News: Inside VeriSign's New Trust Seal
News: Q&A: Jeremy Hartley on the EU Code of Conduct Data Centre Efficiency
News: eFileCabinet Signs Colocation Deal with C7 Data Centers
News: Web Hosting Sales and Promos - March 12 2010
By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
This article appeared in the December 2005 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.
December 12, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The WebHostingTalk (webhostingtalk.com) community forum is the Web hosting industry's largest meeting place. Home to both serious dialogue and vain griping among users ranging from hosting executives to customers, the site unquestionably exerts a tremendous influence over Web hosting.
WebHostingTalk has changed hands several times. It was founded by Matthew Freeman of UK-based Host Investigator in March of 2000, and sold in April 2002 to Robert Marsh of EV1Servers (ev1servers.net).
Industry veteran Gabriel Murphy began eyeing WebHostingTalk even before Marsh acquired it. He thought it would be logical, and more profitable, to group the forum with some other hosting, Web development and hardware sites owned by his technology media company iNET Interactive (inetinteractive.com). Negotiations began with Marsh shortly after he gained control and the site was purchased in September 2003.
In recent weeks, iNET Interactive was sold to private equity firm Stoddard Hill Capital (stoddardhillcapital.com). Troy Augustine, founder and managing director of Stoddard Hill and a former marketing executive for an application service provider, will succeed president and CEO Ryan Elledge, who will stay on in a consultative role along with Gabriel Murphy, founder of iNET Interactive.
Co-founder of Web host Communitech.NET, which was later sold to Interland, Murphy wants to get back into the Web hosting business. He and his holding company Aberration! Ventures have had discussions with some "large entities within the SME hosting space" and expect to complete a deal some time in the next year.
While he is excited about the return to Web hosting, Murphy admits he never expected it to happen. "I didn't think we would be back when I sold Communitech," he says, "just because I thought the companies that were mismanaged at the time would clean up their operation in pretty short order. And that still hasn't happened three and a half years later."
INET's talks with Stoddard Hill began in August. Stoddard Hill had identified Internet media as an area of interest and Murphy had begun considering selling iNET to pursue other investments. "iNET was ahead of its business plan and circumstances allowed us to be able to have an attractive exit opportunity about two and a half years into that investment," Murphy says.
What ultimately made the deal possible was the shared vision for iNET's future. Other suitors wanted to roll iNET's assets into something larger but Stoddard Hill was more interested in maintaining its brand cachet and relevance to the communities it serves.
"Our intent is to take iNET from where it is today, and continue its growth under that same iNET name as well as that iNET Interactive vision," says Augustine. "I think both Gabriel and Ryan, as well as the rest of the team who helped get [it] off the ground, were very attracted to that."
Murphy agrees. "We decided to work with a company that was looking for a platform, versus just another company that would fit within its portfolio," he says. "That was really the principal driver of why we chose to work with Troy's group."
Augustine says there are no immediate plans for changes to WebHostingTalk, or the other iNET properties, and none will be liquidated. The same staff will remain in place and new faces may be added. Augustine says one of his first orders of business is to find ways to improve communication and responsiveness.
"We're going to listen to the communities, listen to the advertisers and take it in the direction that they provide." And it is the community that will continue to drive the direction of WebHostingTalk in the future.
"My general philosophy is that we are here to provide a service to the community," says Augustine. "If it weren't for the community members spending time on the sites, we wouldn't have a business."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.