It seems at first glance to be a bit of an incongruous match - a wholesale hosting provider purchased by one of the biggest printers of checks in North America.

But past that first glance, the deal makes a little more sense than that, said Paul Engels executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Hostopia in a conversation with theWHIR.

"This [came] out of the blue, but there was some logic to it," says Engels. "Deluxe conducted a marketing pilot for web services into their market space, which produced some pretty positive results."

Deluxe's very large base of small business customers responded "very favorably," says Engels, to an offering of web services, which might have included hosting, hosted services, website creation and other similar services. Deluxe decided to implement a web services offering throughout the company.

Deluxe offers a long list of services, among them things like the design of logos and the printing of letterheads, that could generally be described with terms like "branding" and "marketing." And website-related services seem like a logical extension of those services. The company has served more than 6 million customers, and has active relationships with 2-3 million of them, all of which are possible targets for the expanded service.

That it is one big value-add intended for a huge addressable base means the deal makes a lot of sense by Web hosting standards.

"We kind of dabbled in [hosting services] a bit through a partnership with another party," said Terry Peterson, VP of Investor Relations and chief accounting officer at Deluxe, in an interview with theWHIR, "where we had referral relationship to see if we could sell website services to our customer base. That went well, and we felt it was important to us to commit to that product category."

Engels says the two companies have a great deal of synergy because they share the same basic definition of a core customer: "typically a 2-to-25-employee, premised small business that is looking to increase its revenue using the Internet and other services."

Engels says there were several ways Deluxe might have introduced a more proprietary hosting offering into its own services.

"Two of their choices were to build it in house or to outsource it to a third party provider such as Hostopia," he says. "Or they could take a more ambitious step and strategically acquire the capabilities, which is the route they took."