Review Hell Blog

This is where I post site news, tips and tricks, and special web hosting offers. Make sure you subscribe!

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest Review Hell news, blog updates, and special offers in your inbox. No spam, promise!

Site5 Acquired by Endurance International Group

Posted by Review Hell in Web Hosting
Last updated on Aug 2, 2017
image

Well, another quality web hosting company has been purchased by Endurance International Group. According to their latest earnings report EIG bought Site5 and it’s assets, in full.

Quoted from EIG’s 2015 second quarter earnings report:

During the quarter, the company acquired assets of Verio and Site5. The total cash consideration for these acquisitions is expected to be approximately $36 million.

Quoted from the Endurance International Group Holdings, Inc. Q2 FY2015 Earnings Conference Call – August 4, 2015. Prepared Remarks:

At the end of Q2 2015, our total subscribers on platform were 4.4 million, including approximately 86,000 subscribers contributed by the acquisitions of Verio and Site5.

and

Turning to other activity during the quarter, we continued to execute on M&A as part of our overall strategy of growing subscribers and ARPS. In Q2, we acquired two hosting businesses. The first, which closed in late May, was the U.S. retail hosting business of Verio, for total cash consideration of $13 million. The second, World Wide Web Hosting, which reaches subscribers via the Site5 brand, closed in late June for a total cash consideration of $23 million. Combined, these acquisitions added approximately 86,000 subscribers. We expect to manage these businesses at break‐even to marginally profitable for the rest of the year as we migrate their subscriber bases to our back end platform. Once on platform, we expect to reach favorable economics and adjusted EBITDA contribution consistent with our previous framework for realizing synergies from acquisitions.

It’s time to add some more web hosts to the long list of EIG hosting companies…

Since Endurance International Group (via their ownership of Hostgator) already owned a minority share of Site5, they bought out the rest of the shares.

The last known web host EIG purchased was Arvixe in late October of 2014. Read this post from when EIG bought Arvixe because it’s relevant to today’s news about the Site5 acquisition. It wasn’t until June 2015 that there were any large scale server migrations with Arvixe. Part of the appeal of Site5 is that they have over twenty different server locations spread out across the world for customers to choose from. I don’t see why it would be a good idea to change this and I would image EIG realizes this too.

For customers that stay with Site5, it will probably take months before anything changes, but make your own backups regularly (as with any host) because you never know when you’ll need them. Let’s hope EIG retains what made Site5 a quality hosting provider. Best of luck to the original Site5 employees and Site5 customers during the acquisition transition and beyond.

Done with Site5?
Check out some Site5/EIG hosting alternatives!

Site5/EIG Updates

October 2015: Arvixe is now being run by another EIG brand, A Small Orange (ASO). Word is that Site5 will also become apart of the ASO division of EIG. Hopefully lessons were learned with the Arvixe migration/transition to ASO and the Site5 move over to ASO will be much better planned out. As it is now with Arvixe (see Arvixe updates section) they need more hands on deck at ASO, and if they are bringing in tens of thousands of more customers from Site5, the most logical thing to do would be to bring the majority of staff from Site5 into the ASO division.

March 2016: Site5 account migrations are going to start very soon!

From the Site5 transition site – http://transition.site5.com/
We are pleased to announce that your Site5 account will soon be moved to a more dynamic and feature-rich technology infrastructure. The Endurance International Group (“Endurance”) has acquired the web hosting business Site5 DBA World Wide Web Hosting, LLC, and once your account has been moved to the new platform, Endurance will be the service provider for your web hosting, email, and domain name needs.

Endurance will continue to provide services to you under the Site5 brand, even after your account has been moved to Endurance’s hosting platform, at which point you’ll benefit from:

  • Faster, more modern server hardware including an all SSD platform.
  • Increased network security and a larger systems operations team.
  • A larger, highly trained technical support team.
  • A large variety of products and services to help build and grow your online presence.

Endurance was chosen for their expertise in the processes and technologies used to migrate your account in the short run and support your hosting, email, and domain name needs in the long run. The Endurance team has been providing world-class hosting and email technologies to small and medium-sized businesses for 18 years, and we know you’ll be pleased with their service.

We certainly appreciate your business. All of us, both at Site5 and Endurance, understand that it is you, our customers, who have made Site5 the premier online services provider that it has become, and with your help, Site5’s next chapter will be its best one.

Although it is too soon to tell for sure, the Site5 migration might be more thought out then the failed Arvixe migration last year. Hopefully things will go much smoother, but a reminder to all webmasters — no matter how much confidence you may have in your web host create YOUR OWN regular backups so you always have a recent backup on hand should you need to move to another web host (EIG Hosting Alternatives).

We have developed a comprehensive migration quality assurance process: we will simultaneously host your site on both the existing and new platforms, and we will vigorously test key functionality on the new platform to make sure it matches that of the old. Once your account has passed this QA process, we will point DNS to your site on the new platform, completing the migration…
We will send you an email notice before your account is scheduled to be migrated, and we’ll send you a second notice once your account’s migration has been completed and your domain name pointed to the new platform. Once we’ve sent you the second notice, we’ll ask that you test and review your site on the new platform to make sure we haven’t missed anything — after all, you know your site best! We’ll also include information about any significant changes to the way you’d manage your account on the new platform.

Read more about the migration plan.

April 2016: The migrations to new servers have not been off to a good start. There’s also been communication problems; not notifying customers about when account migrations are going to happen and also about when they have been completed. They recently stopped answering the phones and live chat wait times are increasing. It’s reminiscent of the Arvixe transition to ASO/EIG last Fall and sadly just like with Arvixe, there will be Site5 staff let go at the end of the migrations/transition period.

May/June 2016: The reseller account migration process started in late May. On 5/26/16 there was a mass email to resellers telling them to update their nameservers. This was a mistake because the migrations did not even happen yet. Some email notifications about when migrations were going to happen were received less than 24 hours prior to when they were scheduled to happen or never received at all. After migrations were completed there have been problems and also emails sent out were missing important bits of information like new IP address, nameservers, how to log into WHM on the new server, etc…

Reseller client’s experience from a WHT post entitled: Site5 Migrations have Begun
I was on highbury and then r3-chicago for years at Site5. Best of the best in my opinion. Anyway….
My migration completed of my reseller account. No issues other than having no ever loving idea as to when the migration was going to happen. I was mistakenly sent a migration notice on 5/26 telling me all I had to do was update the name servers. Well, migration had not yet happened so when I did that I broke a few of my customer’s sites. Whoops!
After apologies from staff and putting my name servers back to r3-chicago IP addresses I was assured that I would be notified of the migration prior to happening. Well, goes without staying that didn’t happen exactly right. On 5/31 at 10:50PM ET I receive email that migration was completed. Naturally I didn’t see that coming as I was expecting email prior to the actual migration. Additionally, like some other folks that posted in this thread there was absolutely NO USEFUL INFORMATION on the migration email other than “it happened.”
Left scrambling for what my IP was now, my server name, where my server was, my name servers, WHM addresses etc.. that was interesting… but after 5 hours I was able to get everything updated and everyone back online.
All in all.. not bad, but I’m not going to stay. I have been burned in the past (twice) by the company that shall remain nameless in this thread that now owns Site5 so I have no interest in going for strike 3 with them. My hope is that I find a good reseller host for a little guy like myself and migrate off Site5 before the server gets overloaded.

August 25th 2016: Farewell to the original Site5 support staff (YOU are what made Site5 great)! Support has transitioned to Endurance International Group for Site5.

Here are some links to several really nice public Facebook posts from former Site5 staff:

Post 1 — “What the company that purchased us didn’t realize, is that while you can replace us all with new people, when WE walk out that virtual door tonight, EVERYTHING that made Site5 what it is, is going to be walking right out the door with us, it isn’t something the company owned or had the authority to sell and it has a firm permanent NOT FOR SALE sign attached to it, it is the people who strive to be the best and have truly achieved it in our industry.”

Post 2 — Post 3 — Post 4 — Post 5 — Post 6

More tweets regarding Site5 support…


Speaking of SiteGround they recently announced (on 10/06/16) that they hired 32 former Site5 support engineers when they left Site5.

October 2016: Notable long term server outage — The uscentral416 server outage began on 10/12/16 and filesystem repairs went on for 4+ days….
Site5 outage uscentral416 server

A Few Words Concerning Our Recent @Site5 Technical Debacle — Caffeinated Press

Leaving Site5?
Check out these non EIG web hosts!

January 27th, 2017: The EIG / A Small Orange Austin, TX office (provides support for Site5) is laying off approximately 90 customer support agents in the coming months  – A Small Orange (Site5) Layoffs at Austin, TX Office.

August 2nd, 2017: EIG has a group of hosting companies that are considered “non-strategic brands”. Site5 has this classification, which means increased prices, streamlined operations, and an expected decrease in levels of customer retention. Site5’s prices originally started at $4.95/month and on June 1st, 2017 they increased their starting price to $6.95/month, a 40% increase.

Share this post!

33 responses to “Site5 Acquired by Endurance International Group”

  1. Avatar Brian Jackson says:
    August 5, 2015 at 02:31

    Wow, I feel like EIG is like Wal-mart. They own everything and service is crap. InMotion Hosting don’t give in!!! There are very few independent hosts left… Other than the managed WP hosts which is a different story.

    Reply
  2. Avatar srpurdy says:
    August 5, 2015 at 10:50

    wow… another one bites the dust indeed….

    Reply
  3. Avatar Sufyan bin Uzayr says:
    August 6, 2015 at 01:51

    At this rate, I doubt if we will be left with decent web hosting providers. Site5 was (is?) a really good provider… shocking because I always thought EIG would prefer acquiring brands they can royally destroy by migrating data and firing support staff. Site5 has servers around the globe, so migration does not look like a possibility.

    Reply
    • Avatar Ana says:
      August 6, 2015 at 21:06

      I doubt that; Arvixe too said they’d never migrate, and they’re in Provo DC today.
      I bet next year Site5 US-locations clients will be migrated as well.

      Reply
      • Avatar Sufyan bin Uzayr says:
        August 8, 2015 at 23:18

        I guess so; but for non-US locations, especially Singapore and others, what are they gonna do? Migrating to US datacenter would mean losing those clients, and EIG is not known to operate non-US locations anyway.
        I think HostNine, an EIG brand, offer Singapore location as well.

      • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
        October 29, 2016 at 06:53

        At least when it comes to the various US locations, I got a hint about what they’re going to do today. With no help from Site5, I managed to find my way into their new version of Backstage (and also finally figured out how to get to my cPanel from there – it’s exceedingly non-obvious). My sites are on their NYC servers. Under “Your Active Products/Services,” my primary domain is listed as a “Legacy Product.” In other words, when my paid hosting runs out, I’ll be offered the fabulous once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have my account hosted in Provo. There will be no other choice. I’ll lay you odds… ;)

        No telling about the overseas locations, which will be tougher for EIG to deal with. But I remain confident that they’ll find a way to make a complete mess of it.

  4. Avatar MisterNeutron says:
    August 29, 2015 at 21:02

    I fled from Hostgator to Site5, so this is certainly not welcome news. The Site5 folks swear up and down that nothing will change – same great servers, same great support. But based on my HG experience, I’ll know the exact moment that it’s time to run away: when I get an email telling me, in excited tones, that my account is going to be upgraded (with lots of exclamation points). The EIG definition of “upgraded” means an overloaded server in a poorly-managed datacenter, page-loading times that go up noticeably, and ticket response times measured in days, rather than minutes.

    Reply
  5. Avatar MisterNeutron says:
    July 31, 2016 at 02:33

    While it’s difficult to sort out from a distance, Site5 is starting to show some of the signs of “EIG Disease.” As we speak, a handful of servers in their U.S. Central group have been virtually unusable for over four days – some sort of software problem that’s causing disk quota issues. What kind of software problem takes four days (and counting) to fix?

    You can follow the saga yourself: https://status.site5.com/

    And this is not the first multi-day outage in recent months. I don’t recall the details of the others, but it’s all beginning to remind me of the HostGator experience. And it ain’t a happy memory.

    Reply
    • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
      July 31, 2016 at 20:14

      Another day, and it’s getting worse, rather than better – they’ve added more servers to the list. This really does have EIG’s fingerprints all over it. My shared hosting runs out in January – time to move on!

      Reply
      • Avatar JimStarr says:
        August 1, 2016 at 13:59

        all our sites and clients site shave been down for over 24 hours now . and when one client specifically gets in his office at 6 am eastern time …. We are toast with him as a client , they cost me THOUSANDS today , Sunday is my best day for sales on FB . I have had a resellers account with them for a long time …they used to be really good the last 3-4 months have been TERRIBLE

  6. Avatar JimStarr says:
    August 1, 2016 at 13:54

    yeah this has been bull shit the last 24 hours all our sites are down clients sites are down and in less than 6 hours we will have pissed off clients when they cant get in their email accounts when they get to their offices.. NOT happy at all .. and loosing money by the minute !!!!!!!!!!!

    Reply
  7. Avatar MisterNeutron says:
    August 27, 2016 at 05:16

    Just saw your update about the 8/25/16 transition of support to EIG. Sure enough, the formerly useful status page has now been replaced with a site that has a bunch of outdated, useless information, most of it about Arvixe servers. Planning my exit.

    Reply
    • ReviewHell ReviewHell says:
      August 27, 2016 at 05:40

      Wow thanks for sharing! Clicked on dates in August on the status calendar and all are for Arvixe…temporary glitch…

      Reply
      • ReviewHell ReviewHell says:
        August 27, 2016 at 08:37

        e.g https://status.site5.com/?day=2016-08-21 is for leaf.arvixe.com

      • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
        August 30, 2016 at 05:49

        Well, at least they’ve fixed this. The status page is now showing (mostly) just Site5 information. But given EIG’s history, I’ll wager that transparency about server problems starts to fade away pretty soon. Being upfront about problems is good for existing customers, but bad for sales.

      • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
        September 2, 2016 at 21:19

        Well, did I call it, or what?! My shared server, s8-nyc, was down for a while in the early hours of this morning. I could log into “Site5 Backstage,” but not the cPanel on the server. The “Backstage” status display showed that all services on the server were out. Things returned to normal an hour later or so – they probably just rebooted the server, which is their answer to everything. But the publicly-available Site5 status page showed no problem at all. The old status page would have listed this outage.

        “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended….”

  8. Avatar Brian says:
    August 30, 2016 at 22:32

    The sh!t is hitting the fan this week it seems, do a ‘site5’ search in Twitter to see many unhappy customers. Or just check site5’s Twitter feed, every single tweet seems to be an apology! We’ve moved, I urge everyone to do the same :) Hope the old support staff have got jobs again.

    Reply
  9. Avatar IVGFX says:
    September 7, 2016 at 23:39

    I had been with Site5 for going on 10 years. In the last week MySQL servers have gone down 10 times and 12 hour response times to tickets is horrible. Finally got my 30 accounts moved from their servers today. I recommend any current customers of Site5 make backups and move as soon as possible.

    Reply
  10. Avatar David Paquin says:
    October 4, 2016 at 14:07

    Just received a bunch of invoices from them tonight for services in 2014 – this then tripped their automatic suspension since a bill wasn’t paid for 2 years. Backstage is also dead right now (switched to their new platform which gives an HTTP 500 error when you log in) and they don’t answer their phone outside of office hours… So it looks like things are getting worse :(

    Reply
  11. Avatar Tal Galili says:
    October 11, 2016 at 19:53

    I lost access to my sites inside the backstage of the account a month ago (I can login, but I don’t see the domains so I can’t access the specific backadmin). I had several chats and submitted support tickets, and the problem is still not resolved. This doesn’t allow me to transfer my sites if I had wanted to. Anyone had something like this happen to them?

    Reply
    • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
      October 27, 2016 at 06:13

      Yup. Got an email today telling me, in excited tones, that my Backstage account had been upgraded to a new, fabulous platform, and how my login and password hadn’t changed. Can I login to it? Of course not. Thirty minutes waiting for live chat with no response. My paid-up hosting expires in January, but I suspect I’ll be spending some time later this evening getting a new host set up and beginning to upload stuff. Thankfully, my sites are all static, and everything I need is on my own PC. So, I can eventually just switch nameservers and let the Site5 sites wither on the vine.

      (BTW, I can still login to cPanel directly. You might want to explore that route to get around your access problems.)

      Reply
  12. Avatar thorn says:
    October 15, 2016 at 05:47

    All our clients’ sites (and hundreds of others’) have now been down for 52 hours, due to “Filesystem repairs” on a main server. Websites, email, FTP – everything down.

    Apparently the only EIG employee really on top of this is the one writing all the apologies on Twitter…

    Hint: Stop telling us to DM you our support ticket number. THE ENTIRE SERVER IS OFFLINE, fools.

    Reply
  13. Avatar Renate says:
    November 9, 2016 at 21:31

    What to do if you are locked out of your account and want to migrate? No phone, no chat, no log on to backstage, no answers to written requests., no service, silence.

    My client has a large credit amount on account with Site5 from a prior settlement when their service provider did not provide backup and lost all data. They are charging our credit card now for services that are not happening due to acquisition and have threatened with closing the account (unstated by them means if the charge gets disputed through the credit company) so our hands are bound.

    Who to compain to, our States Attorney General, Massachusetts Attornet General, the Federal Consumer Protection Agency, the SEC, the BBB? Any help?

    Reply
    • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
      November 11, 2016 at 20:51

      I found that the original Backstage login wasn’t working, but there’s a new one that is. Try https://customers.site5.com. I’ve left, and closed my account. Site5 has become another EIG toxic waste dump.

      Reply
      • Avatar rheinbach says:
        November 12, 2016 at 23:37

        Thank you, that worked. However it shows 1 account suspended and There is no way to pay the amount to get it back. Any suggestions. Also, which company did you sign up for. I am thinking of A2 or something like netface, cannot remember the exact name. Almost everyone seems to have a bad experience or slow.

      • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
        November 13, 2016 at 10:09

        Can’t tell you what to do about the suspended account. From Backstage, can’t you get to the billing department? And the billing folks will respond to tickets much more quickly than the tech support people.

        I moved to MDDHosting.

      • Avatar rheinbach says:
        November 17, 2016 at 01:53

        I cannot get in that way anymore. Chat just wanted me to change password, sent a link that did not work i told them i was not going to change myid or pw. They need to fix that. Have send registered letter, nothing. What do you uggest?

      • Avatar MisterNeutron says:
        November 17, 2016 at 05:31

        Wish I had something more constructive to offer, but short of calling in an air strike, I’m not sure what to suggest. Complain to the BBB, of course. Site5 is based in TX, so it’s the TX Attorney General you’d want to contact, but also your own State’s AG, since Site5 is doing business in your State. The Federal Trade Commission also has jurisdiction, since it’s an interstate sale.

      • Avatar rheinbach says:
        November 17, 2016 at 07:40

        I will try that, thank you

  14. Avatar Angry Customer says:
    November 19, 2016 at 06:13

    Stay away from site5… I’ve been with them over 8+ years, support used to be amazing, tickets answered within minute was the norm… but recently, since EIG purchase, it’s like they have no more support staff… I have some tickets open without answer for over 1 month, constant server outages/issues, billing errors, its just horrible headaches and impossible to get things solved in a timely manner, just plainly unacceptable, please do not make the mistake of joining site5.

    Reply
  15. Avatar ᅠᅠᅠ says:
    March 28, 2017 at 18:37

    I was affected by the EIG takeover of Arvixe in 2014. Within a few months and with the starting of the dreaded “migration” process, I had several multi-day downtimes (one of them over a week long!), live chat support that could usually be contacted within minutes became almost unreachable (multi-hour queues), the discussion and customer self-help forums were shut down because people started asking questions (the forums are still not back), and customer service took several days just to fulfil their contractual obligation of transferring my free domain name over to me. Positive customer feedback, which still was public at the time, dropped from over 80% to under 20%. It’s recovered by now, probably because everybody that actively used the service has left.

    I’m very sorry for the affected people, but it’s not exactly unexpected that an EIG takeover of Site5 would eventually lead to the exact same pattern. Don’t believe any of the promises and statements, an EIG takeover has always meant, and will probably always mean, that all the original support staff will be laid off and everything consolidated into an already hopelessly unreliable, understaffed and underpowered hosting location.

    It’s really amazing how EIG can be so shit poor at the job they do. You’d think that with those kind of resources, they’d at least be able to keep up a barely passable service. They truly seem to not have a single person on the job with even the slightest idea of what they’re doing. My customer service contact after the Arvixe transition was friendly and ended up helping me out, but they can do only so much if they’re understaffed to such a ridiculous degree, and I don’t envy the customer service reps for having to take all the hate and attacks from disgruntled customers who feel ignored.

    EIG doesn’t have any darn business being in the hosting industry. They barely qualify as a hosting service provider at all. Ask a relative if you could get a bit of space on their NAS, and you’ll be more professionally hosted than at EIG. The only reason that horrible failure of a company is still exists is that they somehow managed to acquire such a share of the hosting market, that frustrated clients keep switching between their subsidiaries without realising that they’re always going back to the same company.

    Reply
  16. Avatar Mark Andrew says:
    February 15, 2018 at 01:18

    Site5 is the most defective, most amateur and most problematic host I’ve ever used. I run several companies with websites hosted by Site5 – HUGE mistake – MASSIVE!

    emails sent to clients and sent to me by clients frequently fail to arrive – ever! I’ve had to run a business GMAIL account in parallel because without a back up email service, there is sometimes no way my business can communicate with clients at all. Having bouncing emails provides such a poor impression to existing and prospective clients and trying to run a business with a GMAIL account sends out completely the wrong message.

    Time and time again I’m making support requests, often with little result. Problems recur again and again.

    I went back to site5 over and over and tried to get my account closed and refunded but they refuse, insisting on making me pay for a whole two years of defective hosting with no way out. Great shame they’re not based in Europe because EU laws prevent second rate companies like Site5 from conning their customers with sub-standard services that don’t do what they’re meant to.

    Word of warning to anyone in business considering Site5 – they may be a bit cheaper but you’ll pay and pay again in downtime, lost business and damage to your reputation. Choose a professional web host and don’t waste time with these cowboys.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CAPTCHA *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.