Last week Wednesday, Ahmad Mukoshy, CEO of Nigerian web-hosting company, GigaLayer, announced on his Twitter account “a merger deal of a pan-African web hosting company.”
In the tweet, Mukoshy left out details of the merger, including the name of the other company involved.
Alhamdulillah, we just signed a merger deal of a pan-African web hosting company. Watch our space & official announcement soon. Super exciting for GigaLayer!
— Ahmad Mukoshy👨💻 (@mukoshy) November 13, 2019
But following a recent conversation with Mukoshy, Techpoint learnt that the tweet was about a merger between GigaLayer and HUB8, a subsidiary of a Czech Republic-based, Russian-owned web hosting company that is Africa-focused.
The interesting part of this deal is that all the operations of HUB8 have now moved to GigaLayer, giving Mukoshy’s web hosting company full control of the new entity.
Work is ongoing to ensure the smooth transfer of HUB8’s services to GigaLayer. This includes existing domain names and hosting services. New orders for HUB8 will be delivered by GigaLayer henceforth.
Already, as of press time this morning, the HUB8 website redirects to a sub-domain of GigaLayer.
Talks of the merger started as far back as 2018. According to Mukoshy, HUB8 was seeking an exit and seeing that the Africa-focused company boasts an array of products that align with the Nigerian web hosting company’s vision for Africa, he couldn’t resist such an opportunity to go all-in with a merger.
HUB8 particularly offers services like WordPress engine hosting, Site Builder, country-specific domains, and a number of others which GigaLayer is looking to build itself. The merger allows the company save cost on inevitably building those products.
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GigaLayer has a virtual presence in 13 African countries including Kenya, Uganda, South Africa and Ghana, which HUB8 also served. Mukoshy also boasts of finally having access to Sudan, which according to him is a fully sanctioned country. While Mukoshy is not ruling out possibilities of a physical presence in those countries in the near future, he says they will continue to deliver services remotely.
Formerly known as Aimtech HostingCo, GigaLayer was founded in 2014 by Ahmad Mukoshy as a pan-African domain name and service provider. Prior to acquiring HUB8, the company has snapped up three local hosting companies along its way.
Today, GigaLayer has a wide-reaching hosting network, worldwide. With servers in regions like Helsinki, Florida, Falkenstein, Cape Town, and Lagos, the Nigerian web hosting company is able to deploy service infrastructure in close proximity to the customer base.
"Our servers are up nearly 100% of the time; over 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40 seconds every day. We are situated in well-secure data centres, ensuring third-party security access is near-impossible," Mukoshy highlights.
It is not every day a Nigerian startup acquires a foreign Africa-focused company. These are exciting times indeed.
