How did you come up with the idea for the company?
I have been in web hosting for a long time. I built up my first hosting brand from my bedroom at 16, and eventually sold that at 29. I left the industry for a while and built some other businesses, but hosting always draws you back. But in that first business it was based in a fixed location in an industrial part of England, very much tied to one physical datacentre and a local customer base. Hosting.com wasn’t going to be like that.
By 2023 technology had evolved far enough that we could do things differently, but there were very few hosting companies that built a global platform. We realised that we could build a truly global hosting company, grow it through acquisitions and then deeply integrate onto a single platform. And we could do it worldwide – everything from the infrastructure to the support teams to the billing.
Tell us about your core product or service
We run millions of websites for hundreds of thousands of clients around the world. Our core product is managed web hosting, where we provide the infrastructure, security, performance and support that businesses need to keep their websites and applications online and running. Around that we also provide domain names, email services, security tools and increasingly more services that our customers need to be successful online. But our strength and really the reason that we built trust with our users is that our hosting platform is technically rock solid.
Our customers range in size, including everyone from small blogs, side businesses, agencies and developers, through to larger international companies running critical parts of their operations using hosting.com. We also work a lot with the agency community and dev community with WordPress. We have datacentres in 12+ locations from Australia to London, and technical teams supporting those hosting customers in a dozen global offices too.
What does scale really look like in infrastructure M&A?
There is a flywheel for us of acquiring hosting brands, integrating them into the platform we build, delivering benefits to the clients, and building a great hosting brand like hosting.com. Each one of them needs the other; we need scale to be able to build a brand and support the teams to do a great job, we need to integrate to be able to improve service and provide a brilliant product, and we need a great brand at hosting.com in order to support the M&A.
Leaving aside the origination, financing and legal side of M&A, technical infrastructure M&A for us is integration, integration, integration. We say internally that we are continuously driving down tech debt. That is critical for us to keep on top of because it’s how we can run things efficiently and keep sane as we grow. Sometimes the businesses we buy are running old 20 year-old systems, and so we move them to our platform and invest heavily in new hardware and datacentres to ensure we can offer the best service. We know that even if we could maintain a legacy platform now, when we are three times the size we would wish we had done the work.
For example, if we want to roll a configuration change, we can run that now on tens of thousands of web servers with a single command. If we didn’t integrate, and even on the smaller businesses we acquire, this might be manual or haphazard work.
So the work involves bringing acquisitions together, standardising systems and processes, then improving security, strengthening the support and maintaining service quality, all while ensuring the business grows. The model has worked for us as it’s allowed us to build a platform that handles more complexity, meaning it’s more robust and reduces risk for customers’ businesses, and for us, handles more customers and more websites, meaning we’re able to grow it and develop a pipeline of future M&A.
How is managed hosting evolving in the AI era?
Managed hosting is becoming even more important in the AI era because the risk is shifting from infrastructure uptime alone to the whole deployment and security stack.
A lot of people can now build something quickly with AI. People who ten years ago would’ve never expected to code now have an expectation to build on a daily basis, and we’re seeing that in practice across sectors. But they don’t realise that building applications and websites is only the first step. What matters is what happens when that application is live, like whether it is patched, monitored, backed up, protected from attacks and managed properly. And it’s also where hosting infrastructure has a massive part to play. It goes beyond just providing servers, but being a trusted operating partner to keep websites and apps online and secure.
On a management layer, the patching velocity has also increased for us – with Mythos and equivalent tools the speed that we can react to CVEs is a sign of our professionalism.
Why is “vibe coding” without deployment discipline creating the next generation of security risks?
The risk isn’t just in AI making it much easier for non-developers to create applications, but more in the discipline around deployment, testing, patching and security being skipped. Yes, people can now “vibe code” something quickly on a laptop and stitch together a web app that previously would’ve taken someone weeks. But that does not mean they are thinking about what happens when it is exposed to the internet. And it definitely does not mean they automatically understand the safety protocols drilled into developers early in their coding journeys.
