Key Takeaways
- Ireland’s largest independent host just joined a European group, and its CEO told us “consolidation is inevitable.”
- Webglobe and A2 Hosting (now part of hosting.com) said almost the same thing on their way into other groups.
- More and more, independent hosts aren’t choosing between staying solo and joining a group anymore. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
There was a time, not too long ago, when “independent host” was a flex that you could build an entire brand around — you know, with selling points like “founder-owned,” “personally answers the phone,” “own our servers.”
It’s a good pitch; one that worked for decades. But for dozens of regional hosts across Europe who have hundreds of thousands of loyal customers, things are changing.
On June 17, Blacknight — Ireland’s largest independent hosting company — announced it’s joining Your.Online, an Amsterdam-based hosting group.
“We built the company up from zero over the past 23 years, so when we decided to join forces with a bigger entity it had to be one that shared many of our interests and value and we believe that Your.Online does.” — Michele Neylon
At first glance, it kind of sounds like every other M&A we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years. But founders Michele Neylon and Paul Kelly will stay in their roles. The entire team is staying, too. So’s the brand name.
We asked Neylon directly what’s actually going on — and it turned out, he wasn’t interested in playing it safe. He told us: “Consolidation is inevitable.”
Yup: Just the thing every independent host’s owner already suspects and almost nobody actually wants to say. And yet…Neylon doesn’t seem to be mourning the independent-host era at all.
This Isn’t a Rescue Mission
Let’s be clear about what Blacknight actually is, because “indie host joins a bigger group” can sound like a small fish that’s gotten hooked in the big pond. But it’s actually not that at all.
Blacknight is Ireland’s largest independent host — it has more than 90,000 customers, nearly 60 employees, its own data centers in Carlow and Dublin, ICANN accreditation, ISO 27001 certification, and a national broadband business it picked up back in 2021.
So, no, nobody needed to “rescue” this company. Turns out, this wasn’t Blacknight’s first offer either.
“We’d been approached many times by different companies over the past number of years,” Neylon said. “The approach that most of them took was simply not a good fit for us and would have had a negative impact on the company, our staff and our clients.”
This time, the fit was different.
“We built the company up from zero over the past 23 years,” he said, “so when we decided to join forces with a bigger entity it had to be one that shared many of our interests and value and we believe that Your.Online does.”
Maybe it’s not bad advice for the other independent hosts fielding phone calls right now.
Now, it’s not all doom and gloom. Neylon himself doesn’t think “inevitable” means hopeless. It just means that things are evolving, as they always do.
“The ecosystem also needs healthy competition,” he explained. “Right now there are a number of European owned and run groups that are expanding and competing against each other. That’s the kind of environment we need to have.”
The question facing an independent host isn’t if you get absorbed anymore, but whether you end up with a group that fits or one that doesn’t. And whether you have any say in which, of course.
A Good Kind of Oversight
Every acquisition press release promises the same things — titles stay, the team stays, the brand stays, day-to-day operations stay. So we asked Neylon the obvious follow-up: How do you actually stay independent inside someone else’s group?
“The [Your.Online] approach is very much decentralized,” he said. “Each company within the group has a very high level of autonomy and independence. So in some ways it’s like we’ve now got some parental oversight and that’s not a bad thing.”
“Each company within the group has a very high level of autonomy and independence. So in some ways it’s like we’ve now got some parental oversight and that’s not a bad thing.” — Michele Neylon
Parental oversight. It’s an interesting term, but maybe one that makes deals like this seem a bit less corporate. Maybe absorbing or joining a larger hosting group is not about submitting in a hierarchy, but more like a family that’s looking after one another.
“Being part of a much larger entity means that we’ll be able to learn from what works and doesn’t work in other companies and markets,” he added. “That should translate into us being able to offer new products and services to clients, while also improving our service delivery.”
Blacknight is actually Your.Online’s eighth acquisition in just six months. But this group is obviously not the only one building a thick portfolio: team.blue, the Belgium-based group, also spans more than 60 brands across 22 countries, serves 3.3 million SMBs, manages 10.6 million domains, and employs more than 4,000 people.
It’s Happening Everywhere
Look across European hosting right now and you’ll find the same story over and over.
Take Webglobe, for example. Founded in Slovakia in 1999 by Igor Strečko, it spent two decades growing into a CEE hosting leader the old-fashioned way — by acquiring smaller regional hosts itself, 24 separate deals by the time it was done. Then in 2024, Strečko sold the whole thing to group.one, a Sweden-based hosting group.
“My goal is to continue building successful business projects and investing in companies that find raising capital the most challenging,” said Strečko.
Or look at the World Host Group. WHG has made more than 30 acquisitions in the past three years: UK host Stablepoint in 2023, India’s HostingRaja in 2023, developer-focused FastComet in April 2025, and A2 Hosting in January 2025, the deal that triggered the hosting.com rebrand itself.
“It became apparent that in order for us to grow as a company, we would need to join up with an organization that has the size, scale, and resources that we do not have independently,” A2’s own leadership said.
If you’re running an independent hosting company with a loyal regional customer base, maybe consolidation isn’t a risk you want to avoid.
Because if Blacknight (among others) have told us anything, it’s that what you can still control is which group, and on what terms. After all, Neylon said no for years to deals that would’ve hurt his staff and customers, and said yes to the one that, by his account, wouldn’t.
Leverage belongs to the hosts who haven’t had to say yes yet, and that’s leverage worth using while it’s still yours.
