A Few More Notes on the Hostway-Affinity Deal

As you might have already read, Hostway announced today that it has acquired Affinity Internet, adding another company to the short list of Major Players in the shared Web hosting space.

I spoke to John Lee, Hostway's vice president of global marketing and Andrew Schroepfer, president of Tier 1 Research today, which is probably evident from this feature.

As is sometimes the case, there was interesting discussion in both conversations that didn't quite fit into the scope of the story.

One interesting thing that came up was that John Lee, in discussion of the deal, said "I believe this effectively puts us as the largest shared hosting provider in the world. . . in terms of customer count, as well as revenue."

Hostway-plus-Affinity is without question one of the big players in shared hosting now, but this seems like a bit of an exaggeration. But more interestingly, it is illustrative of the fact that the size and influence of a Web hosting company can be hard to define.

Andy Schroepfer agrees:

"As you well know, there are a billion ways to define this industry. If you want to do domains or servers or. . ."

At any rate, Hostway is now of the scale where that kind of assertion, though perhaps not 100 percent accurate is within the realm of believability. What a difference a day makes.

Also interesting were some of the lesser-known assets of both companies, which John Lee discussed:

"I think something that might not be obvious is that as a combined company, we actually have a pretty robust channel partnership, in terms of helping broadband providers both on the telco and the cable side, and online portals, to offer value-added Web services. I can't name names, but as a combined force, we'll have some of the biggest names in North America, and be the private label Web hosting provider to those providers, so that they can offer Web hosting and other Web services, such as hosted Exchange and online backup to their customers, to add more value to their broadband products.

That's probably the biggest part of the not-so-obvious news."

TAGS: hostway, affinity internet, acquisition