A major British host was acquired, wound down, and its customers migrated to a company founded by its own former team. The most instructive story in UK hosting.
If you were building websites in Britain in the 2010s you almost certainly used Heart Internet. It was one of the largest UK hosts, the default choice for a generation of freelancers, and particularly strong in reseller hosting. It no longer exists as a hosting business. The way it ended is worth understanding, because the same pattern keeps repeating.
The sequence
Heart was founded in Nottingham and grew into a serious UK player on the back of good reseller tooling and reasonable prices. It was acquired by Host Europe Group, which was itself acquired by GoDaddy in 2017 — so Heart arrived inside GoDaddy not by anyone's design but as a line item in a much larger deal.
What followed was gradual rather than dramatic. Investment slowed. The platform stopped gaining features. Support degraded in the way support does when the engineers who built the thing have left and the people answering tickets are reading from a script written for a different product. Eventually GoDaddy wound the hosting business down, and Heart's customers were migrated to 20i.
The detail that makes the story: 20i was founded by Heart Internet's original team, who had already left and started again from scratch. The customers ended up back with the people who built the platform they had originally chosen — just under a different name, on better infrastructure, a decade later.
What it actually demonstrates
You are loyal to people, not brands. What made Heart good was a specific team with specific priorities. The brand was the label on that team's work, and when the team left, the label kept trading on a reputation it no longer earned. Reviews written in 2015 were describing a company that no longer existed by 2020, and people kept reading them.
Acquisitions rarely announce their consequences. Nobody sends an email saying "we have been bought and your support will get worse". It arrives as a slightly slower ticket response, a feature request that never lands, a migration to a new panel you did not ask for. By the time it is obvious, two years have passed.
Wind-downs happen to big companies too. "They are too large to disappear" is not a plan. Heart was one of the biggest hosts in the country. Media Temple, another well-loved brand, was retired inside GoDaddy as well.
The same pattern, elsewhere
- TSOHost — independent, beloved for its support, acquired by GoDaddy in 2017, community consensus turned within roughly two years. The servers did not get worse; the relationship did.
- Bluehost — once a straightforward recommendation, now inside Newfold Digital, and recommended today mainly because of an old WordPress.org listing rather than current performance.
- Flywheel — a distinctive designer-focused host, acquired by WP Engine, roadmap now subordinate to the parent's.
This is not a moral failing on anyone's part. Roll-ups exist because fragmented markets are inefficient and consolidation is often financially rational. It is simply a thing that happens to hosting companies, at a fairly predictable rate, and your planning should assume it.
How to be un-strandable
- Domain at a separate registrar. If the host disappears, your identity does not go with it.
- Backups in storage you own. Not your host's backups — your own, in your own Backblaze or Cloudflare R2 account. A wind-down or a billing dispute takes the host's copies with it.
- Know your migration path. Can you take a full site export today, unassisted? For WordPress, yes. For Wix, no. That asymmetry is the whole argument for open platforms.
- Read reviews by date. Search "[host] acquired", note the year, and discard everything written before it.
- Prefer structural independence where the price is close. An employee-ownership trust or a B Corp — Krystal, Zen — cannot be flipped to a roll-up as easily as a founder-owned company can. That is worth something real.
The optimistic reading: the Heart story ended well. The team rebuilt, the customers found them again, and 20i is a better product than Heart ever was. Good people in this industry tend to resurface. Their old employers' brand names, less so.
Published 4 August 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.