Endurance International Group has an unfortunate track-record of ruining web hosting companies that they acquire – and the recent blow seems to be coming to Bluehost as EIG announces plans to lay off 440 Bluehost employees. That includes staff from accounting, customer support, human resources, and training staff – all of whom add up to over half of Bluehosts 750-person workforce.
This isn’t the first time EIG has announced major layoffs following an acquisition. Back in February 2016 EIG laid off 15% of the Constant Contact workforce following their acquisition. In fact we could write up an entire post about what happens to hosting companies following an EIG acquisition – but ReviewHell.com has already put together a beautiful post about it which I highly urge you to check out here. However the following chart by ReviewSignal shows a great concept at what happens to customer satisfaction amongst different hosting companies since their EIG acquisition.
Bluehost has been acquired by EIG back in 2011 – and since then has suffered several bad outages and a steady decline in customer satisfaction. Nobody really knows what the future holds – however history hasn’t been kind to EIG-owned hosting companies. Good-luck Bluehost!