EIG Acquired Hostgator
There're several articles on web state that EIG(endurance International Group) has acquired hostgator. Indeed, it's absolutely big news to everybody in the business. The effect is wide and related to millions clients on the globe. If it's the first time you hear of the news, let's learn more about the event and see how will the deal goes.
The news firstly posted on webhostingtalk forum by someone and provided a link to Brent Oxley's letter writing. From the letter, Brent seems pretty satisfied with the deal which is $225 million. He says the EIG CEO Hari pretty understand how to continue with the hostgator success and promote the business to the next grade. Here're the original reasons Brent list why he would like to sell hostgator:
* I want to travel the world before my wife and I have kids.
* I've been doing HostGator since I was 18, and I'm looking for a newchallenge.
* I'm extremely worried about the financial path our country is headed down.
* Taxes will be going up significantly in 2013, making it more difficult for business owners.
* I've failed more times than I can count to launch software that would allow us to compete as a registrar.
* We have tried and failed to develop a billing system that has automated and can integrate with our key systems such as chat, phone, affiliates, and tickets. I think we are finally on the right track, but unfortunately I no longer have the patience to wait for it to all come together. Thankfully EIG has tackled a lot of these challenges already.
* I have practically 100% of my chips in HostGator and if something should ever happen to the company, I'd more than likely be bankrupt in a matter of a few months.
Hostgator business statistics
- Over 12,000 servers under management
- Over 400,000 global customers
- Hosting over 8 million domains
- The largest reseller hosting provider
As we see, the hostgator is running a very huge business on the planet. If EIG finally acquired hostgator, their overall business will even bigger than Godaddy and become the largest web hosting company.
Worries about the take over
The main worries would be from the existing hostgator staff and clients. For such business acquisition, current workers will worry about the potential redundancies and replacement of company cultures etc. However, from the previous experience such problems never happened. "Bluehost was at 280 employees when the sale closed and they have 450 today. Their management team has stayed the same and the culture has stayed the same." Brent explained. He also assures hostgator’s management team won’t be going anywhere if the deal is completed.
As about the worries from clients, it would be the service quality from the EIG support. Based on many people's experience their support is not so responsive (the very limited EIG supports are mainly Inida based). However, EIG is well known of it's powerful technologies and stable system. They introduced advanced server managing skills and make all hardwares/softwares up to date. In this way, no much service outage happened. The main support requests are not from server problems but websites themselves. Most likely the EIG will keep the current cpanel and plesk system for users so people no need to change anything and be familiar to a new software etc. On this point on view, the acquisition doesn't actually affect anything to end users.
How do we think about the event?
It's not a surprise to see any hosting acquired by EIG. No matter how popular the hosting is, if there's opportunity to be more profitable, their owner will consider it. Hostgator has been the industry leading name and recommended by almost every webmaster. I can't say how much better EIG will bring to this brand but surely it will keep the popularity and gain more success. What actually changed is the owner but not the service itself. Don't be surprised when you see more promotions with hostgator in future.
Visit http://www.Hostgator.com and see current promotions
