This Looked Like Another Typical Hosting Acquisition — Until It Wasn’t

When someone tells you to “be careful of the A-word,” and they’re not talking about artificial intelligence, it raises an eyebrow. Acquisitions have undoubtedly been a running theme in hosting — Namecheap, FastComet, and A2 Hosting have made headlines this year, just to name a few.

But to many, acquisition tends to mean one thing: Founders get bought out, and then they either leave or are reassigned to a new role while other execs come on board.

We’ve also watched as Pagely’s founders stepped aside after GoDaddy’s buyout, and EIG practically built its reputation on this formula, with founders of Bluehost, HostGator, Arvixe, and A Small Orange all walking away after acquisition.

So when Rocket.net officially joined Hosting.com this year, most people assumed it would follow the same story as so many others. Instead, founder Ben Gabler took on an even bigger role as Chief Product Officer and has become one of the company’s largest shareholders.

“There’s a lot of negativity in this industry when a merger takes place — and some of it rightfully so. There hasn’t exactly been a good track record of companies going through this process,” Gabler told us. “The biggest difference when you look at all these acquisitions over the last 15 to 20 years is that the founders leave.”

It was the early 2000s and Gabler’s day job was to deliver pizzas.

His turning point into the hosting industry was almost comically small when someone on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bragged about making $1,500 a month selling hosting. That was music to Gabler’s ears — and much better money than pizza delivery.

From there, he worked his way into the industry and eventually landed as an early employee at HostGator. When the company relocated to a different state, he didn’t go with them. Instead, he stayed behind and founded HostNine, grew it to nearly $2 million annual recurring revenue (ARR), sold it back to HostGator, and earned himself the COO job.

Intrigued, Gabler continued teaching himself software development, diving headfirst into edge, CDN, and WAF. That’s when he pitched the idea of building a WordPress-focused product to fix WP-specific churn. When StackPath didn’t bite, Gabler left and built Rocket.net.

In its early days, Rocket.net was basically a burned-out Gabler doing everything — support tickets, hardware, product — and he barely took a day off in five years. There were a few interested buyers who could have helped take the load off, but none of their offers felt right.

Until Hosting.com entered the picture. And it comes from trusted beginnings: Hosting.com has its own rags-to-riches arc, now serving as the flagship brand inside World Host Group, a wave that started with its acquisition of A2 Hosting earlier this year.

“This was not an exit; it was an entrance,” Gabler said. “And what that means is the team is still here. This wasn’t a ‘let’s sell this thing and retire’ move. This was a ‘let’s join forces with an incredible group of individuals who have seen just as much, if not more, of this industry.’”

Since Hosting.com’s acquisition, several products have launched at a scale that Gabler says would have otherwise been impossible. One is Rocket Lite, a middle-ground plan for users who want affordable shared hosting but don’t need a fully managed stack.

“It’s basically the same product we sell on Rocket.net but stripped down a bit and priced at about half the cost,” Jessica Frick, the General Manager at Rocket.net, told us at CloudFest before her chat with Mark Szymanski (below). “We’re excited to share that, and of course, there are always new advancements coming with Rocket as well.”

Another is Clone Site which is landing in UI this week. WooCommerce SKUs and Object Cache Pro are also on the shortlist.

And then there’s their monitoring, which is so aggressive that Rocket regularly catches Cloudflare issues before Cloudflare updates its own status page. Gabler talks about it casually, like it’s normal, though it absolutely is not.

“I always joke around like, how do we know about our data centers having network issues before they do?” Gabler said. “And it’s really just because we stay we hold a very high standard for ourselves.”

To say the World Host Group is a fast-growing company would be an understatement. Within just a few years, it’s easily on its way to becoming the hosting industry’s largest monopoly.

In 2023 alone, it jumped from three to 18 brands. Fast-forward to today, it has more than 25, including Hosting.com, hosts 3 million websites across 40 locations, and more than 800 employees.

But the brand most people are likely familiar with is WebPros, which owns cPanel, Plesk and WHMCS. We actually spoke with a WebPros field specialist, A’Teja Mullins, at CloudFest Miami, who described WebPros’ approach as very hands-on.

“We really keep our eyes and ears open to what our customers are asking for,” she said in our discussion (partly below). “A lot of us also use the products ourselves, so we can give the kind of firsthand feedback customers appreciate. It helps us connect — we don’t just sell the product, we use it.”

But unlike many traditional private-equity investors in hosting, WHG is made up of people with actual hosting backgrounds.

“We have an SRE and DevOps team now. We doubled engineering. Support is bigger than ever. It’s the strongest system I’ve ever had in my career,” he said. “These investors actually understand hosting. We’re not being run off a spreadsheet.”

Gabler still answers emails. He’s still involved in the day-to-day. He still plans to stay up with top customers on Black Friday.

“I made some real promises to our customers,” he said, name-dropping natashaskitchen.com and wellplated.com, continuing, “I always said, if one day — even ten or fifteen years down the line — you ever need anything for your website, I’ve got you covered. I intend to fulfill that promise as long as I live. I’m not going anywhere; I’m more energized than ever.”