FireHost, the Dallas based cloud hosting company, today announced a series B investment by The Stephens Group, as well as earlier-round investors. FireHost is a young cloud company that is targeting large companies with particular compliance and high traffic needs – customers span the eCommerce, SaaS, healthcare and security areas.
The funding is destined to help FireHost scale their business including a planned expansion into Europe – that will be interesting to watch as Europe is often a market a little understood by US companies – language, regional and regulatory factors make providing cloud services in Europe a very different proposition from in the US. FireHost is already servicing clients in 26 countries however so perhaps this experience will help with an on-the-ground presence in Europe.
In April this year, to build upon its focus on highly regulated customers, FireHost gained PCI-DSS 2.0 compliance and has since gained high profile customers such as Hewlett Packard, Johns Hopkins University, Farmer’s Insurance, Johnson & Johnson, Duke University and Sotheby’s
FireHost first gained notoriety in 2009 when the company begun hosting the website of known former-hacker Kevin Mitnick, after his own site suffered a series of hacks. FireHost uses this as a case study and claims to block thousands of hack attempts a day against Mitnick’s site.
