UPDATED 13:30 EDT / JANUARY 04 2018

INFRA

WordPress hosting provider WP Engine lands $250M round led by Silver Lake

Every day, 5 percent of Internet users visit at least one website powered by WP Engine Inc., a hosting provider that today announced that it has completed a $250 million funding round to capture an even bigger slice of the online landscape.

The investment in the Austin-based company came from Silver Lake, the prominent private equity firm. It’s notable for backing major tech companies such as Dell Technologies Inc. and China’s Group Holding Ltd.

Silver Lake’s cash infusion caps off a productive few months for WP Engine that saw it surpass $100 million in annual revenue. The provider offers a platform for hosting sites built with WordPress, the popular content management system, that promises to automate most of the associated maintenance work. Companies can handle high-level tasks such as making backups via a graphical management console.

For large enterprises, WP Engine offers a number of more advanced features. These include a separate website hosting environment that runs on a dedicated cluster of Amazon Web Services cloud computing instances. The company replicates content across multiple AWS data centers so that if one facility goes offline, visitors can still access the site.

WP Engine is a partner of the cloud giant, as well as a competitor. AWS sells a low-maintenance hosting service called Lightsail that lets users run sites based on WordPress and other popular web technologies starting at $5 per month. For comparison, WP Engine’s cheapest tier is priced at $29 a month.

The new funding should put the provider in a better position to deal with the competition from AWS and other contenders. WP Engine will use the capital to build more features for customers, as well as step up international marketing efforts. It already maintains six offices throughout the U.S., U.K. and Australia. 

WP Engine has raised a total of $290 million in funding to date.

Image: WP Engine

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU