Web Hosts HostGator Discusses Web Hosting with Us

What web hosting trends do you see emerging as the dominant ones for 2007?

We are going to see many hosting companies entering the VoIP (Voice Over IP) market, and Host Gator is going to be helping a lot of them. And of course the usual increase in disk space and bandwidth. Most hosting companies already offer what is equivalent to unlimited disk space and bandwidth so doubling or tripling yet again doesn't mean anything to the consumer.

As a follow up, what exciting new plans does Host Gator have prepared for 2007?

Host Gator will be launching Windows hosting in a few days, but the most exciting product on our horizon will be a VoIP offering. The company name will be voipo.com, and it promises to add some value for resellers and end users alike.

It seems like everywhere online when searching for web hosting you see the name Host Gator. Can you talk about your market approach and branding strategies?

Our branding style has been to advertise everywhere we can see a solid return on investment, and anywhere we haven't tried give it an initial test to see whether or not its effective. And of course, we put a lot of emphasis into public relations. We have good relationships with most of the media and regularly contribute articles to the top outlets.

You seem to market your reseller hosting plans very heavily. How large is your reseller business?

We have close to 14,000 resellers. I am not aware of any other hosting company that comes close to our size in the reseller market.

What web hosting markets (i.e. shared, reseller, managed servers, etc.) do you see as having the largest growth potential over the next year?

I know our biggest growth factor will continue to be shared hosting which currently represents over 80% of our net monthly subscribers.

How large is Host Gator now and what percentage do you expect to grow this year?

Hostgator is currently at about 60,000 customers with over half a million domains hosted. At the rate of our current net monthly signups we would hit close to 100,000 customers, but historically as we get bigger so does our net monthly so I wouldn’t be surprised if we doubled in size this year.

We are at close to 100 employees expecting to easily hit over 150 before the end of the year.

What is the one thing that keeps you up at night?

I currently live in our 30,000 sq foot office building so I'm constantly woken by employees to deal with customer issues, server issues, and vendor problems. If you are talking about what I worry the most about that would by far be a 0 day exploit taking control of all our servers.

What is the one thing that makes you jump out of bed in the morning?

I'm definitely not the jumping type when it comes to morning, but any type of hosting outage gets me speed-crawling out of bed.