Lloyd’s Development Capital (LDC), the private equity arm of Lloyd’s Trustee Savings Bank, the third largest bank in the U.K. (and state-backed) announced today that it has acquired a majority stake in leading web hosting provider UK2Group. The equity group paid a total of $77 million for its majority stake in partnership with the current management team.
Founded in 1998, the UK2 Group is an international provider of domain name registration and website hosting services, best known for its acquisitions of big hosting properties, such as midPhase and WestHost and for launching its own innovative hosting services, like 100TB.com and VPS.NET.
Ditlev Bredahl, UK2 Group’s CEO of 5 years will be leaving the company to focus on his role as CEO of OnApp — a cloud hosting software platform spun off from the technology behind VPS.NET. Phil Male, previously Chief Strategy Officer at Cable & Wireless Worldwide and Chief Operating Officer of Thus Group plc, was appointed by Lloyd’s as executive chairman.
With a state-backed bank behind them, and a reputation for acquiring hosting companies, look for UK2Group to be getting involved in some M&A activity in the near future.
The UK2 Group has been around since the conception of founder brand UK2.net in 1998. Over the years the group has expanded in terms of brands, products, services, employees and customers. To date they have sold over a million domain names, have thousands of shared and dedicated hosting customers and operate out of several state of the art, multi million pound data centers in both the UK and US.
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