Something potentially horrible has happened today. Endurance International Group (EIG) has announced a deal to acquire Constant Contact for $1.1 billion. Now this may sound like great news to you – and you’re probably thinking that this surely means that Constant Contact have developed a great platform and Endurance International Group is excited to continue to grow it and expand on it, right? Normally this would be the case – however Endurance International Group doesn’t exactly have the best track record.
Over the last few years we webmasters have watched EIG destroy dozens of web hosting companies. HostGator, Bluehost, Hostmonster, iPage – all once reputable and well-performing web hosts are now ran on out-dated servers, with limited customer support. Most of the staff that built those companies has been laid off. And many of the customers have been migrated to limited-functionality control panels on limited-performance servers. If you’ve never read into the history of EIG I highly suggest you start here.
Taking all of this into consideration – I’m quiet scared for Constant Contact. I utilize Constant Contact on a daily basis for many of my clients and I am dreading having to contact customer support for anything once the EIG takeover occurs. I’m imagining non-relevant auto-replies and day-late ticket replies. Slow servers. Emails that never get delivered.
Maybe I am totally wrong here – and I really, really hope I am. Good luck Constant Contact.