Looking to Sell Your Web Hosting Company?
We aim to be a great long-term home for your brand — and for the customers who trusted you with their websites.
We aim to be a great long-term home for your brand — and for the customers who trusted you with their websites.
Selling a business is usually a slow, draining process. It can take months of preparation just to get listed with a broker. Then come the tyre-kickers — people who act like serious buyers, take up weeks of your time, and walk away at the last moment. Or the low-ball offers from buyers who were never really in a position to complete.
We have been on the other side of that process ourselves, and it was every bit as frustrating as it sounds. So when we started acquiring web hosting companies, we set out to do it differently: a fast answer, a straight offer, and a timeline you can actually plan around.
We get back to you within 48 hours of your enquiry — usually much sooner. No waiting to find out whether we are interested.
Once you can supply the information we need, we will make you an offer within 7 days. A real number, not a range designed to be negotiated down later.
We aim for a 15-day diligence process and a completed handover within a month of agreeing terms.
“When I posted DomainNameSanity.com for sale, I knew the unique nature of our business — in terms of its target customer and systems — would turn off most buyers. I sent Site Arrow and other potential acquirers information that explained both our potential and the challenges they would face integrating my company into their systems.
After sending this further information, Kevin from Site Arrow was literally the only person who was up for the challenge and willing to make an offer. After further due diligence, he made what I thought was a fair offer and I accepted without negotiation. He did exactly as he promised and wired funds quickly.
To my pleasant surprise, he was able to transition many of our systems to his systems while still maintaining the vital elements of ours that should keep our clients happy. I was nervous about giving up this business and my clients after 17 years, but Site Arrow made this rather painless. Thank you for your professionalism.”
Bruce B.
Founder of Domain Name Sanity, Acquired by Site Arrow in 2018
This is what makes it sustainable for us to run the brand for the long term — to provide proper hardware for the customers' sites and to staff support properly, rather than cutting both to make the numbers work.
We are looking for long-standing brands that have stood the test of time and proved they can win and keep their customers' loyalty.
At this stage we can only acquire brands supported in English. We offer ticket and email support, so we are also not a good fit for brands whose customers mostly rely on phone support.
Plenty of the people we buy from are not scaling up — they are retiring, and what they want is a good home for the customers who stayed with them. A small book is not a problem: we have completed acquisitions at $5,000 and $10,000 of annual revenue in the last few years.
Not sure whether your company fits? Send it in anyway — if it is not right for us, we will try to connect you with other buyers.
Your customers stay with people who do this properly.
We hold partnerships with the key vendors in the hosting ecosystem, including CloudLinux and Imunify360, WHMCS, cPanel and DirectAdmin — so the platform your customers move onto is a familiar, well-supported one.
Site Arrow was incorporated in 2015 and is family owned and profitable, with no outside investors and no debt. We fund acquisitions from the cash flow of our existing operations, which means we can complete without financing conditions — and the brands we run, Domain Name Sanity among them, have been serving customers since 2000.
We run our own technical support team, available 24/7, with business-hours cover for sales and billing. And we review every closed ticket, so the quality your customers receive is checked continuously rather than assumed.
The more of this you can answer, the closer our first reply gets to a real number rather than a range. If you do not have it all to hand, send what you have — the brand and a rough idea of size is enough to start.
The three that move the price most are what you sell, your revenue over the last few years, and how much churn you are seeing.
Either way, we will come back to you within 48 hours.
Anything you send us is treated as Commercial in Confidence, and is deleted if we do not proceed with an acquisition.
Prefer email? Write to [email protected].
No. You can deal with us directly, which is usually faster and avoids a commission coming out of your proceeds. If you already have a broker, we are happy to work through them.
They keep their hosting. We migrate accounts onto our platform and take over support, billing and renewals. Keeping churn low after a handover is in our interest as much as yours, which is why support quality is the thing we guard most closely.
It depends on size. For smaller brands we would usually roll it into Domain Name Sanity, so the customers move onto our platform and are looked after under our name. Larger customer bases keep their own brand, and we continue to run it as its own business.
By card or PayPal. Those are the only methods we bill on — we do not take cheques, bank transfers, direct deposits or cash. Customers paying by any of those today would need to switch to card or PayPal at their next renewal.
Every customer will need to re-enter their payment details during the transition. Stored cards and PayPal agreements sit with the merchant account they were set up under, so they cannot be transferred from one entity to another. We handle the communication around it, but it is the part of a handover that needs the most care.
It is worth telling us early if a meaningful share of your customers pay another way, because it affects how many carry over and we would rather plan for it than discover it during diligence.
No — we acquire pure hosting and domain customers only, not full-service web design clients.
We also do not do carve-outs, spin-outs or splits, so a mixed business is not something we can take part of. The companies we buy are ones whose customer base is only hosting and domains.
Shared hosting and domains are what we prefer, and that is where most of what we buy sits. We are also open to managed VPS and managed dedicated customers.
We would rather not take on unmanaged VPS or unmanaged dedicated — those customers are supported on a different basis to ours. It is not an outright no, though. If they are part of a book that otherwise fits, tell us and we will look at it.
If your book is a mix, tell us the split when you get in touch and we will let you know quickly where we stand.
As a rule of thumb, a flat or declining brand is worth around 1× forecast annual revenue. Where churn is running high we may reflect that in the forecast, or structure part of the price as a holdback released once the customers have transitioned.
A growing brand is worth more — typically 1.2 to 1.5× annual recurring revenue.
These are starting points rather than a formula. Hosting costs, how concentrated the revenue is across a few large customers, and the payment mix all move the number. We would rather tell you roughly where you sit in the first conversation than after weeks of diligence.
To start: the brand name and URL, roughly how many customers you have, and revenue for the last three years. For a firm offer we will want to see billing data and a breakdown of your plans, hosting costs and churn.
Almost certainly not. We have bought companies with as little as $5,000 and $10,000 of annual revenue in recent years, often from owners who were retiring and wanted their remaining customers looked after. If it genuinely is not a fit we will tell you quickly rather than string you along, and we will try to point you toward buyers who may be a better match.
Yes. Everything you send is treated as Commercial in Confidence and is deleted if we do not proceed.
