The story
The company traces its corporate roots to MicronPC, a multi-billion PC manufacturer. MicronPC entered the web services industry with the acquisition of HostPro in 1999. Two years later, they merged with Interland, Inc., a public company based in Atlanta, Georgia. The combined company retained the Interland name and sold the PC business to focus on Internet hosting. Interland's primary business was providing web services, such as shared and dedicated hosting. Interland acquired numerous hosting companies between the years 2001 and 2006, including Worldwide Internet Publishing Company, Innerhost, Dialtone, Interland, Burlee, Trellix, Communitech and WazooWeb. In August 2005, Interland's board of directors decided to bring in new management with the goal of turning around the company. It removed its former CEO, Joel Kocher, and replaced him with Jeff Stibel. Over the next several months the company also brought in a new Chief Technology Officer, Vikas Rijsinghani (former founder and CTO of VerticalOne) and a new Chief Marketing Officer, Judy Hackett (former CMO of CareerBuilder). The company acquired Web.com in December 2005 for $4.8 million and changed its name from Interland to Web.com.
Web.com held 21 registered patents and claimed to have the primary underlying technology for various aspects of web hosting, software as a service, customer-facing control panels, and website builders. Some of these patents were licensed to Hostopia, a wholesale web hosting provider. On February 1, 2007, Netcraft named Web.com one of the most reliable hosting companies.
When the company was known as Interland, the stock had risen to meteoric levels and then suffered with the "Dot-com bubble" and was ranked among the 10 worst performances for a United States listed company. But since the company brought on new management and changed its name to Web.com, the stock price recovered. At the time of the merger with Website Pros, the company's stock closed at $7.15, which represented more than a threefold increase since new management joined in August 2005. According to the company's financials, the last four quarters showed revenue and subscriber growth at Web.com, despite having consistently lost revenues and subscribers prior to the turnaround. During the first quarter of 2007, the company announced a profit and earnings growth but the second quarter of 2007 the company reported a loss, mainly due to merger related costs.
From Wikipedia’s article on Web.com (1995–2007), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5