For the past 10 years, 20i has been focused on one thing: building better hosting technology.
Since launching in 2016, we’ve developed our platform around performance, scalability, automation and giving our customers more control over how they host, manage and sell services.
To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we’re looking back at 10 of the innovations that have helped shape 20i into the hosting platform it is today.
Autoscaling hosting platform
20i launched in 2016 with a autoscaling hosting platform designed to move beyond the limitations of traditional single-server hosting.
By distributing workloads and automatically scaling resources when demand increases, the platform gives websites greater resilience and performance without customers having to manually manage server capacity.
StackCP
Rather than relying on an off-the-shelf control panel, we developed StackCP to give customers a hosting management experience built specifically around its own platform.
StackCP has continued to evolve with new tools, features and integrations that make managing websites, domains, email and hosting services easier, all from one place.
HostShop
In 2019, we introduced HostShop, giving resellers an integrated way to automate hosting sales, billing and provisioning.
Instead of requiring a separate third-party platform, resellers can create hosting packages, take payments and automatically provision services directly through the 20i platform.
20iCDN and edge performance technology
In 2020, the global content delivery network was introduced, bringing CDN technology directly into the hosting platform.
By caching and serving website content closer to visitors, 20iCDN helps improve loading times and reduce the amount of work required from the origin infrastructure, while later developments such as StackCache have continued to extend that performance focus.
No traffic limits and no performance throttling.
International infrastructure expansion
As 20i grew, our infrastructure expanded beyond the UK to support customers and website visitors around the world.
The opening of US datacentres in 2021 marked an important step in that journey, followed by further international expansion that has helped make 20i a truly global hosting platform.
Multi-cloud Managed Cloud Servers
We expanded our cloud offering by bringing together 20iCloud, AWS and Google Cloud infrastructure within one managed platform.
Customers can deploy Managed Cloud Servers across more than 60 locations while still using familiar 20i management tools, offering greater flexibility over where and how their applications are hosted.
WordPress management and performance tools
Over the last decade, we’ve built an increasingly comprehensive set of tools specifically for WordPress.
Features include staging, cloning, caching, Redis, Elasticsearch and WordPress management tools help developers and agencies manage sites more efficiently while taking advantage of infrastructure designed for demanding WordPress workloads.
A reseller platform built for growth
Reseller hosting has evolved far beyond simply providing disk space for customer websites.
We’ve developed white-label management tools, automated provisioning, customer controls, HostShop integration and the ability to resell increasingly powerful hosting and cloud services, giving agencies and hosting businesses more ways to build recurring revenue under their own brand.
Resilience and independent backups
Protecting websites from infrastructure failures and data loss has remained a major area of investment.
Alongside high availability and automatic failover, we’ve continued to develop backup technology, culminating in the Timeline Backups Manager, which provides isolated backup storage and more control over restoring website files, databases and other necessary data.
Supercharging websites with Website Turbo
A 20i exclusive and the first high-frequency hosting available for white-label web hosts to sell under their own brand.
The introduction of Website Turbo gives resellers an easy way to deliver even faster websites for their customers.
Sites are intelligently balanced across our high-frequency compute nodes, with global CDN pre-caching and increased MySQL storage delivering an extra performance boost.
Final thoughts
10 years on, our focus remains the same: continue to build better hosting technology.
Because we own and operate our own infrastructure, we can listen to our customers, turn their feedback into product improvements and move quickly without being beholden to third-party development cycles or roadmaps.
It’s this combination of in-house innovation, customer insight and control that will continue to shape the next decade of 20i.