Confirmed: Digiweb buy Novara’s hosting business and are on lookout to acquire more

Cash deal. Makes Digiweb second biggest hoster in Ireland. Looking at more hosting and telco acquisitions. When are they going to buy that other Wireles company eh?

Some details from the press release:

· Novara’s customers include high profile organisations such as Jurys Doyle, EBS Building Society, An Bord Pleanala, A-Wear and The Department of Justice

· The deal will involve Novara’s 15,600 customers gradually moving to Digiweb’s technical infrastructure while all of Novara’s web hosting staff will join Digiweb’s hosting team. This combined hosting and managed services team will turnover in excess of €7.2m in the coming year for Digiweb and is projected to create an additional 25 highly qualified network and systems jobs in this area over the next three years.

· Though detailed terms of the transaction are undisclosed, the consideration was all cash in nature and represented a significant 7-figure sum.

· On foot of this acquisition Digiweb will become the second largest hosting company in the Irish shared hosting and domains market. On the higher value datacentre services side due to being one of few providers with new datacentre space now readily available Digiweb is also experiencing exponential growth in those services.

· Digiweb will continue to operate the highly successful brands of register.ie and host.ie.

· Digiweb has been growing strongly organically in recent years, recording in excess of 100% growth many years, due particularly to high levels of referral from existing customers, and to an expanding range of products, services and national reach.

· Digiweb is now seeking to build on this organic growth through selective acquisition of complementary businesses in the Irish and UK voice, hosting and broadband industry. The company currently has a number of acquisitions under active consideration, with a view to achieving the company’s stated objective of achieving number one position in the fragmented Irish telecoms and ISP market.

Some nice customers being added to the Digiweb stable which includes Boards.ie one of the busiest websites in Ireland.

11 Responses to “Confirmed: Digiweb buy Novara’s hosting business and are on lookout to acquire more”

  1. Niall O'K says:

    If Digiweb are now to be 2nd biggest, who’s the biggest? 365?

  2. […] Damien Mulley Blog Archive Confirmed: Digiweb buy Novara’s hosting business and are on lookout… […]

  3. Yes, 365 are still the largest – even post merge, by nearly a factor of 3.

  4. roosta says:

    Gwan the town

  5. Yep H365 is still the biggest and there is still a large gap between Digiweb/Novara and H365. There’s also Blacknight to consider. The hosting business just got a lot more interesting.

  6. darragh says:

    My money’s on whatever company provides most up time, best online help and easy to follow guides for even the most basic of novices. The market is saturated with offers, sites and – to the inexperienced – somewhat bewildering options – ruby, linux, windows, shared, dedicated, secure etc and people have already moved away in droves from the “consultants” charging 3k and more for sites. Any company that empowers people to get online easily – and while it’s easy enough now it could be even easier – and shows it’s an expert in helping people, in providing the best options and in supporting the businesses, events, bloggers and campaigns that make them worth talking about is going to clean up.

  7. Cian Duffy says:

    Which “other” wireless company? The one built with countless dubs toll money, or the one built with the profits from the sale of a US mobile network? Admittedly, that second one hasn’t got much in the way of coverage…

  8. Is size the most important thing? Maybe not.

    I like the way you can email Blacknight at three in the morning and curse them for technical glitches. They don’t seem to mind, and they even write back soothing messages saying nice things to a drunken madman. Very civilised.

  9. Michele says:

    @Bock – ROFL

    So now I understand the subtext a lot better 🙂

  10. Size is a factor (mainly in the investment you can make in staff, systems, infra, etc) which is why we are the only host in Ireland that offers real, manned 24/7 support by email and livechat.

  11. Barry Hand says:

    Yup, the bigger the infrastructure, the bigger the chillers you need 🙂

    Pointless willy waving, choose a host that you feel comfortable with and suits your needs.

    On the story, It’s good news and fair play to the Digiweb team, I used to work there and the Hosting setup is pretty sweet 🙂