Hosting.com places renewed emphasis on HostMySite brand; expands Newark operations

HostMySite President John Enright

Tom Paine

Many in Philly's tech community are familiar with or may be/have been a customer of HostMySite, the Newark, DE web hosting service founded in 1997 by Lou Honick and Neil Heuer. It was acquired in 2008 by Charlotte-based Wachovia Capital Partners, now Pamlico Capital, which was spun off from Wachovia acquirer Well Fargo, though Wells Fargo is still listed as a limited partner on Pamlico's website. In making the investment the PE firm was backing two experienced data center entrepreneurs, Art Zeile and Joel Daly, who it had backed previously when they built a company called Inflow, which was eventually acquired by SunGard Availability Services. Zeile and Daly's strategy was to use HostMySite as a base around which it could integrate other acquisitions and build a larger web hosting and cloud services business.

After the acquisition, HostMySite moved its headquarters to Denver, though the bulk of its operations remained in Newark. In 2009, HostMySite acquired Louisville, KY-based Hosting.com, creating what was said at the time to be a $50 million (revenue) business. The combined entity took on the Hosting.com name, and also built a new data center in Denver. It now has data centers in Louisville, Dallas, and San Francisco and Irvine, CA, in addition to Newark and Denver. The data center footprint in Newark is now 18,500 square feet. Hosting.com is focused more on serving enterprise customers, while HostMySite mostly serves small "mom & pop" type businesses or individuals trying to build their own web presence. One of HostMySite's objectives is to give its customers the tools to help them grow their websites or online businesses, and in the process hopefully become larger customers.

Hosting.com data center in Newark, DE

Despite Hosting.com's expansion, Newark has remained the central base for Hosting.com in terms of operations and headcount. The HostMySite name never went away, but did not receive much emphasis as a brand; at least I can say I've rarely heard that name used over the past three years until recently. About a year ago I did hear complaints on some area message boards claiming that Hosting.com had dramatically increased its pricing on some of the old HostMySite plans, effectively making them cost prohibitive for some small customers.

But in a phone interview, the company tells me that while it never went away as a brand name, HostMySite was relaunched last year as a separate division of Hosting.com, focused on maintaining, building, and enhancing the small business hosting experience. In this segment, HostMySite competes against companies like GoDaddy, Web.com and Chesterbrook-based 1&1 Internet USA, although it is tiny in comparison to those in terms of numbers of customers. HostMySite has about 35,000 customers who pay on average $20 per month. HostMySite President and web host industry pioneer John Enright says that "our goal is to make the process of building and managing a website as easy as installing and using applications on an iPhone".

HostMySite plans a series of new product introductions and enhancements over the next several weeks. One of them is an upgraded control panel, of which one of the key features is an “application catalog that makes it easy for customers to install a variety of different web applications – from popular content management apps like Wordpress and Joomla to complex e-commerce platforms like Magento. The installation and configuration process is entirely automated so a customer can jump right in and start using the app, rather than spending time trying to figure out how to get it up and running", Enright says.

Hosting.com has over 200 employees in Newark and says it is hiring there in tech support, operations, and engineering. Newark supports enterprise level Hosting.com operations, in addition to the HostMySite service. I recall HostMySite once being very visible in the Philadelphia developer community, and they say they hope to revive that presence.

Although the enterprise side of Hosting.com employs VMware for virtualization, HostMySite primarily uses Parallels' offerings to provide VPS (virtual private server) environments to its customers. HostMySite recently announced the availability of ColdFusion 10 hosting services.

Hosting.com had an outage incident in Newark two weeks ago. The outage began after an engineer performing maintenance accidentally cut power to the facility. Although power was restored within minutes, it took some time to get all the servers back up. The average site down time was an hour, although some sites were down for several hours. 1,147 customers were affected, Hosting.com CEO Zeile told the Wall Street Journal. Many customers pass on a backup option that adds about 30% to their total cost, Zeile said.

HostMySite co-founder Honick, who stayed on for a while after the acquisition, started a new business, Newark-based Host Merchant Services, which provides low cost credit card processing services to small ecommerce merchants. Host Merchant Services has partnered with HostMySite to offer its solutions to HostMySite customers.



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