If you’ve been through enough webhosts, or been around this part of the internet long enough…
You probably became aware of EIG, Endurance International Group to be specific.
A billion dollar company listed on NASDAQ that seemed to own every single webhost.
- Bluehost
- Directi
- Domain.com
- FastDomain
- Homestead
- HostGator
- iPage
- Typepad
- Web.com
To name a few. It’s more unlikely you haven’t used them than if you have.
Why did they own so many different webhosts?
Because they grew mainly through acquisitions, and then after acquiring the customers, mainly affiliate marketing through their various brands.
But the main business model I’d generally describe them as operating is along the lines of churn and burn.
Meaning:
Buy sub-brand, acquire customers, milk it for everything, rinse and repeat.
Most seemed to hate them, a lot of people would have simply preferred to use alternatives but didn’t necessarily hate them, but some enjoyed EIG.
One of our community members over at Lowendtalk, Jarland, owner of MXroute had this to say about EIG after working for them through HostGator:
(Censored part says “they don’t give a gosh darn about what changed in 15 years”, by the way.)
So, not all have bad things to say about EIG.
If you ask Jarland, EIG more or less saved HostGator. There’s always multiple sides, and different perspectives.
But it doesn’t matter anymore.
Because EIG is dead.
It no longer exists, kind of.
Starting in about 2018, EIG started going through hard times.
The CEO and CFO were fined $8 million dollars for fraud, for misrepresenting subscriber numbers to investors.
You could just tell they were on pretty shaky ground, stagnant, with the share price peaking nearly 3 years back in 2015 at just over $20.
Right before acquisition, the share price sat at just under half of that peak at under $10 per share.
Then in November 2020 came Clearlake Capital Group that bought EIG for $3 billion dollars, what I’d expect was somewhat of a saving grace.
As per most acquisitions, there was some changes…
In 2021 Clearlake Capital announced it would create a sub-brand named “Endurance Web Presence” that was responsible for being the parent company essentially for many of the brands EIG owned such as HostGator, Bluehost, and beyond.
That didn’t last long, though.
Shortly after, still in 2021, Endurance Web Presence merged with Web.com
That merge formed Newfold Digital, a joint venture between Clearlake Capital and Siris Capital Group (original owner of Web.com).
Newfold Digital still exists to this day operating as the new age EIG.
They’ve retained the same business model of primarily focusing on acquisitions.
For example, this site uses EIG/Newfold Digital by using Yoast SEO, one of the most popular WordPress plugins ever.
They also just acquired YITH Plugins, another WordPress plugin producer.
So they’re still very much active to this date, and still of course own and operate the notable brands you recognize, such as HostGator.
Thus far, Newfold Digital seems to be a success… but the same complaints on the quality of services remain, to haunt them from the ghost of EIG.
It seems they have nearly endless capital, though, and if ever facing hard times again who’s to say another behemoth wouldn’t just bail them out.
EIG or Newfold Digital is basically the Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, or Wells Fargo (a lot! and that’s summarized!) of the hosting industry.
Seemingly too big to fail, I’d expect them to stick around quite a bit longer.
What do you think about them?
Bad experiences, good experiences? Never tried ’em?
Let us know below in the comments!
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I was a contented Site5 user for many years until EIG bought them out. They
– canned all Site5’s excellent tech-support staff, replacing them with outsourced script-readers
– started changing higher rates on existing plans with no added features/functionality
– had shoddy/slow service (tickets could only be supported certain limited ways, chat was flaky/understaffed, phone support went away)
– downtime increased
– perpetually suggested SNI was on the roadmap, but easily a decade later, they still haven’t implemented it (charging for HTTPS was much more lucrative)
– not properly managing email so it became undeliverable to a number of hosts like Yahoo email addresses
– changing up underlying servers (IP addresses, certificates, hostnames) willy-nilly, leading to breakages
So yes, I’m in the “bad experiences” camp and try to dissuade anybody who asks from seriously considering any EIG property for hosting when there are so many other providers who actually care about their customers.