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How Bluehost Evolved to Become the Perfect Host

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Since companies shifted their services and business online, web hosting services have been having a great business. With the Internet Age being in full force, such companies that help other companies in maintaining websites have been seeing tremendous growth. One such company, which was able to make use of the internet boom to capture a large market share is Bluehost. Here’s a look at how this web hosting company grew to be one of the biggest players in the market.

Founding Bluehost

Matt Heaton, is in no way a stranger to cyberspace, being a serial entrepreneur with a love for all things cyber-related. He opened Computer Warehouse at the age of 21, then moved on to Free50, and HostMonster, before adding Bluehost to his resume. Matt Heaton began Bluehost as a free service named 0catch.com. But soon enough the service became so popular that he could upgrade it to a paid service.

Therefore, he renamed the company and re-launched it as a shared-hosting service in 2003. Very affordable plans, great customer service, and unique features helped propel the brand as they became a standard in the industry. One of the biggest selling points of the company was the fact that it provided different price points. Hence, everyone from an individual running a business to a multi-national conglomerate could find what they were looking for on Bluehost.

Early Years and Growth

The company invested in research and did pioneering work in the field of server hosting. In 2009, they launched CPU throttling, which helped in reducing CPU usage whenever a user pulled too many resources. Whenever a user took up too much of the server resources the software drastically reduced their usage, shutting down their sites. This innovative method that helped prevent CPU burnout, also helped the company keep its resources in play effectively. Furthermore, it also served as a great warning to other users from doing the same thing, helping substantially to improve the hosting platform’s performance.

Another feature that helped Bluehost stand a class apart from competitors was the fact that their service was easy to use. The company used templates that even less technologically-savvy can navigate and figure out. Throughout their growth and expansion strategies, the company has stuck to its principle of making their layouts as simple as possible. By providing plug and play website templates, the company makes setting up and running your own website an easy affair. Moreover, Bluehost was also the first to advertise their uptime record, which helped build a feeling of reliability for their brand.

Sustained Growth and Success

Endurance International acquired Bluehost in 2010, due to its stellar performance in the years following its founding. Even after the acquisition by Endurance International Group, the company made it clear that BlueHost would continue to work under its own name. Some of the other holdings that Endurance International has to include FatCow, Hostgator, JustHost, and Mojo Marketplace.

A year later, CEO Matt Heaton stepped down to work on the platform’s structure and COO Dan Handy took over. Bluehost introduced their own VPS and dedicated hosting in 2013, further expanding their business, and acquiring a larger share of the market. The company provides various services now, such as shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud and WordPress hosting. Most of their servers run on PHP 7 and HTTP/2 caching. In 2015, Mike Olson took over as the CEO, while Handy moved to the field of mobile and application development for small-scale businesses.

The company ran into trouble in 2009, when they censored websites hosted by citizens of countries the US considered rogue states. Furthermore, in 2011, they had to take down a religious website they hosted for making insensitive comments on minorities. But quick thinking, good crisis recovery methods, and smart branding have helped them navigate through such controversies and maintain a great brand image.

Bluehost is one of the largest web hosts in the world, with over 2 million domains. They also play a major role in the working of their sister concerns, iPage, HostMonster, and FastDomain. Headquartered in a massive 50,000 square feet server facility in Utah with HostMonster, Bluehost has over 700 employees in that facility alone. They are pioneers in the field of hosting, having been one of the earliest analyzers of collaborative virtual learning programs. BlueHost has grown to become one of the most recognized names in the field of Webhosting with decades’ worth of experience and by utilizing smart business acumen.

Weebly

The Founding Story of Weebly : The Website Hosting and Building Interface

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There have been many cases when people created wondrous things without knowing its worth. Though they want to accomplish a goal, they don’t have the idea that of the impact of their end product. They just keep working to get the product, and at the end, when the product is ready, it transforms their whole lives. One appropriate example of the same is none other than Weebly. Three college students, Dave Rusenko, Chris Fanini, and Dan Veltri, founded Weebly as a college project in 2006, and now, it is one of the most popular website building platforms.

Rusenko and Fanini were friends and met Veltri at the Pennsylvania State University. The university required every student to maintain an online profile. So one of Rusensko’s friend, who was a non-computer student, asked him to help her out with building her website for the astronomy class. While he was helping her, he figured out that many people need a website, but don’t have the skill to build one. This incident led him to think of developing a software that would help people, who did not know how to code, build a whole website.

Rusensko wrote the first line of code for the software, Weebly, as his college project, and Fanini and Veltri also joined in. In 2006, they completed a basic product and represented the same in a tech gathering of 1000 people. But for their disappointment, the CEO who was leading the gathering called the software “the worst idea” over the mic. This was heartbreaking for the three, but they kept the belief in their product, as it was a fact that not many people were into coding and ultimately, needed a website.

After the successful release of the invitational beta of the software in January 2006, in six months, they launched the official private-beta of the software. The next year in January, they took the software to Y Combinator’s winter startup program in Silicon Valley, California. Even though they were the last to apply, their idea had the potential that they got the entry. After getting selected in for the program, the three started working full-time on the software. The next year, they included a new editing interface named “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” to the software. They also raised a US$650,000 funding the same year.

Weebly now was a company, and they had to monetise the software. For that, they introduced the Pro accounts for the users, and also, included AdSense to the platform. In 2009, they also added support for editing the HTML and CSS to Weebly software. In 2013, the company hosted the C series funding, which helped them raise another $35 million. Companies, like Sequoia Capital and Tencent Holdings Ltd., also became the investment partner of Weebly. Till the time, the company had joined 80 employees to its work fleet.

In 2016, the company started working to add support for building an eCommerce website to the software, including the support for online payments through PayPal, Stripe or Authorize.net. It also included features to help people promote their brand, like Facebook Ad creator, integrated email marketing, and lead capture, etc. The platform offers support for 15 different languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, German, etc.

In 2018, Square acquired Weebly for a massive $365 million in cash and stock.

The website builder provides the users with multiple feature-rich options, such that they can create a multi-function website in minutes. Today, the very platform also provides hosting service where the users can get domain name including .weebly.com, .com, .net, .org, .co, .info, or .us. In the past 12 years, the company has earned over 45 million customers.

In 2007, Weebly was among the 50 Best Websites of 2007 by TIME Magazine. The CEO and co-founder of Weebly, David Rusenko, got a place in the Forbes’ list of “30 Under 30” in 2011.