Monthly Archives: February 2016

Endurance International Group Acquires IX Web Hosting

Some tidbits from EIG's most recent earnings call (source).

...we acquired the assets of IX Web Hosting for a total consideration of $28 million.

EIG also talks a lot about Constant Contact acquisition which seems like it's about to be gutted personnel wise.

Importantly, as part of this acquisition, we believe we have the opportunity to reduce cost and better balance top line and investment in order to drive accretive EBITDA and future cash flows. Our plan for the reduction in cost was based primarily on head count reductions, which accounts for $48 million of the $55 million in targeted annual run rate synergies. With the head count reductions last week, we eliminated approximately $30 million in annual run rate costs. We intend to continue to balance costs and investments appropriately across our brands in order to continue to leverage our scale.

And they also are saying to expect less M&A in the next couple years.

Brian L. Essex - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Good morning, and thank you for taking the question. Marc a question for you. I guess with the combination of Constant Contact, given the profile that you just kind of highlighted with the reduction in debt target by the end of fiscal 2017, with the addition of Constant Contact to the platform as well, how might your M&A appetite change versus how Endurance has run its acquisition strategy historically? What will you be focusing on? And will you be perhaps taking a pause from M&A or managing it a little bit differently? Maybe a little bit of color there would help.

Hari K. Ravichandran - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director

Sure. This is Hari. So, from an M&A standpoint, obviously we've just completed this sizeable transaction. It's a big team. We have a lot of work still in front of us cut out for getting the integration done, realizing the synergies and the costs on the revenue side. Our bar for M&A is probably significantly higher than it ever has been in the past. We've always been very judicious about capital deployment and looking at return on invested capital, IRRs, and present value of acquisitions as we have done them in the past.

But given the fact that there is significant opportunity within our current asset base, and given the opportunities for further refining those, I would say over the next four to six quarters, from an M&A standpoint, the bar is quite a bit higher, with the focus more on debt pay down for the business to get the leverage down as Marc noted in his remarks.

Free Web Hosting Offers for Startups

Software/Internet startups have never had it easier. A handful of the largest cloud hosting providers offer very substantial amounts of free credit to startups. If it says [Reviews] next to the company, it means we have published reviews of that specific company on Review Signal. Check out the offers below.

Company Offer Requirement
Amazon AWS Activate [Reviews] Free tier for 12 months. Free Technical/Business Essentials Training. $80 Credit for self paced labs. 1 month business support. Open Application
Amazon AWS Activate [Reviews] Varies by Partner Approved Accelerator/VC
Microsoft BizSpark (Azure) [Reviews] $150/user/month up to 5 users for 36 months Startup, <5 years old, <$1m revenue, and privately held.
Microsoft BizSpark Plus (Azure) [Reviews] $10,000/month for 12 months Approved Accelerator/VC
Digital Ocean [Reviews] $10.00 Anyone
Digital Ocean [Reviews] $250,000.00 for 12 months YCombinator/TechStars/Case-by-case
Google Compute Engine $300.00 Anyone
Google Compute Engine $100,000.00 for 12 months Approved Accelerator/VC/Incubator
IBM Global Entrepreneur Program $1,000/month for 12 months Open Application
IBM Global Entrepreneur Program $10,000/month for 12 months Approved Accelerator/VC/Incubator
SoftLayer [Reviews] $1,000/month for 12 months Internet dependent startup

If an offer is missing please contact us.

Review Signal’s Best Web Hosting Companies in 2015

Another year, another mountain of data added to the largest web hosting review site. This year we added over 49,000 new reviews (a slight increase from the 45,000 last year). We added two new companies in Arvixe and Site5, both of which are now owned by EIG. We published our first WordPress Plugin WPPerformanceTester. WPPerformanceTester was built for our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks which we performed yet again with our largest batch of companies ever. We even got some outside validation from LiquidWeb which published its internal NPS benchmarks which matched very closely to their Review Signal Rating.

But the year ended on a somewhat sour note with The Rise and Fall of A Small Orange. It tells the story of ASO and how they've played such a huge role on this site. Including winning at least one of these awards every year since inception. But not anymore. So without further ado...

Best Shared Web Host: LiquidWeb [Reviews]

2015-best-shared-hosting-liquidweb

 

Best Web Hosting Support: SiteGround [Reviews]

2015-best-hosting-support-siteground

 

Best Specialty Web Hosting: FlyWheel [Reviews]

2014-best-specialty-flywheel

Best Unmanaged VPS: Digital Ocean [Reviews]

2014-best-unmanaged-vps-digitalocean

Best Managed VPS: LiquidWeb [Reviews]

2015-best-managed-vps-liquidweb

 

For the second year in a row FlyWheel [Reviews] has set the bar in terms of how high a company's rating can be. They won the best specialty web hosting award with their managed WordPress hosting.

For the first time ever someone besides A Small Orange [Reviews] has won the best shared web hosting. A huge congratulations to LiquidWeb [Reviews]! They also managed to pickup the Best Managed VPS hosting award.

Digital Ocean [Reviews] continues its massive growth and popularity, they have won the Best Unmanaged VPS provider for the third year in a row.

Finally, SiteGround [Reviews] returned to our awards and won Best Web Hosting Support, an honor they last received in 2013.

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