Hello Brent, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to introduce yourself to our visitors.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for reaching out to me and to HostGator

Can you please tell us about how Host Gator started and how it grew to its current scale hosting over 1,300,000 domains?

I started HostGator in my dorm room at Florida Atlantic University with about a $1,000 investment back in October of 2002. In the beginning, I was a one man operation and couldn't afford advertising. I found I was able to gain customers by offering free hosting support to webmasters reaching out on public forums. In most cases they were amazed I was providing better support for free than they were getting from their paid hosting provider. It was only a matter of time before the majority of people I helped ended up switching to HostGator. It quickly became overwhelming. I was waking up numerous times a night and constantly walking in and out of classes to take sales and support calls while attending college. At the end of my freshman year, I decided to drop out and go work with HostGator full time. Here's a quick breakdown of our growth and a testament to what word of mouth can do:

At the end of our first year in business, we had 412 customers.
At the end of our second year in business, we had 3,665 customers.
End of third year in business, we had 12,932 customers.
End of fourth year in business, we had 39,024 customers.
End of fifth year in business, we had 70,712 customers.
End of sixth year in business, we had 131,784 customers.
We are just a few months into our seventh year of business and already have surpassed 150,000 customers.

Hosting companies live and die by the level of customer service they provide. Had we provided even mediocre support early on, we wouldn't be a tenth of the size we are today.

Tell us about the “alligator eating the H" logo.

The alligator came about because we used to be based in Boca Raton, Florida, right near the Florida Everglades. Our slogan is “we eat up the competition” and the gator in our logo was hungry.

Nice. What sets HostGator apart from other hosting companies and why should one choose your company?

We offer everything you would expect from a hosting company (lots of space, bandwidth, low prices, industry leading technology, etc.) and then make it better by offering our own add-ons (free SSL certificates, 866 numbers, web templates, etc.) and supporting it all with industry leading, US-based 24/7 support over the phone, live chat, and email. We offer a unique value proposition and one that is hard for our competition to beat.

Host Gator offers a free site builder with 4,500 templates. Can you please tell us about this feature and how it can help customers starting a website?

Web site design is tough. The thousands of templates we offer make it easy for anyone to get started with a professional design and implement it quickly and inexpensively.

We all agree that tech support is one of the most important aspects of web hosting, what does Host Gator do to accommodate its customers with this aspect?

Support is a huge focus at HostGator. We provide 24/7 support to our customers over the phone and via live chat and email. There are always people staffing our phones, helpdesk, and live chat and we’re always working on improving the quality of service we offer.

Great, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer our questions and introducing yourself and Host Gator to our visitors.

You’re very welcome! Thanks again for reaching out to us