Hostgator's creator started out selling watermelons

So I stumbled upon the a great post by Hostgator’s creator where the entire history of how the service came to life is fully exposed.

It turns out everything started with a good-old childhood fruit stand:

“I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a kid. In sixth grade, I sold candy at school and had all the kids in my neighborhood working for me. When I was 14, my cousins and I had a business where we sold watermelons from a truck on the side of a road. The deal we offered was simple, but effective: “2 for $5.”

It doesnt seem anything like the beginning of a world surrounded by ultra-geek terms like MySQL, ASP, or DNS. But from this humble beginning a passion for making money online came to life – thus the background on Hostgator’s generous approach to affiliate marketing.

From the original post:

Freak webhosting: pre-Hostgator

“I decided to create real web sites and sell my own advertising inventory. The network that I created was called The Freak Network and consisted of scfreak.com, dfreak.com, and wcfreak.com, all of which were named after best selling Blizzard Entertainment games (Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, respectively).

My network was making me about $40 a day, which was impressive given that all of my pimple covered friends had to get real jobs and make less money.”

The whole thing seems right out of the internet entrepreneur book, right?

A good-old rag to riches story seemed on the way – but NO.

Apparently, the gaming traffic was tagged as “malicious” and Freak Web Hosting went down in flames – the server called it quits, forcing a major refund to be issued to customers and the last straw on on a stranded, over worked entrepreneur.

(it still sounds like a Rag-to-Riches story)

After getting back to the normal rat-race world and back into College, the dream was then revived by a friend – who suggested a partnership where one would be technical, other would be sales. They managed to get everybody back on board, but needed a new name:

Old Hostgator hosting interface

Hostgator was born in its earliest stage:

Soon after, college life came to an abrupt end too -

“I was a 24/7 one-man operation. I was being woken up numerous times a night with phone calls and there wasn’t a single class I would make it through without having to leave at least a few times to take a business call. I knew I was on path to be making more than the average college graduate in about six months. I also knew it would have been impossible to finish another year of college while running HostGator, so I decided to drop out of school and follow my dream of growing HostGator into the world’s largest hosting company.”

And now it is: over 2 million websites hosted , a fully green hosting company, and the best darn uptime in the industry. To top it off, free cpanel hosting, unlimited asp.net hosting support, fantastico wordpress hosting, and the trademarked best-selling Hostagtor’s hosting package.

No reason they rock – they really focus on giving the best possible service, and that’s why I strongly recommend them:

Sign up now for Hostgator (use coupon code hgc25 to get 1st month for $0.01!)

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