| Type | Privately held |
|---|---|
| Industry | Web Hosting |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Key people | Lucas Roh, CEO; John Lee, VP Marketing; |
| Products | Internet Services |
| Employees | 700 |
| Website | www.hostway.com |
Hostway is a multinational web hosting company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, United States, founded in 1998. It provides individuals, small- to medium-sized businesses and large corporations with hosting services for web sites, databases and business applications in addition to Internet marketing and web design services. Hostway Corporation serves more than 600,000 customers worldwide. Major clients include: Coca-Cola, Disney, McGraw-Hill, Sony/BMG, Wrigley Company, Hershey’s, Fox News Channel and Wikimedia.[1][2]
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In 1998, University of Chicago alumni Lucas Roh, John Lee, Arnold Choi and two other business partners acquired Spectronet Inc., a Web hosting company with annual revenues of $30,000. They renamed the company Hostway Corporation and began preparations to expand its reach in the US and international markets.[3]
Roh previously served as a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, conducting pioneering research in the emerging field of "automatic differentiation". He also worked for six years as a software and hardware engineer at Tektronics and Hewlett-Packard. Roh’s background in technology plus his interest in business led him to become a founding partner, president and CEO of Hostway.
After building up the company’s customer base in the Chicago area and throughout the United States the company launched Hostway Korea. This proved an ideal starting point to expand Hostway’s business as Roh was raised and educated in South Korea before his family immigrated to the United States during high school and was very familiar with its business culture and processes. This would serve as the beginning of a much larger push towards its globalization of web hosting services.
Hostway has remained a privately held company throughout its expansion, which has seen the company open data centers and offices in North America (Chicago, Tampa, Austin, Vancouver) Europe (United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany) in addition to Australia, India and Korea. Profitable since its inception, it is also notable mentioning that Hostway’s globalization efforts were carried out entirely without the utilization of outside venture capital funding.
In the 2000s Hostway conducted a number of mergers and acquisitions of companies to increase its client base and build its strengths in the dedicated server/managed hosting and domain name registration markets. The most significant of these was the 2003 merger with Canada’s NetNation Communications with approximately US $10 million paid in cash to NetNation stockholders.[4]
In June 2006, Hostway announced the opening of its new data center located at Boeing International's worldwide headquarters, in the heart of downtown Chicago. It is the largest commercially operated data center in downtown Chicago.[5]
In April 2007, Hostway announced the acquisition of Affinity Internet Inc.[6] Affinity Internet Inc. is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with approximately 300 employees, and has been operating since 1996. In July 2007, Hostway moved the Affinity Miami data center in what was called the second worst "Data center Disasters of 2007" by IT management magazine (January 28, 2008).[7]
In May 2009, Hostway sold their Fort Lauderdale, FL Data Center and colocation customers to Host.net of Boca Raton, FL.
Hostway operates data centers and offices in: