In 2022, Liquid Web begins its 25th year of business. As we celebrate this milestone, we do so with a Family of Brands that represents 10 companies purpose-built to deliver technology, services, and support for thriving businesses and nonprofits running mission-critical websites, eCommerce stores, and applications.
We start by thanking our employees, the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting®, who make us an industry leader known for fast, highly available, secure, and hassle-free hosting. We also extend our deep appreciation to our customers who trust us with their business. We take great pride in being a trusted technology partner for these small business owners and the designers, developers, and agencies who create for them globally.
As a Family of Brands, we have three distinct but highly related product groups. Liquid Web (High Performance Managed Hosting), Nexcess (Digital Commerce Cloud), and StellarWP (WordPress Software and Tools) have more than 500,000+ sites under management, supporting over 175,000 paying customers and 2.5 Million+ free version software users. We share a common mission to enable small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – and the creators who build sites and stores for them – to make money online.
When you consider the pace of innovation and change in technology, 25 years represents multiple lifetimes of learning, growth, and evolution. In 1997, when Liquid Web was founded as a shared hosting company in Holt, Michigan, only 18% of households in America had Internet access. In addition, 56kbps modems were brand new to the industry, and Netscape Navigator was the web browser of choice. In 2022, as we celebrate this milestone, WordPress is the most used content management system (CMS) in the world, powering over 40% of the Internet and an estimated 64 million websites. And over the last 25 years, we changed too. We’ve built a broad portfolio of products and services that allow our customers to buy and manage the way they want and have the peace of mind that they are backed by experts who are here to help 24/7/365.
We believe that we can lead in providing simplified, highly performant, secure, curated solutions to accelerate SMBs and creators getting, staying, and growing online. Our North Star, our strategic vision, is to continue to simplify online commerce – in all its forms – for new and existing online merchants, leveraging open-source solutions riding on our infrastructure, our software assets, our industry expertise, and our world-class technical support.
As we celebrate this milestone, we do it with acknowledgment and gratitude to Matt Hill, the founder of Liquid Web, who passed away unexpectedly on July 13th of this year. He was in high school when he founded Liquid Web. And for 18 years, before he sold in 2015, with the help of his family and friends, he built the foundation for what we are today. We are grateful for his entrepreneurial vision and technological talent that started the opportunity and success that all of us at Liquid Web enjoy today.
We have a great deal of pride in what we have accomplished together. We also continue to understand the responsibility that we own, knowing that our services are tied to the businesses we support. We all have a purpose here: to enable small businesses to make money online. And you have our commitment that In this age of technology, we will give you more than just the best and widest choice of hosting products. We will give you The Most Helpful Humans In Hosting®. Because we believe the more you need technology to fuel your business, the more you need expert, caring people to be there for you.
Here’s to many more anniversaries to come – working to keep online businesses dreaming big and doing more.
