Endurance International Group (EIG), previously named BizLand, was an IT services company specializing in web hosting. The company was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA.[1] In 2021 Endurance International Group merged with Web.com forming a new company, Newfold Digital. It is one of the Internet's largest webhosting providers, the company was structured differently from other large hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoDaddy, or 1&1 Ionos. The company has grown its hosting and related business through numerous acquisitions.[2][3][4]
In 2011, Endurance was bought from Accel-KKR by Warburg Pincus and GS Capital Partners, for around $975 million.[5] In September 2013, the company announced plans to raise $400 million in an IPO.[6] The company announced it would list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol EIGI.[7] It went public in October 2013 raising $252 million selling shares to the public at $12 each. This was below the company's target goal of $400 million.[8][9]
This path to increased size is similar to the path networking company Verio followed in the 1990s, using free cash flow and access to capital markets[10] in acquiring assets to add to their corporate portfolio.[2] The concept was to roll up small ISPs into one large ISP and achieve economies of scale. Endurance acquired hosting companies domestically and internationally.[4]
In March 2015, the company announced an investment in Netherlands-based technology startup AppMachine, acquiring 40% of the company.[11][12] In August 2015, EIG announced the acquisition of Site5 and Verio Web Hosting from NTT. It is estimated that EIG gained 86,000+ new subscribers through these acquisitions.[13][14] In November 2015,[15] the company acquired Constant Contact, and days later laid off 15% of their workforce.[16] Also in November 2015, EIG acquired the assets of Ecommerce, LLC for $28 million.[17]
In August 2018, the firm's CEO and CFO were fined United States dollar 8 million for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for misrepresenting company subscriber numbers.[18]
Endurance acquired Ecomdash in October 2019 for $9.6 million in cash, and placed it under the Constant Contact group.[19][20][21]
In November 2020, Clearlake Capital Group announced that it would acquire Endurance International Group for around $3 billion.[22] At the closing of the deal in February 2021, Clearlake Capital announced a few wrinkles. Clearlake spun off the Endurance Web Presence division, including subsidiaries Domain.com, Bluehost, and HostGator.
Endurance Web Presence merged with Web.com to form a new company, Newfold Digital, in 2021. Newfold Digital is a joint venture between Clearlake Capital and Siris Capital Group, owner of Web.com since 2018.[23][24]
Clearlake also spun off the Constant Contact division of Endurance into a separate joint venture between Clearlake and Siris.[25]
In November 2022, Newfold Digital "signed a definitive agreement to purchase MarkMonitor™, an industry-leading enterprise-level provider of domain management solutions"[26] from Clarivate. MarkMonitor provides brand protection, anti-piracy, and domain-name registration services for a variety of Big Tech industry giants and other companies. MarkMonitor provides services to Akamai, Alibaba, Baidu, Google, Microsoft, CloudFront, Amazon, Tencent, Intuit, AVG, Meta, Salesforce, Verizon, YouTube, Wikipedia, Coca-Cola, Tesco, Zenly, Carrd, Mattel and eBay, among others.[27][28]
Subsidiary brands
The company has owned and operated numerous hosting businesses, with shared support information and support agents. Subsidiaries and brands include:[29][30]