Global web hosting, dedicated server and cloud hosting provider, Liquid Web, a company aiming its managed hosting services at small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), is celebrating 25 years of helping businesses grow online.
Liquid Web has expanded over the past 25 years to become a family of brands that provides technology, services, and support for flourishing businesses and NGOs who operate vital websites, ecommerce stores, and applications.
More than 500,000 websites are now managed by Liquid Web (High Performance Managed Hosting), Nexcess (Digital Commerce Cloud), StellarWP (WordPress Software and Tools), and Modern Tribe (Enterprise WordPress Agency), which also supports more than 175,000 software subscribers and over 2.5 million users of the free version of their software.
Matthew Hill, the founder of Liquid Web who passed away suddenly on July 13, 2022, started the business in 1997. In Holt, Michigan, he started Liquid Web while still a high school student. With the aid of his family and friends, he laid the groundwork for the business’ current structure over the course of 18 years until selling it in 2015.
Online Commerce
In 2015, Madison Dearborn and the management team, CEO Jim Geiger, CTO Joe Oesterling, and COO Carrie Wheeler invested in Liquid Web. The new leadership team set a vision to build a platform to enable small businesses – and the creators who build sites and stores for them – to make money online. The strategy was developed to innovate products and services that address market trends toward simplification and deliver the best experience in hosting – to become the ‘Most Helpful Humans in Hosting.’
“All of our efforts and strategies are focused on helping small businesses make money online,” said Liquid Web CEO Jim Geiger. “We’ve coined the phrase ‘Web-Dependent SMBs’ because, for our customers, their online presence is their business. They are not ‘setting and forgetting’ their website; it’s not brochureware, it’s not a hobby. Our platform(s) power their online commerce and therefore, their livelihood.”
By introducing Managed WordPress (2016), Premium Business Email (2017), Managed WooCommerce Hosting (2018), Protection and Remediation Services (2018), VMware Private Cloud (2019), CloudFlare (2019), Acronis Cyber Backups (2020), Managed Cloud Servers (2020), VMware Private Cloud Multi-Tenant (2020), and Threat Stack (2021) in the past seven years, Liquid Web has significantly increased platform and support capabilities.
The Liquid Web Family of Brands has also strategically grown its presence in the WordPress space by adding software companies like iThemes (2018), Restrict Content Pro (2020), The Events Calendar (2021), Iconic (2021), KadenceWP (2021), GiveWP (2021), LearnDash (2021), and Modern Tribe (2021) to its portfolio. In addition, StellarWP, a new division of the Liquid Web family of brands, was launched to act as the umbrella brand for all WordPress software products.
Open Source Technologies
Liquid Web has developed a strategic focus on open source platforms and technologies and the ownership and freedom they offer owners of online stores and websites. The company says it is dedicated to fostering ongoing innovation with new features, curated solutions, and tools to help customers realize the power that open source provides. This is because the majority of the clients they draw are from the WordPress ecosystem, which powers over 43 percent of all online properties on the Internet today.
Liquid Web introduced StoreBuilder, one of the first SaaS-like consumer experiences for purchasing, establishing, and maintaining an online shop, in 2021. In 2022, LearnDash Cloud was introduced.
These offerings would combine Liquid Web’s managed hosting services with a variety of the company’s own software programs to provide “cutting-edge” WordPress online commerce solutions.
“We continue to believe that we can lead in providing simplified, highly performant, secure, curated hosting solutions to accelerate SMBs and creators getting, staying, and growing online,” added Jim Geiger. “Our North Star, our strategic vision, is to continue to simplify online commerce – in all its forms – for new and existing online merchants by leveraging open source solutions riding on our infrastructure, our software assets, our industry expertise, and our world-class technical support. We celebrate this anniversary with great pride and appreciation for our customers who trust us with their business and our employees, the ‘Most Helpful Humans in Hosting’ who make us stand out as an industry leader. As we look ahead to our future, we understand the responsibility we have to the businesses we support and will continue to focus on our purpose of helping SMBs and their creators make money online.”
