If you built a small business website in the 2010s, there was a good chance Endurance International hosted it, even if you never heard the name. The Massachusetts company owned dozens of hosting brands, including Bluehost and HostGator. It bought rivals, moved their customers onto shared systems and sold them add-ons like domains, email and security. When it went public in October 2013, it was one of the largest web hosts in the world.

A Roll-Up of the Web

Hari Ravichandran founded Endurance in 1997. The company grew by buying other hosting companies, often with backing from private equity owners. The bet was scale. Hosting a small website earns a few dollars a month, so the winner is the company that serves the most sites at the lowest cost. Endurance kept each brand's name and storefront while it merged what ran underneath.

Subscribers Under Scrutiny

Endurance priced its IPO at $12 a share in October 2013 and listed on Nasdaq as EIGI. It raised about $252 million. Growth slowed in the years after the offering. In 2018 the company paid an $8 million penalty to settle SEC charges that it had overstated subscriber numbers. In 2021 Clearlake Capital took it private for about $3 billion and combined it with Web.com to form Newfold Digital.

Cover: Arctic Seascape, William Bradford. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a ship in Arctic ice (Shackleton's Endurance).