Who actually owns them
Not who the website says. Search the brand name with the word “acquired” and see what comes back. This is public information and takes a minute.
The hosting industry
Who actually owns your web host?
Many of the best-known hosting names are brands rather than companies, kept alive because the name still ranks and still renews. Here is who owns what, with sources — and what it does and does not mean for you.
What happened
Two decades of buying up the neighbours
Web hosting used to be a cottage industry: thousands of small operators, most of them a few people with a rack and a phone. Over roughly twenty years, a great many of them were bought. The names survived because the names were the asset — customers search for them, trust them and renew with them.
The clearest example is Newfold Digital, formed in 2021 by combining Endurance Web Presence, previously the Endurance International Group, with Web.com Group. It is backed by the private equity firms Clearlake Capital and Siris Capital, and its portfolio includes Bluehost, HostGator, Network Solutions, Register.com, Web.com, Crazy Domains and Yoast, among others.
Read that list again, because it is the part most people find surprising: several brands customers think of as rivals, and switch between when they are unhappy, are the same company.
GoDaddy went the other way — it stayed itself and went public instead, trading on the New York Stock Exchange as GDDY and sitting in the S&P 500. It has also bought its share of hosts. It acquired Media Temple in 2013, a company with a devoted following among designers and developers, and has since retired the brand entirely and moved its customers onto GoDaddy.
The table
Who owns what
Verified against public sources on 21 September 2026. This is a sample of the larger names, not a complete list — Newfold alone holds considerably more brands than are shown here.
| Brand | Who owns it | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | Newfold Digital | Acquired |
| HostGator | Newfold Digital | Acquired |
| Network Solutions | Newfold Digital | Acquired |
| Register.com | Newfold Digital | Acquired |
| Web.com | Newfold Digital | Acquired |
| Crazy Domains | Newfold Digital | Acquired |
| Yoast | Newfold Digital | Acquired |
| Media Temple | GoDaddy | Brand retired |
| GoDaddy | Public shareholders (NYSE: GDDY) | Publicly traded |
| IDLhost.com | idlhost.com | Independent since 2000 |
Being fair about it
Being acquired is not automatically bad
A larger owner can mean more capital, better hardware, round-the-clock staffing and security resources a small host cannot match. Plenty of people are perfectly happy on a Newfold or GoDaddy account, and if that is you, there is no reason to move. We would rather say that plainly than pretend every acquisition is a disaster.
What changes is subtler. Support gets standardised, which is efficient until your problem is not standard. Pricing gets optimised, which is why the renewal rate so often bears little relation to the rate that got you in. And decisions move further away — the person answering your ticket increasingly cannot change anything, because the thing you want changed was decided somewhere else.
The honest summary is that consolidation trades responsiveness for scale. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on which one you needed.
What it means for you
Three things worth checking on any host
The renewal price, not the intro price
Ask what you will pay in year two, in writing. A host that is straightforward about this is telling you something useful about how it will treat you later.
Whether you can leave
Can you take a full backup yourself, today, without asking anyone? If the answer is no, that is worth more attention than any feature list.
Questions
Common questions
No, and it does not try to be. It covers the larger names most people recognise. Newfold Digital in particular holds a good many more brands than are shown here, and the sector changes often enough that any list goes stale.
No. We are saying they are bigger than they look and more connected than they look. Plenty of people are well served by them. What we object to is the impression that switching between two brands with the same owner is a meaningful change of supplier.
You do not, and anyone who promises otherwise is overpromising. What we can point to is twenty-six years of not being. The company has had the same owner since 2000 and has never been sold, merged or rebranded — and every account here is a standard cPanel account you could take elsewhere tomorrow if that ever changed.
Partly because it is genuinely useful and almost nobody lays it out plainly. Partly because independence is the main thing we have to sell, and that argument only works if you can see what the alternative looks like.
Also worth reading
Comparing more than one?
Leaving Bluehost?
How we compare, what Bluehost genuinely does better, and what moving involves.
Leaving HostGator?
How we compare, what HostGator genuinely does better, and what moving involves.
Leaving GoDaddy?
How we compare, what GoDaddy genuinely does better, and what moving involves.
Want a second opinion on your current host?
Send us the domain and we will tell you what you are on, what it is likely costing you at renewal, and whether moving is worth it. No obligation, and sometimes the answer is to stay put.