Our homepage has changed a lot over the past ten years! Join us for a trip down memory lane, courtesy of Wayback Machine, and see how 20i.com was born, grew up, matured and occasionally dressed up for the season.
Before 20i
Did you know that 20i.com had a life long before we existed?
If you visited the domain in February 2001, you would have found a car search page, complete with dropdown menus for make and location.
By May 2014, there was no car search to be seen as the domain was for sale for $8,800 which is around $12,400 today.
The following year brought a very basic placeholder, followed by a page saying the domain had “been reserved for future use”. Then, in January 2016, a recruitment page advertised for a mid-level PHP developer to join a “new business”.
This job advert was a glimpse of what would come next.
Our first hosting homepage
By October 2016, the first iteration of the 20i hosting website was live!
It introduced Reseller Hosting, WordPress Hosting and Web Hosting, with domain search and StackCP all given prominent space.
A large photographic hero section led into three dark product cards, followed by an explanation of our unique autoscaling cloud platform.
Further down the page, visitors could see StackCP running across desktop, tablet and mobile screens. StackCP would eventually develop into My20i, the control panel for 20i customers. The StackCP name lived on in the form of the fully Reseller-customisable control panel.
The page also introduced Tim and Jonathan Brealey as the founders behind Webfusion, 123 Reg and Heart Internet.
Even at this early stage, the home page had several important jobs: to show the products, explain the technology and introduce the people behind a brand new company.
More products and a brighter design
The site developed steadily through 2017. By November, the navigation had expanded to include VPS, while My20i and Georgie Barrat appeared in the page content.
The April 2018 page shows a much more significant visual change. The navigation became white, the hero used the site’s orange and charcoal colours and four bright product columns made the range easier to compare. Reseller Hosting, WordPress Hosting, Web Hosting and Virtual Private Servers each had their own card and price.
The home page had also become much longer. It demonstrated account management, explained the platform, included testimonials and gave Platform News a substantial section near the footer.
A home page built around choice
After a big sale in January 2021..
.. another significant redesign was deployed.
The darker blocks of 2016 and 2018 had given way to a brighter, more open page with larger screenshots and illustrations. Our Trustpilot star rating sat above a six-product grid covering Reseller Hosting, Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS, Managed VPS and domains.
Expect more from your hosting
This capture from March 2023 shows the next design taking shape.
The home page opened with “Choose better hosting” and four compact product cards for Reseller Hosting, Managed Cloud Hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting and Virtual Private Servers.
The emphasis shifted towards the breadth of the platform. Visitors could now explore our global data centre locations, one-click migrations, founder history, Platform News and hosting powered by renewable energy, without leaving the page.
The visual structure remained broadly similar up to early 2025 where we see the next major content change: customer success stories and reviews were given a more prominent section.
This version of the homepage gave more space to what customers had built and what they thought of the service, alongside the familiar product and platform information.
Christmas trees, ghosts and a wandering Santa
Some of the biggest visual changes to our homepage were temporary.
Our first holiday-themed home page takeover was in December 2018. Snow, trees and a snowman were layered around the existing design, while the footer saw an animated Santa Claus in a tricky situation.
Christmas 2019 went further, placing the main offer inside a huge bauble and turning the footer into a sleepy, snowy village.
By October 2020, Halloween had received the same treatment. A bright orange banner invited visitors to take part in a ghost hunt, cobwebs reached across the page and a tiny ghost floated beside Platform News.
The footer graphic now featured a spectacularly spooky graveyard scene filled with bats, crooked headstones and bare trees.
Christmas 2020 was a simplified design with a decorated tree, gift-wrapped presents and falling snow that formed a transition into the next section.
If you visited 20i.com around Halloween 2021, you’d have been greeted by a dark, terrifying jack-o’-lantern festooned design that contrasted with our delightful Pumpkin Pursuit mini game.
The Christmas 2021 design saw Santa soaring across a moonlit sky above an illustration of the 20i headquarters.
Christmas 2022 featured skaters, trees and more activity throughout the page.
By Christmas 2023, the hero section had become a snowy night while a colourful winter city spread across the footer.
We brightened things up for our 2024 Halloween homepage, adding more subtle spiderwebs, bats and gravestones to hit the right balance of navigability and fun.
In 2024, Santa and his reindeer could be seen hurtling across our homepage at incredible speed!
Christmas 2025’s design was inspired by the carol Past Three O’Clock and showcased a “a cold frosty morning”.
These designs used the whole page as a canvas while leaving the products and navigation familiar enough for visitors to get around.
Which version do you remember?
The home page has moved from product panels and platform demonstrations to a cleaner overview of our products, infrastructure and customers. Along the way, it has hosted snowmen, pumpkins, ghosts, skaters and more than one version of Santa.
Were you with us for any of these designs? Tell us which version you remember, or which seasonal takeover was your favourite in the comments.
Really interesting seeing 20i’s journey over the last 10 years! I’m currently learning and building my own hosting business with 20i Reseller, and it’s been really helpful so far. Looking forward to what’s next! 👏
Amazed to read/see such a personalised blog post after a long time. That’s why I believe 20i is still managed and supported by real humans 🙂 Happy using and recommending 20i hosting.