When Microsoft, Cisco and Sun needed someone else to run their web servers, they called a company in Beltsville, Maryland. Digex built data centers, filled them with servers, and kept its customers' sites up around the clock. By mid-1999 it served over 500 customers, from big corporations to internet startups. Its parent, the phone company Intermedia Communications, had bought Digex two years earlier. That summer Intermedia sold part of it to a public that wanted every slice of the web it could get.

Renting Out the Server Room

Running a busy website in 1999 meant buying servers, wiring them to fast lines and hiring people to watch them all night. Digex offered to do all of it. A customer's site lived on servers Digex managed in its own data centers, with its staff handling the networking, the security and the late-night failures. Intermedia Communications, a Tampa phone company, acquired Digex in July 1997.

Passed From Owner to Owner

Digex sold 11.5 million shares at $17 each in the summer of 1999 and listed on Nasdaq as DIGX. Intermedia kept control. Then the owners kept changing. WorldCom agreed to buy Intermedia in September 2000 and closed the deal in July 2001, taking voting control of Digex with it. In 2003 WorldCom, which renamed itself MCI, bought out the remaining public shareholders. Verizon acquired MCI in 2006 and folded the hosting business into Verizon Business.

Cover: Interior of an Inn (The Corridor of an Inn), Charles François Daubigny. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a corridor of rented rooms (web hosting).