- Liquid Web was founded in 1997 by Matthew Hill while he was in high school, who passed away unexpectedly on July 13, 2022.
- Madison Dearborn and the management team invested in the company with a vision to create a platform for small businesses.
- In the last 7 years, the company expanded its platform and support capabilities and grew its presence in the WordPress space with acquisitions
Liquid Web, a popular cloud hosting and software solutions provider that focuses on small to medium-sized businesses, is celebrating a quarter century of business. Liquid Web was founded in 1997 by Matthew Hill, who unexpectedly passed away shortly before the company’s 25th anniversary. Hill founded the company while he was in high school and sold it in 2015. Madison Dearborn and the management team, including Jim Geiger, Joe Oesterling, and Carrie Wheeler invested in the company in 2015 and set a vision to create a platform designed for SMBs.
Family of brands
The company grew into a family of brands, including Liquid Web, Nexcess, StellarWP, and Modern Tribe that manages over 500,000 sites, supports more than 175,000 software subscribers, and over 2.5 million free version software users. Since 2015, the company has added Managed WordPress, Premium Business Email, Managed WooCommerce Hosting, Protection, and Remediation Services, VMware Private Cloud, CloudFlare, Acronis Cyber Backups, Managed Cloud Servers, VMware Private Cloud Multi-Tenant, and Threat Stack to expand its platform and support capabilities. The company also expanded its presence in the WordPress by adding companies, such as iThemes, Restrict Content Pro, The Events Calendar, Iconic, KadenceWP, GiveWP, LearnDash, and Modern Tribe to its portfolio and introduced a new arm of the business, StellarWP, an umbrella brand for all WordPress software offerings.
Liquid Web is also focusing on open-source software and platform. The company is innovating new features, curating solutions, and tools for customers who realize the power of the open-source. Liquid Web launched its first SaaS-like customer experience for buying, building, and managing an online store with a product called StoreBuilder in 2021. In 2022 the company also launched LearnDash to integrate hosting and curate the company’s owned software solutions to innovate online commerce solutions on WordPress. Jim Geiger, CEO of Liquid Web said,
« All of our efforts and strategies are focused on helping small businesses make money online. 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.
We continue to 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 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. »