News: 0178885854

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Hosting.com Acquires Rocket.net To Expand Global WordPress Hosting Business (nerds.xyz)

(Tuesday August 26, 2025 @05:20PM (BeauHD) from the ready-to-scale dept.)


[1]BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz:

> Hosting.com has [2]acquired Rocket.net, bringing the fast-growing managed WordPress hosting company under its corporate umbrella. The move gives hosting.com a proven SaaS platform and a strong brand in WordPress hosting, while Rocket.net gains the capital and global reach of a much larger player. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

>

> Rocket.net will continue to operate under its own name, but it is [3]now part of hosting.com's family of brands . As part of the deal, Rocket.net founder and CEO Ben Gabler has been appointed Chief Product Officer at hosting.com, where he will lead product and software engineering across the entire company. [...] For hosting.com, the acquisition strengthens its ability to serve a wider range of customers. The company, founded in 2019, already operates more than 20 data centers, powers over 3 million websites, and serves 600,000 customers worldwide with a team of 900 employees.

>

> The Rocket.net platform will now be rolled out across hosting.com's global footprint, including the USA, UK, Germany, and Singapore, as well as new regions such as Mexico, the UAE, and Australia. Both companies stress that their commitment to WordPress and open source will remain intact. Hosting.com already sponsors global WordCamps and encourages employees to contribute to the WordPress project, while Rocket.net has long positioned itself as a champion of the open web.



[1] https://slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli

[2] https://rocket.net/blog/rocket-net-joins-hosting-com-to-build-and-deliver-industry-leading-saas-web-hosting-platform/

[3] https://nerds.xyz/2025/08/hostingcom-acquires-rocketnet/



Brief History Of Linux (#23)

Linus Torvalds certainly wasn't the only person to create their own
operating system from scratch. Other people working from their leaky
basements did create their own systems and now they are sick that they
didn't become an Alpha Geek like Torvalds or a Beta Geek like Alan Cox.

Linus had one advantage not many else did: Internet access. The world was
full of half-implemented-Unix-kernels at the time, but they were sitting
isolated on some hacker's hard drive, destined to be destroyed by a hard
drive crash. Thankfully that never happened to Linux, mostly because
everyone with Net access could download a copy instead of paying shipping
charges to receive the code on a huge stack of unreliable floppy disks.

Indeed, buried deep within a landfill in Lansing, Michigan sits a stack of
still-readable 5-1/4 floppies containing the only known copy of "Windows
Killer", a fully functional Unix kernel so elegant, so efficient, so
easy-to-use that Ken Thompson himself would be jealous of its design.
Unfortunately the author's mother threw out the stack of floppies in a
bout of spring cleaning. The 14 year old author's talents were lost
forever as his parents sent him to Law School.