Hostway

Hostway is a multinational web hosting company headquartered in Chicago, IL founded by Lucas Roh and John Lee in 1998. Operating 12 data centers worldwide; Hostway 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 History

In 1998 University of Chicago alumni, Lucas Roh, John Lee and Arnold Choi along with 2 other business partners acquired web hosting company Spectronet Inc. with annual revenues of $30,000 and shortly after founded Hostway Corporation. [1] Previously, Roh served as a computer scientist with Argonne National Laboratory, conducting pioneering research in the emerging field of "automatic differentiation” in addition to six years in software and hardware engineering working for Tektronics and Hewlett-Packard.

After building up the company’s customer base in the Chicago area and throughout the United States the company launched Hostway Korea one year later in a move to branch out into new markets. 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 it’s 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 2000’s 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 (Nasdaq: NNCI) with approximately US $10 million paid in cash to NetNation stockholders.

Today Hostway Corporation serves more than 400,000 customers worldwide. Major clients include: Coca-Cola, Disney, McGraw-Hill, Sony/BMG, Wrigley Company, Hershey’s, Fox News Channel and Wikipedia.

References

Podmolik, Mary Ellen. "40 Under 40", Chicagobusiness.com, 2003, retrieved November 6, 2006