 | |
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Web hosting |
| Founded | October 22, 2002 [1] |
| Founder | Brent Oxley [2] |
| Headquarters | Houston, Texas, United States |
| Products | Web services, Cloud services |
| Revenue | $100 million (2012) [3] |
Number of employees | 1,000 (2012 [4] ) |
| Parent | Endurance International Group (2012–present) |
| Website | www |
HostGator is a Houston-based provider of shared, reseller, virtual private server, and dedicated web hosting with an additional presence in Austin, Texas.
HostGator was founded in October 2002 by Brent Oxley, who was then a student at Florida Atlantic University. [1] In 2006, the company moved from the original office in Boca Raton, Florida to a new 20,000 square foot building in Houston, Texas. [1] [5] In June 2006, the company opened its first international office in Canada. [1]
In 2008, Inc. Magazine ranked HostGator in its list of fastest growing companies at 21st in the United States, and 1st in the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas area. [6] The same year, HostGator decided to make their hosting service green by working with Integrated Ecosystem Market Services. [7]
In 2008, HostGator prepared for competition with companies touting themselves as providing "unlimited" hosting services. Founder Brent Oxley was adamant about being able to back up an "unlimited" option prior to offering service named as such and increased staffing. He suggested that this move increased sales by at least 30%. [8]
In 2010, an office was added in Austin, Texas. [5] In May 2011, HostGator started operations in India with an office in Nashik, Maharashtra and a data center. [9]
On July 13, 2012, HostGator was sold to Endurance International Group (EIG) for an aggregate purchase price of $299.8 million, of which $227.3 million was paid in cash at the closing. [10] On 21 June 2012, CEO and founder Brent Oxley announced the sale of HostGator, and advised employees and users not to worry in part because Oxley would still own the buildings HostGator used. He said he wanted to travel the world before he had children. He was also candid about the failures in creating stable billing and register portions of HostGator, and hoped that Endurance might fix those. [11]
In 2015, HostGator launched Optimized WP, a set of tools for building and maintaining WordPress websites. [12] By the end of 2015, EIG launched local HostGator sites in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey and Mexico. [13] As of 2019, HostGator also offered a web hosting service in the United Kingdom and Australia. [14]
In 2006, HostGator suffered from a Trojan attack that affected more than 200 machines. [15]
In May 2012, the computer hacker group UGNazi claimed responsibility for hacking the web server of the web host billing software developer WHMCS in an apparent social engineering attack involving HostGator. [16] [17] A member of the group Cosmo called WHMCS's hosting provider impersonating a senior employee. [18] They were subsequently granted root access to WHMCS's web server after providing information for identity verification. UGNazi later leaked publicly WHMCS's SQL database containing user information and 500,000 customer credit cards, website files, and cPanel configuration. [18] [19] After this issue WHMCS emailed members to change their passwords.
Since its acquisition by Endurance International, HostGator has suffered an increased incidence of server outages and downtime. Notably, on August 2, 2013 and December 31, 2013, Endurance International Group’s data center in Provo, Utah, experienced network outages that affected thousands of customers of Bluehost, HostGator, Hostmonster and JustHost. [20] [21] [22] [23]
In January 2019, TechCrunch reported that Paulos Yibelo, a well-known bug hunter found serious vulnerabilities at Bluehost, DreamHost, OVH, iPage and HostGator. [24]
In computing, SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution. SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application's software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. SQL injection is mostly known as an attack vector for websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database.
Yahoo! Mail is an email service offered by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yahoo! Small Business brand, before it transitioned to Verizon Small Business Essentials in early 2022. Launched on October 8, 1997, as of January 2020, Yahoo! Mail has 225 million users.
Strategic Forecasting Inc., commonly known as Stratfor, is an American strategic intelligence publishing company founded in 1996. Stratfor's business model is to provide individual and enterprise subscriptions to Stratfor Worldview, its online publication, and to perform intelligence gathering for corporate clients. The focus of Stratfor's content is security issues and analyzing geopolitical risk.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).
Plesk is a commercial web hosting and server data center automation software developed for Linux and Windows-based retail hosting service providers.
Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Dubai, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Mexico, and Hong Kong. Its data centers are located in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Virginia (USA), Chicago (USA), Dallas (USA), London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Hong Kong (China), Kansas City (USA), New York City (USA), San Jose (USA), Shanghai (China), Queenstown (Singapore), and Sydney (Australia).
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
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Hacker Dojo is a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2) community center and hackerspace that is based in Mountain View, California. Predominantly an open working space for software projects, the Dojo hosts technology classes for biology, computer hardware, and manufacturing events.
Bluehost is a domain registration and web hosting company owned by Newfold Digital. It was one of the 20 largest web hosts in 2015 and was collectively hosting over 2 million domains in 2010.
OVH, legally OVH Groupe SA, is a French cloud computing company which offers VPS, dedicated servers and other web services. As of 2016 OVH owned the world's largest data center in surface area. As of 2019, it was the largest hosting provider in Europe, and the third largest in the world based on physical servers. The company was founded in 1999 by the Klaba family and is headquartered in Roubaix, France. OVH is incorporated as a simplified joint-stock company under French law. In 2019 OVH adopted OVHcloud as its public brand name.
Internet censorship in Syria is extensive; with numerous websites and online platforms being banned for political reasons. Internet usage is authorized only through state-run servers and people accessing through other means are arrested. Filtering and blocking was found to be pervasive in the political and Internet tools areas, and selective in the social and conflict/security areas by the OpenNet Initiative in August 2009.
Endurance International Group (EIG), previously named BizLand, was an IT services company specializing in web hosting. The company was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA. In 2021 Endurance International Group merged with Web.com forming a new company, Newfold Digital. It is one of the Internet's largest webhosting providers, the company was structured differently from other large hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoDaddy, or 1&1 Ionos. The company has grown its hosting and related business through numerous acquisitions.
UGNazi is a hacker group. Composed of JoshTheGod, MrOsama, CyberZeist, .mp3, CosmoTheGod, and VariousLulz, The group conducted a series of cyberattacks, including social engineering, data breach, and denial-of-service attacks, on the websites of various organizations in 2012. Two members of UGNazi were arrested in June 2012; one was incarcerated. In December 2018, two members of UGNazi were arrested in connection with a murder in Manila.
We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists is a 2012 documentary film about the workings and beliefs of the self-described "hacktivist" collective, Anonymous.
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