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Yes, you read the title right, and although it has happened a while back, the acquisition of Hostgator by EIG is still an important bit of tech news, not for any other reason but because it has given rise to speculation about whether it is safe to use Hostgator as a hosting site. Now that it is in different hands. But before we explore that issue; a little background.
EIG or Endurance International Group, which has a pretty clear history of acquiring web hosting companies, offered about $225 million to the folks at Hostgator – we speak of course of Brent Oxley who was the Hostgator CEO.
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Hostgator CEO, Brent Oxley Decision
Brent Oxley clearly decided this was a great offer and sold the popular web hosting site away. Much to the disturbance of several people who worried whether they may suffer now that the company changed hands.
The move led to a lot of speculation over online forums and blogs by concerned site makers and people started to back up their information – very wisely – to be on the safe side, anticipating problems, and waiting to watch what would happen.
In the meantime several people also started looking for alternatives to move their information to other web hosting companies.
EIG CEO, Hari Ravichandran Announcement
But EIG CEO, Hari Ravichandran, made an announcement that the core team of Hostgator would remain with the company. Which makes sense of course because, why ought do they try to reinvent the wheel when everything was going right with the company anyway?
In any case, this obviously allayed some fears with people about the safety of their content with Hostgator. Hostgator apparently has 4 million users and obviously no one wants to wreck that, not to mention mess with the bandwidth and domain and emails that Hostgator gives.
Hostgator has also been known to provide great tech assistance, so it is clear why people were concerned with this move, and why Mr. Ravichandran was quick to allay their fears.
But how safe is Hostgator now? That is the question
As it turns out, Hostgator is Safe Harbor certified, so there is little cause for worry. What people need to be concerned about is the change in pricing strategy which EIG will undoubtedly think of.
It is unlikely that EIG will mess around with many core elements of Hostgator, but the fact that it has spent $225 million means it must acquire it back soon from the activities of Hostgator, if not for profits than for break-even.
How this pans out and how quickly that occurs is a thing we must wait for, but either way it is likely to affect the customers. If the quality continues to be as great as it has been, or even better, then people are unlikely to complain.
But Hostgator was so good to begin with; it is difficult to see how it can be improved upon!
Update September 2014 – EIG is the Borg of Hosting companies. They assimilate and kill them. HostGator, which I have had for over a decade with two accounts and many sites, has tanked. I had a security issue and it took them 5 days to even acknowledge my ticket. EVEN after I live chatted with a supposed HUMAN to alert them to PHP injection script and that my clients site was GONE. It used to take them 24 hours to acknowledge and FIX and restore this issue.
I have been told at each worsening support interaction after another that they are experiencing higher than NORMAL volume. As a professional support person myself, this is code for, We are too cheap to hire people. We don’t care about service after the sale. We want your money, will pay our CEO large amounts of money, and put no money into staff, or infrastructure.
RUN, my friends RUN away. You can find all EIG BORG hosting company holdings on the Wikipedia page, do NOT purchase from any of them as they all have similar poor service after the sale. Many were once top notch companies as was Host Gator and Blue Host to name just two of the like 50 companies assimilated into the EIG Borg machine.. it is sad that owners would knowingly sell their companies to such a slow death.
But the Borg must offer compelling reasons to be assimilated..there are still lots of top notch companies out there like Liquid Web and others.
Host Gator RIP
Its a mess. They started screwing with stuff two weeks ago (Mid July, 2013) . Received an email notice Thursday at 3:30 pm stating they were “consolidating” the servers. (Packing 10 Lbs of sh….servers into 5 LBS sack) Someone DERPED the DNS and our clients were down for 16 hours.
No-one knew what was going on. Hold times have increased from a few minutes to a minum of 15 minutes, and I’ve experienced 30+ min hold time which was unheard of with HostGator. This company is being absorbed into the EIG borg as just another cookie cutter website. I get cpanel and emails cut off because of spam, and a generic notification saying we have identified “emails” comming from a domain and passwords for email and cpanel have been reset. HG used to send an informative email that would show the users mass mailing and we could identify the workstations and users proactively. Now, we have to wait for a client to call and tell us their email is not working, and sit on the phone or chat for an hour to find out who was affected.
EIG should take a lesson from HG, and implement the successfull policies that Brent had established as the best in the business, instead of rolling the site into their cookie-cutter format.
I’m shopping for a replacement, cause its only gonna get worse boys. This EIG company is a predator.
Thanks Rickkee, for sharing your experience.
Like Rickkee if anyone else is facing issues with Hostgator, please share.
I bad news for owner or it could be good if EIG carry on the Hostgator legacy of offering ultimate support… Any update on final deal? When EIG will take over Hostgator data center?