HostGator was founded in October 2002 by Brent Oxley, who was then a student at

Florida Atlantic University.[1][5] By 2006, HostGator had passed the 200,000 mark
in registered domains.[citation needed] 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.[6]

In 2008, Inc. Magazine ranked HostGator in its list of fastest growing companies at
21 in the United States and 1 in the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas area[7] The
same year, HostGator decided to make their hosting service green hosting by working
with Integrated Ecosystem Market Services.[8]

In 2008, HostGator prepared for competition 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%.[9]

In 2010, an office was added in Austin, Texas.[5] In May 2011, HostGator started
operations in India with a its office in Nashik, Maharashtra and a data centre.[10]

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.[11] On 21 June 2012, CEO and founder Brent Oxley announced the
sale of HostGator, 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.[12]

In 2015, HostGator launched Optimized WP, a set of tools for building and
maintaining WordPress websites.[13] By the end of 2015, EIG launched local
HostGator sites in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey and Mexico.[14] As of 2019,
HostGator also offered a web hosting service in the UK and Australia.[15][16]

Incidents
2006 Trojan attack
In 2006, HostGator suffered from a Trojan attack that affected more than 200
machines.[17]

2012 social engineering attack

Further information: UGNazi � WHMCS_leak
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.[18][19] A member of the group Cosmo
called WHMCS's hosting provider impersonating a senior employee.[20] 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.[20][21] After this issue WHMCS emailed members to change
their passwords.

2013 service outages

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.[22][23][24][25]