HostGator: Web Hosting with Passion

If you want to rile Brent Oxley, CEO of HostGator, tell him there’s only a 5-year shelf life to shared Web hosting, then get out of the way. If on the other hand, you want a blueprint for success beyond that span, pull up a seat.

TH: HostGator’s revenue continues to escalate as witnessed by the impressive showing across a number of categories in the Inc. 5000 rankings. What do you consider the one primary reason for this success overall?

I think a lot of our success is due to the fact that we don’t over think things. I’ve worked really hard to keep HostGator from getting too “corporate.” We don’t really have meetings, we don’t write long reports, and we don’t have tedious processes that bog us down or diffuse accountability among a group or a team. The result of that way of working is that we can move a lot quicker and that we can hold people a lot more accountable.

In addition to that, but also consistent with our “keep it simple” principle is the fact that no one here is too “important” to talk to customers. I talk to customers on a daily basis and there’s no reason anyone else on our management team shouldn’t. Our CTO works with customers on most of our beta projects, our CMO works with customers on new products and services, our Customer Service Manager mans our Twitter account, and so on.

Working with customers helps keeps everyone here close to the pulse of our customers and gives them a better understanding of what our customers want, need, and experience. With that, we can continue to improve our services, add new products and services, and grow as a company.

TH: There has been one of two recent 'outages' at The Planet that impact HostGator customers directly, through no fault of your own. When these incidents of downtime occur, what is the best way to deal with customer complaints, concerns and anxieties?

I’m not quite sure which two outages you’re referring to, but as a major datacenter company, The Planet is going to have outages. Our servers have outages because we have several thousand of them. The Planet has problems because they have several datacenters and a complex network to manage. Things break and that’s the reality.

We obviously want to minimize the number and the severity of any outages that do occur (a desire I’m sure The Planet shares) and we’ve been fortunate enough to have had relatively few major problems as a result of any of The Planet’s outages, but we still have to be prepared for things breaking.

We’ve embraced Twitter a lot recently and have used it to communicate with our customers during some of The Planet’s more recent issues and any issues we’ve experienced as a company.

The result was that we a) kept our customers in the loop about what was wrong, what they could expect to happen, and what we were doing and b) got more positive comments and press about our/The Planet’s outage than negative comments. It’s pretty amazing to be reading praise emails after a datacenter goes offline for a half hour, but that’s the reality associated with communicating well and communicating quickly.