Episode: 827
Title: HPR0827: HPR booth and HostGator
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0827/hpr0827.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:06:47

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Everyone, this is Clancy reporting to you live from Ohio Linux Fest.
Well, by Ohio Linux Fest, I named my school and by live, I named Battle Week after the fact.
Anyway, I did go to Ohio Linux Fest. I do have some interviews. Maybe some have already played. I don't know the order, but this interview that I'm about to play is fairly short.
So I figured I'd buffer it a little bit with a little overview of how Ohio Linux Fest went in terms of HPR.
So, a hacker public radio had a booth at Ohio Linux Fest this year, and I think the previous year, possibly. I don't remember, but there was certainly a hacker public radio booth at the Southeast Linux Fest, and then also at the, not Indiana.
Well, possibly Indiana, but certainly the Northeast Linux Fest. So I've been getting some booths lately, and I wanted to make sure that everyone knew why that was happening and how it was happening.
And clarify that it doesn't have to be anyone special. You can certainly just go to any festival that you want and establish a hacker public radio booth and take hacker public radio live with you.
One thing you might want to do is get onto the mailing list that hacker public radio maintains so that if you are going to establish a booth at some event that everyone else knows just in case someone else is going to be at that same event, then you can have a booth with two people at it rather than two people.
The way that this worked for me at the Ohio Linux Fest was actually really, really well. I got to the Exposition Hall early in the morning, the day of the festival, found the booth that I assumed was going to be the hacker public radio booth.
It wasn't clearly marked, but it was marked fairly well. So I found the one that I figured was probably us. I sat down at it, and I took out the hacker public radio booth kit that I believe pokey and code cruncher kind of invented.
And this is a kit that in theory will travel to each festival that hacker public radio attends officially.
So if you are establishing a booth at some festival, let the mailing list know and whoever has the kit can mail it to you.
Otherwise, whatever you've got that is vaguely hacker related will probably make a pretty good booth. I had no time before the Ohio Linux Fest to order more stickers, unfortunately.
But luckily, the booth right next to the hacker public radio booth that I was tending was the Indiana Linux Fest, and the guy manning that booth was Lord Dragon Blue.
And of course, Lord Dragon Blue, you might know from, for instance, Infonomicon and a couple of other in rev-ish projects. So you might know of him, might not.
But anyway, he's been associated with HPR for a while. He turned out had had like a hundred maybe hacker public radio stickers and handed them to me.
So I put those out on the table and didn't really have a whole lot else to do. So I just put out some information about hacker public radio and was there to field questions about, okay, what is this booth about?
Later on, I was approached by a stranger who was familiar with hacker public radio, obviously, and asked me if I was the guy who had done the urban camping episodes, and I said yes, and so he sat down and talked to me about urban camping at a lot of really good ideas, really great conversation.
And I think his name was John, and I could be wrong. We kind of forgot to officially introduce ourselves to one another, and I definitely forgot to get his email address.
So if John is listening to this episode, or the guy who sat down at the hacker public radio booth and talked to me, here's this episode, then yes, you feel free to email me at clatsuithacker public radio.org.
Otherwise, this guy was really nice, sat down, and we talked, and then I went to go do a presentation that I was going to do at Ohio Linux Fast, came back.
So he manned the booth, which was really cool. And so then I came back, and he said, hey, do you mind if I get some lock picking materials and kind of set them out?
I thought, hey, that'd be really cool. So he left, came back a little while later, with not just a couple of lock picking tools, but a whole lock picking village essentially.
We ended up taking two booths over, two tables completely dominated by this hacker public radio display.
We got a lot of people's attention with the lock picking activity over at the booths. People just flocked to the table.
I don't know how many of them actually understood that the booth was hacker public radio's booth. We'd run out of stickers long before that.
So I don't know in terms of advertising or whatever, I'm not sure how successful it was, but it was really great. And that's what's really important, obviously, is the community around hacker public radio and the community at a convention, at a technical convention.
So it was really, really fun. It was really, really cool, very educational.
I think the lessons that I guess I learned from all of this was that, well, a hacker public radio booth is very malleable. It can be by anyone, just like the show.
It can be, it can contain practically anything, just like the show. And as long as you have some sense about you and have some kind of idea of what other hackers might be interested in, and if you consider yourself a hacker, then you probably do have some idea.
Then the booth can be that it can become whatever you want it to become and add to that the age old wisdom of grace, hopper, the idea of it being easier to ask forgiveness rather than permission, which is basically the philosophy we had when setting up the lock pick village.
I don't know if the conference itself would have been completely ready to jump on board a lock picking village off to the side of their of their conference, but we set one up and no one stopped us and we even sold off some lock picking kits.
So if you are going to a convention, I know a lot of people are going or have gone to DerbyCon, so they've already got their booth going. They've kind of coordinated that on the mailing list. Likewise, if you're going to a convention and you want to set up a hacker public radio booth, please do so.
I don't remember that it doesn't really have to be anything important or special, just try to represent HPR and meet new people and have fun.
And now here's an interview with the CEO of HostGator, who was at the Ohio Linux Fest. The company is looking to hire cis admins beginning level as well, or entry level as well as experts.
I actually took one of their little job interviews and as far as I know I did pass, I'm not actually looking for a job and while their pay was certainly attractive, I really, really like my job right now.
I didn't really have a whole lot of incentive to change, but if you're looking for a job, hit HostGator up, tell me you heard about them on hacker public radio, and good luck.
Hi everyone, this is Clat 2. I'm at the Ohio Linux Fest and I'm talking to Lance from HostGator. What do you do at HostGator Lance?
I'm the president and CEO of the company.
Oh okay, you don't look like a president and CEO, but so I've actually seen a lot of ads for HostGator. Mainly I've seen them on Revision 3, which is like a video cast network and they talk a lot about that. What are you guys?
We're a web hosting company, we do everything from basic shared hosting for a website about to put anything on all the way up to enterprise level solutions.
We've been in business since 2002, we have about 900 employees based in Houston and Austin, Texas, and always looking for more employees.
What kind of hosting do you do? Is this like VPS stuff, or do you do some dedicated or everything?
We do everything. We do everything from a basic shared plan that starts at about 8.95 a month all the way up to dedicated servers, VPS, reseller hosting, we have everything windows, Linux, all the good stuff.
Okay, I don't know. I keep thinking that websites, personal websites, it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal anymore. People aren't getting personal websites.
I would imagine that they would be going to Facebook or Myspace or Jeep, I don't know, whatever. Online cloud services to give themselves an identity or whatever.
Do you see that at all? Is your client basis mostly big businesses or something?
Not at all. A lot of people are using WordPress, making blogs. They're doing a lot of business, small business sites, personal stuff, and then we also have the larger business clients too.
Cool, alright. And I'm assuming you probably have all the usual one click installer.
Yes, we do. We have fantastic and we have quick install, which is an in-house one. That way we have all one click install.
Okay, so knowing nearly nothing about big professional hosting, what kind of server, what kind of server load should I be looking at if I do?
Maybe I have a small software project, maybe I have a personal site I want to throw up online. You think I can get away with like the basic plan or something?
Yeah, I recommend you start of what's called the baby plan, it's 10 bucks a month. We give you the unlimited space, the unlimited bandwidth, we have no caps on that.
Nice. And then if you end up growing from there with CPU usage and stuff, we move you up to dedicated.
I recommend if you've got a small site, just start on the $10 plan.
Okay, so just to give people an idea, maybe if they've never had a VPS or whatever, what's the experience? Do you get your login information from HostGator?
Yeah, we give you the login information, we give you the name server, and then we just give you a clean install with CPanel.
You've got a lot of things there for the site builder, you've got a lot of different things to help you along the way, and a lot of different people that put things in our control panel assist you making your website.
Another thing is we have 24-7 phone support, 24-7 chat support, 24-7 email support, so whether you want to talk to us over the phone, you want to come in to chat like the basic instant message conversation, or you want to send us an email.
We'll reply to that 24-7 365.
Wow, nice. And actually, I mean, I have to say, because you guys are here at the Ohio Lid especially, I've met you last night at the party and stuff.
It seems like at least the people you've got with you right now, they seem really, really knowledgeable, which is not the experience I've had with other hosting providers.
Like, you know, you talk to someone for support, and after like five minutes you start to realize that they don't know any more than you do.
Yes, we look for the best of the best with our hiring, so right now with the reason we're at the Ohio Lid's best is to get those technical people, to get the people that can help our customers.
Because a lot of our customers are new to the industry, a lot of them are experiencing.
When they talk to someone, they want to talk to someone technical.
Nice, nice.
And what kind of, like, I mean, let's say I'm a Fedora user, I want to make sure that I've got a Fedora install, because maybe that's the stuff I know, you know.
We can do that on a VPS, yes.
On a VPS or dedicate, we can do that.
Oh, no, on either one.
Okay, cool. Wow, well, thanks a lot for talking to me, and I'll, what's the site again?
Hostgator.com.
Cool. All right, thanks a lot.
All right, great talking.
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