Deluxe (NYSE:DLX) announced this week that it is selling its web hosting and logo design business to HostPapa, a Canadian firm.

Deluxe is only marginally on-brand for the LowEnd community, but has a historical connection.  Originally, LowEndBox (and after that, LowEndTalk) were founded by the enigmatic LEAdmin.  He sold it to Chief, who sold it to ColoCrossing who in turn was acquired by Deluxe.  Deluxe then sold it the current private owner, Jon Biloh.

Deluxe is exiting the web hosting business so it can focus more on its core payments and data processing products, which no doubt enjoy much healthier margins.  Web hosting in 2023 is a commodity business that requires handling a lot of support questions, fixing servers in the middle of the night, and other grubby infrastructure work.

Here’s Wikipedia’s description of Deluxe Corporation:

Deluxe Corporation is an American payments and business technology company. Its four business divisions comprise payments, cloud, promotional products, and checks.

One of these things is not like the other, and now it’s been sold to HostPapa.

HostPapa was founded in 2006 and is based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.  They charge $49.99/month for a 2GB VPS with 1TB bandwidth (with no panel and self-managed) and their cPanel hosting starts at $2.95/month with a 3-year prepay limited to a single domain.  Not exactly aiming for our community 😄

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.