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Site5 Acquired by Endurance International Group

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

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Comments

  • 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.

  • srpurdy

    wow… another one bites the dust indeed….

  • 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.

    • Ana

      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.

      • 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.

  • MisterNeutron

    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.