• Weebly Deal Gives Hosting Provider Endurance International A Web Editor That Doesn't Stink

    Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

    Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). → Learn More

    Since mid 2007, Weebly has offered an intuitive and powerful drag-and-drop website building tool that makes it easy to build rich sites websites with no technical know-how required. Up until now, the company has marketed its product directly to consumers, generating revenue by offering some premium features and services. Today, the startup is bringing its technology to a new market: web hosting customers. The company is announcing that it has been integrated with Endurance International Group, a company that owns a number of hosting providers. Endurance has over 700,000 paid customers across all of its properties, and all of them will get Weebly integration.

    Weebly has provided Endurance with a dedicated set of servers that will be running the service. By keeping the Weebly machines on site, Endurance will be able to keep access speeds high to its customers, and can better control reliability and data storage. But while Weebly won’t be directly in control of the servers, they’ll still be pushing regular updates as Weebly proper gets updated.

    Weebly CEO David Rusenko says he can’t disclose details of the deal, but that Weebly will make money through a revenue sharing agreement. Endurance customers will be offered Weebly’s premium features, with pricing tiers set by Endurance. Customers will pay through their Endurance accounts, and Weebly will take a portion of the proceeds. The tool itself will look identical to Weebly.com, but will be accessed through an option in the hosting provider’s control panel.

    This is a win for both Weebly and Endurance users. Anyone who has recently used a web hosting provider knows that the page building options almost always leave a lot to be desired — sure, you may be able to install WordPress using an automated script, but for building a custom website your options are extremely limited. These integrataed tools typically leave you with something that looks like it was designed in 1999. Weebly is a big step up from these outdated tools, allowing users to build custom sites that can include everything from blogs and rich media to Ecommerce.

    Rusenko says Weebly is in talks with other hosting providers to launch similar integrations, so it’s likely we’ll be hearing related news in the near future. He also notes that Weebly recently passed 3 million users.

    Company: Weebly
    Website: weebly.com
    Funding: $670k

    Weebly is an AJAX website creator that allows you to create pages with template skins and content widgets. Users can easily drag-and-drop content widgets like pictures, text, video and Google Maps in WYSIWYG-fashion. They also have a new blogging platform that can be added to the navigation bar of your personal Weebly page. Weebly has opened up its API to outside developers so they can create embeddable widgets for both the Weebly pages and blog platform. Users can track their...

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    Launch Date: 1997

    The Endurance International Group is a provider of shared Web site hosting and other online services to individuals and small-to-medium sized businesses.

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