marketing credits*.

HostGator has partnered up with the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program and is now offering an AdWords Coupon voucher good for $25 in credit with all Hatchling, Baby, and Business shared web hosting plans.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising program by Google. With AdWords, advertisers can promote their website’s products and services on Google.com’s search results in the “sponsored links” section. Quality ad text and relevant keyword buys will give you an edge over your competitors. And with AdWords, you can set your own budget and change your campaigns at any time – there are no commitments or spending requirements of any kind.

We at HostGator currently use Google AdWords for our own internal marketing efforts, and we truly believe that most businesses can benefit from the highly targeted traffic that this program can yield.

Great, how do I sign up?

New and old HostGator customers on qualifying plans can redeem the coupon code by visiting their HostGator control panel, navigating to the “Google AdWords Offer” link on the left hand side and clicking the “redeem now” link. It’s as simple as that.

If you don’t already have a HostGator web hosting account, take a look at our Shared Web Hosting plans, sign up today, and get started promoting your site!

* (the fine print our lawyers asked us to include): To read the terms and conditions as well as to learn more, visit the HostGator Google AdWords Coupon page.

STAFFING. Or rather, the lack of it.

Every day I wake up to read about thousands of Americans being laid off of work. Unemployment is hitting new highs in America and yet I’m being forced to, once again, slow down HostGator’s growth due to the lack of qualified employees.

It’s almost as if America’s recession needs to be a full blown depression (If we’re not already there), in order for us to find the employees we are in desperate need of.

If you are a qualified Linux or Windows system administrator in America, on unemployment, and fail to apply for a job with HostGator, you should know that you are a leech on society. There are millions of Americans out there doing everything that they can to find a job and keep themselves from starving to death while we are here begging for you to apply with us!

If you are too lazy to fill out our online job application (doesn’t take long at all), then post a comment and I’ll personally get in touch with you. If you live in another state, we’ll even provide up to $5,000 for relocation assistance to our office in Houston, TX.

The United States of America used to be the land of opportunity, but we have now become the land of bailouts and handouts. A couple days ago, I had to go to the county tax collector’s office and I couldn’t help but notice that the line wrapped outside of the building. A few months ago, I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and it ended up taking three hours to get to the front of the line. It has been a while since I’ve been to a post office, but I can’t recall one time in my life the line wasn’t at least twenty minutes.

How is it we have millions of people who are either under employed or unemployed and every time I need to get something done with the government I usually end up waiting hours? I paid thousands at the tax collectors office and the DMV sure doesn’t do anything for free.

What about the millions of Americans receiving checks without having to do any work at all? Call me crazy, but I believe some of those people should be put to work for the money they are getting paid. I was in line with over fifty tax payers for about three hours at the DMV. If you added up how much money we all made per hour you would find that the government wasted thousands of dollars worth of our time. The DMV could even make some type of priority line that charges an extra fee. I would have gladly paid $10 bucks more to cut the line. This would create more jobs, more revenue, and saved me from wasting hundreds of dollars of my time.

There was a former HostGator employee, we’ll call him Derek. He worked part-time for us at around 20 hours a week. One day, when things got busier than normal and we asked him to stay a bit later to help out. Derek quickly said he was unable to and made sure to leave on-the-dot. This made sense when later we found out that he was collecting welfare checks and if he worked over 20 hours he would have made “too much money” to where he wouldn’t receive his welfare check!

Millions of people are out of work and everyone is saying how bad the economy is, which I won’t argue. Yet, it’s close to impossible to get someone on the phone and when you do it’s usually a fifteen minute hold. HostGator’s hold times aren’t what we hope for them to be at the moment and that’s why were hiring!

Bank of America recently announced that they will be laying off 30,000 to 35,000 employees. I went to a local branch two days ago to do a wire. The wire cost me $25 and I had to wait 40 minutes to be helped. The time before that I went to a different branch and I waited about a half hour for service. In fact, I can almost guarantee that any time I walk into a BOA, I’ll be waiting about a half hour. It seems to me they should be hiring instead of firing. But that’s not how it works when CEOs and executives pillage a company blind. The little guys get screwed while the big time crooks live the good life.

Bernard Madoff, the man who stole over $50 BILLION from charities, business owners, and now bankrupt individuals, is currently under house arrest in his $7 million dollar Manhattan apartment. What the government need to do is a public hanging and then broadcast it on TV. We should all be rioting in the streets that he is still living a life of luxury with stolen money. We need more accountability in America and that’s never going to happen with bailouts and handouts.

Once logged into a Google account, you’ll notice that the search results have two small icons next to the listings that can be used to promote or remove a result. By promoting a result, you can bring the site above other results on the page.

You can learn more about the SearchWiki by watching the Google SearchWiki team’s video.

Now, this is hardly news to many of you out there. We covered Google’s Promote Feature in early December.

What is interesting though, is the idea that Google’s index of results will be swayed by user input on the SearchWiki. On Google’s Official Blog announcement for SearchWiki,it mentions that: “The changes you make only affect your own searches.” While this is true directly, it’s not hard to imagine that Google will collectively use user input to influence search results and page ranking.

Currently websites are listed in order on Google’s web page according to their super-duper secretive algorithm. Those in the search engine optimization industry have been trying to figure out this algorithm for very obvious reasons. If you can cheat the search engines and get a website listed on the front page for certain keywords, than you are able to get more traffic to your site, which generally equates to more revenue for web site owners and businesses.

Microsoft’s search engine, although behind both Google and Yahoo, has something similar setup known as U Rank. Microsoft is also researching a system known as BrowseRank – which measures page importance by the number of visits made to a page and the time spent on each page by a user.

I predict that Google will, in fact, use information gained by SearchWiki to calculate how web sites are ranked in the future. It’s easy to see how showing users web sites listed in order ranked by other users, with similar browsing habits and interests, would be beneficial. Overall, by taking in user feedback, Google should be able to provide more relevant information to its users.

It will be interesting to see how this affects the search engine optimization industry, who has built itself around tricks and techniques to rank websites higher in the search engines.

A couple of months later, though, I’m happily Twittering from the web and from my ever trusty BlackBerry. A majority of our presence on Twitter is aimed at addressing customer concerns and feedback in what is essentially real time, but our presence on Twitter is also about reaching out to customers through a different medium and in a unique way. We already reach out to those who blog or post about us, so Twitter seemed like the next logical step.

So far, it’s been incredibly successful. We have over 275 followers on Twitter (the number increases daily) and I have personally reached out to and helped a lot of existing and potential customers through Twitter. We’ve also gotten some great ideas and some excellent feedback that we’ve taken seriously.

To get an idea for yourself, check out our favorites and see what people have been saying. Some excerpts:

LOVE LOVE HostGator! Have hosted at many places. Couldn’t dynamite me out of HG! – WordPressWizard

Thanks for awesome customer service, that’s how it’s done. Will remember when someone is asking for a hosting company. – KatjaPresnal

Your help today convinced me to sign up for 2 years of hosting. Thanks again! I’m uploading now at ~1400kbps. Amazing! – steelopus

I REALLY appreciate that you care about your customers, even on twitter though. Impressive! – BenTremblay

I appreciate your presence on Twitter. It’s more convenient for me to read your tweets than it is to go to your site. – keithgoode

Well, Madame or Sir HostGator, you sure know how to solidify a customer with service that spoils. Major thanks! – Rich_Arnold

Of course, our own Twitter stream can serve as another example. You’ll mostly see me reaching out to and responding to customers, but you’ll also see some other personal tidbits and web hosting related thoughts as well.

Here are some other things you can look forward to seeing on HostGator’s Twitter stream in the near future:

• Survivor: HostGator Manager Editor. I am going camping for the first time with a group of my friends very soon and if my BlackBerry still works (which I am really hoping it will), I will be providing updates over Twitter.
• More quotes and interesting thoughts. I tweeted that it was time for our Twitter followers to see my inner-nerd (because I obviously conceal my inner-nerd well by working for a web hosting company) and I think interesting quotes and thoughts from some equally interesting people is a good way to show it.
• Web hosting tips. I’m going to begin posting some tips (technical and not) about how to get the most out of your web hosting account right on our Twitter account.

Check out our Twitter stream and if you like what you see, consider following us. And of course, if you have any suggestions for what we should do with our presence on Twitter, don’t hesitate to let us know.

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!