We have some really big news to share today. A2 Hosting has been officially acquired by World Host Group. For more than 20 years, A2 Hosting has been a leader in the hosting industry known for our commitment to customer service, technical excellence, and performance-driven solutions.
“Our goal is simple yet transformative: to build the world’s most trusted hosting group,” said Seb de Lemos, CEO of World Host Group, in our recent press release. “With A2 Hosting, we’re not just preserving its strengths but amplifying them to deliver unparalleled value to its customers.”
Both World Host Group and A2 Hosting share a customer-first philosophy. A2 Hosting has long been a trusted partner for agencies, developers, and businesses, thanks to its performance-optimized hosting solutions tailored to unique needs. Joining forces with World Host Group ensures that this legacy continues and evolves with new investments in infrastructure and innovative solutions.
This acquisition will allow A2 Hosting to scale, continuing to offer our exceptional hosting services, while also expanding our reach and support.
What It Means For Our Customers: Highlights from Our Conversation
I recently had the chance to sit down with Seb de Lemos and talk about the acquisition, his plans for A2 Hosting and World Host Group in the coming months, and what it means for our existing customers.
Seb also expressed his enthusiasm for working with the A2 Hosting team: “I am absolutely delighted that, at World Host Group, we’re able to work with the excellent team at A2. We’re super happy to have been trusted to take what Bryan Muthig, Paul Carter, Justin Mazzi, Aaron Campbell, and the rest of the team have built. And we’re able to take that and take it to the next level.”
Experienced Technical Founders and Hosting Leadership
One of the things that always set A2 Hosting apart from other companies in the industry is that Bryan Muthig, our CEO, was also a technical founder. Unlike some businesses where the CEO was focused solely on growth, Bryan understood the technical aspects of our business and really cared about the quality of our hosting service. So does Seb and World Host Group.
What makes this acquisition so special is that Seb also has his own history with the technical side of web hosting. He started hosting his own website and working as a hosting reseller when he was in his teens.
In our interview, Seb tells me how he got his start, saying, “My parents gave me, I think, $30, to take a hosting account from Hostway, who was my first server hosting provider.”
“And that didn’t quite cover the server from Hostway, so I had to go and find other people who would share the server cost with me. And so from that, we kind of started offering hosting.”
In addition to focusing on his school, Seb was managing relationships with customers and handling support requests. Almost by accident, he had grown his hosting company into a really great business.
“Then in 2015, I needed to do something else, try something else in my life.” That’s when Seb sold his hosting business. He went on to lead teams that developed the billing software called Upmind, the Enhance control panel software, and a WordPress maintenance company called Fixed.net.
One of the core problems each of those businesses faced was hosting.
“We just couldn’t get around the fact that the hosting that we were dealing with wasn’t very good. And we were like, we could do this so much better. And there was also a part of me which was like, ‘I really missed waking up on a Sunday morning and checking support tickets.’”
Seb went on to say, “So we kind of started hosting as a little side project around 2020. And then grew another great brand in the UK, just organically really. But thinking much more philosophically about how we wanted to architect things, how we wanted to do infrastructure, and how we wanted to make things not so dependent on individual locations and control things centrally, rather than have things grow organically over time. And very quickly that then snowballed into a World Host Group.”
Without a doubt, Seb has a history of building hosting companies and growing successful businesses. But that success really comes down to who he is as a person.
“What I really like is building things. And I like putting things together and making things that fit well and grow well and run well. And that’s one of the awesome things we’re able to do at World World Host Group.”
Seb’s Vision for A2 Hosting and World Host Group
For Seb, acquiring A2 Hosting was more than just purchasing an asset. It was about folding a successful business – and the team that helped it grow – into the World Host Group bigger strategy, with A2 Hosting as the core. .
“A2 is a brilliant business, to be honest. A2 reminds me so much of the business that I built in 2003. A2 is a bigger business, right? But the qualities that A2 has, the commitment to customer service, the commitment to technical hosting, the performance base, the fact that the most important thing that everyone’s working on is to make sure that the product is actually good is just so core to A2.”
When it comes to the future of A2 Hosting and World Host Group, Seb’s vision is clear: It’s about building trust with customers. And that means continuing to offer exceptional customer support and product excellence.
Talking about trust, Seb said, “It’s all about trust, because we know that what we do as a host isn’t rocket science. And we know that the relationships that we have with our clients are the most important things, and it’s very easily broken.”
Any disruption to hosting services can have a lasting impact on our customers. And it’s not just about having a place to host your website any more. It’s about offering the services and the tools to help our customers thrive.
He added, “We want our clients to know that we have their best interests at heart, and we want to be able to prove it.”
Talking about World Host Group, Seb said, “We’re obviously only a couple of years old, and we’re just over about $115 million in revenue, but growing extremely quickly, partly through organic growth and most of the growth at the moment is coming from mergers and acquisitions.”
“We are building a very long term business with absolute long term sight. We want to build a global hosting group that we can be proud of, and that bucks the trend of what everyone currently says about hosting groups.”
Part of the key there is talent, with Seb saying, “We’ve assembled an absolute top team with lots of different expert areas, some in hosting and some outside hosting.”
While we will remain committed to offering high performance hosting and industry-leading customer service, Seb also hinted that something big is coming, saying “We have something super exciting coming in April.”
Not wanting to give away too much, he said, “It definitely involves a proper rethink of what a hosting experience needs to be and should be for customers and for staff, and for all of us.”
My Full Interview With Seb de Lemos Is Available Now
For more about World Host Group and Seb de Lemos, watch our full podcast now. Seb and I cover many different aspects of the hosting industry.
Some of the other topics we cover include the importance that open source software like WordPress, PHP, and Laravel have on the hosting industry and the role that agencies play and how A2 Hosting and World Host Group is committed to helping them grow with new services and solutions that help them remain competitive.
Also, subscribe to the A2 Hosting channel on YouTube as we continue to explore the evolution and innovation of hosting and how they relate to WordPress, website optimization, and marketing.
