UK-based hosting company Memset buys URL shortener Is.gd

Cloud hosting company Memset this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire URL shortening service Is.gd. Memset in a statement says it has thus secured the URL shortener’s future, and added that it plans to maintain it as a non-advertising-supported, free Internet service indefinitely.

The acquisition and Memset’s stated intents represent good news for Is.gd users, who (should) have been rightly worried about the service’s ability to compete with the likes of Bit.ly and major Internet players who’ve introduced their own short URLs (Amazon, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc.).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Is.gd founder Richard West will be staying on board to keep working on the service. He plans some major improvements to the site over the next few months, including the ability for users to create custom shortened URLs free of charge (a long overdue feature if you ask me).

Kate Craig-Wood, Managing Director of Memset, explained the rational behind the acquisition:

“I love Is.gd and use it a lot, and have often worried about a service like that failing or being bought and monetised. As a cloud provider, we have huge amounts of compute resource and bandwidth, so it was a good match for us. The costs are relatively small, and it also makes a great showcase for our network and hardware performance.”

According to the press release, Is.gd was good for the shortening of over 25.5 million links in March 2010 compared to 1.12 million in March 2009. According to the Is.gd website, a total of more than 173 million URLs have been shortened with the service since its inception.