Web hosting firms to merge
Hosting firms Best Internet and Hiway Technologies will merge into one company with some 80,000 customers.
The merger, to be announced March 9, will give the combined company a total of 250 employees. It also will give its customers some measure of assurance that they remain unaffected by natural disasters.
The 28,000 customers of Best, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, could face outages should the area be shaken by an earthquake. And Hiway's 50,000 customers in Florida could face down time from hurricanes. By bringing both companies together, customers are assured that even if they're down, their Web sites won't be.
"It will give us the ability to have redundant hot site on each side of the country," said Scott Adams, president and cofounder of Hiway.
The new company will be called Hiway Technologies.
"We are growing very fast," said Steve Umberger, vice president at Hiway. "This is a truly wonderful merger."