Back in 2002 a young man by the name of Brent Oxley started what had turned out to be one of the best hosting companies on the planet. After having issues with many of the big name hosting companies and their POOR customer service and website down time Oxley decided to start his own hosting company and focus on HIGH QUALITY customer support and utilize the BEST data centers.
From his dorm room at Florida Atlantic University he started Hostgator.com.
Since that time, HostGator has grown from a small hosting company with just three servers into a world leading and industry recognized hosting provider with more than 12,000 servers under management.
Oxley had built the type of hosting company he couldn’t find back in 2002.
Everything was great at Hostgator, that is until Oxley decided to sell the company to none other than Endurance International Group (EIG). Apparently EIG already owns many other large hosting companies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group) and now they have Hostgator.
Since being sold to EIG, Hostgator.com support requests that use to be answered in a few minutes are now answered in hours or even days.
One of the first things EIG decided to do was move all of the Hostgator.com sites to Utah to their own Data Centers and move away from paying rent at Softlayer. From a business perspective I can understand this so they can make more money. I get this but does it always have to be about money? How about keeping customers happy? Can’t you just be happy with the money you are making and not get greedy?
People had become accustomed to Hostgator’s great service and speed of the Softlayer data centers in Dallas Texas. But now, ever since moving sites to Utah, hosting clients have had issue upon issue with their sites being up and down frequently, DNS issues and now today 8/2/13 all of the sites hosted in the Utah data center are down. But of course the hostgator.com site is still up because they are still hosted at Softlayer.
It is very sad to see what has happened to Hostgator after what it use to be.
They say “all good things must come to an end“…well I guess the greatness of Hostgator.com has now come to an end.
Will they ever get back to where they use to be?
I think that is doubtful if you read about all the issues other hosting companies have had since getting bought out by EIG.
I guess only time will tell.
Good Luck Hostgator!!!
