Hostway

Founding

In 1998, University of Chicago alumni Lucas Roh, John Lee, Arnold Choi and two other business partners acquired Spectronet Inc., a Web hosting company in the Chicago suburbs with annual revenues of $30,000. They renamed the company Hostway Services Inc. and began preparations to expand its reach in the US and international markets.

Roh previously served as a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, conducting pioneering research in the emerging field of "automatic differentiation". He also worked for six years as a software and hardware engineer at Tektronics and Hewlett-Packard prior to becoming a founding partner, president and CEO of Hostway.

Globalization

Initially, company growth was focused on sales throughout the United States, primarily in Chicago. In 2000, the founders expanded Hostway to international markets with the launch of Hostway Korea. South Korea was chosen as the starting point for Hostway's expansion, due to Roh being raised there. This would serve as the beginning of a much larger push towards its globalization of web hosting services.

From 2000 to 2007, Hostway grew via acquisition, increasing its client base and building its experience with the dedicated server/managed hosting & domain name registration markets. The most significant of these was the 2003 merger with Canada's NetNation Communications with approximately US$10 million paid in cash to NetNation stockholders.

In June 2006, Hostway announced the opening of its new data center located at Boeing International's worldwide headquarters, in the heart of downtown Chicago. It is the largest commercially operated data center in downtown Chicago. In April 2007, Hostway announced the acquisition of Affinity Internet Inc., which is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with approximately 300 employees, and has been operating since 1996.

In September 2016, Emil Sayegh joined Hostway as president and CEO. Prior to Hostway, Emil was the chairman of the board, CEO, and president of Codero Hosting, VP of Cloud Services at HP, and VP/GM of Cloud at Rackspace.

As of July 2024, Jim Parks serves as Ntirety's CEO, where he is responsible for driving the organization's strategic direction and go-to-market strategy.

Hostway has remained a privately held company throughout its expansion, which has seen the company open data centers and/or local offices in various locations. Offices in these cities are currently run by Hostway Services:

Enterprise Hosting

Managed server hosting – Hostway delivers custom managed hosting services, on dedicated servers. Hostway will build, monitor, secure, maintain, and patch the infrastructure. Customers have the ability to install and manage all applications on the servers.

Cloud hosting – Hostway is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider that sells both public and private cloud capabilities under its own FlexCloud brand. Both services include virtualization technology with the main difference being that the public cloud is shared by multiple customers, and the private cloud allocates specific virtualization resources to one customer.

Hybrid cloud – Hostway launched hybrid cloud hosting in 2012 as a service that combines dedicated/managed server infrastructure with virtualized cloud environments (public or private) through a private VLAN connection. Customers may also connect the Hostway infrastructure to their on-premises environment.

Colocation – Hostway colocation services allow customers to lease space at one of Hostway's data centers in order to take advantage of its security, power, and network while maintaining control of their servers.

Acquisition

In December 2013, Hostway was acquired by private equity firm Littlejohn & Co.. Financials of the deal were not disclosed, but Crain's projected the deal to be worth in the neighborhood of $200 million.

Merger with HOSTING

In January 2019, Hostway and HOSTING announced a merger of the two companies. Backed by previous private equity firms Littlejohn & Co. and Pamlico who will stay on as equal partners.

In September 2019, Hostway|Hosting Announces Re-Brand, Changing Company Name to “Ntirety”