SiteLock & EIG & UnitedWeb

Been reading a lot on SiteLock and the shitty experiences people have been having so I started doing some digging.

Found some interesting data that I wasn't able to find anywhere else...

- SiteLock is owned and Operated by United Web: http://www.unitedweb.com/ << known information

- The CEO of United Web is: Tomas Gorny

Mr Gorny has a long history with hosting. He was the co-founder of iPower, formerly iPowerWeb, Inc). He sold iPower to EIG sometime in 2007. He seems to be an advisor to EIG. He was also a Director at EIG. From what we can see, he's still a Director on the board. << well this is interesting..

- The CEO of Endurance International Group (EIG) is: Hari Ravichandran

Mr Ravichandran also has a very long history with hosting, and an incredible story at that. From nothing to something in the past 20 years, kudos to him! But it seems through a relationship forged over time Mr Gorny and Ravichandran have found a way to screw us over when it comes to security for our websites. << Let's learn more

Here is an interesting snippet of information pulled form the EIG 2015 FY / Q1 filings:

Ninth, in our S‐1 and in subsequent public filings we have clearly stated the nature and extent of related party transactions. As disclosed in our SEC filings, my family owns Tregaron Holdings, and its related companies, Diya, Glowtouch Technologies, and Touchweb. In addition to providing services to other companies, these businesses provide some of our brands with subscriber support and engineering assistance. In FY2014, Endurance had $10.4 million in expenses related to purchasing services from these companies. These relationships started over a decade ago when Endurance was still a fledgling company. As shown by the disclosures in our public filings, the economic value of this relationship has been decreasing as a percentage of Endurance revenues as we have built our own support and engineering capabilities. We have also disclosed a second related party relationship between Endurance and Innovative Business Services (IBS). Endurance offers Sitelock, a security product for SMBs developed by IBS, across its brands under a revenue share arrangement. One of our board members, Tomas Gorny and I are shareholders in IBS. Revenue share payments to IBS related to Sitelock totaled $5.4 million in FY14. The revenue share between Endurance and IBS for Sitelock has been set at 55%/45% in favor of Endurance. 

 In case you missed it, SiteLock, which is owned by UnitedWeb, is also owned by Innovative Business Service (IBS) (eek.. where does UnitedWeb fit in?) which through a relationship with EIG has monopolized the website security space within hosts. Did you notice how both Hari and Tomas are both shareholders in IBS, whom which EIG has the relationship with? Is it any surprise they are employing shady tactics to trick us into buying their services?

This report is from 2015 talking to 2014, so let's see what we can find for 2015...

What do we have here.. the 2015 Annual report: http://ir.endurance.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-16-485478&CIK=1237746













Here we see an adjustment in their financials for 2013 and 2014, but beyond that you can see that EIG paid IBS (SiteLock's Parent Company) an estimated $6,300,000 million for what they call their multi-layered third-party security applications. Described here:

The Company also has agreements with Innovative Business Services, LLC, (“IBS”), which provides multi-layered third-party security applications that are sold by the Company. IBS is indirectly majority owned by the Company’s chief executive officer and a director of the Company, each of whom are also stockholders of the Company. During the year ended December 31, 2014, the Company’s principal agreement with this entity was amended which resulted in the accounting treatment of expenses being recorded against revenue.

During 2013 the Company expanded the services provided by IBS under the agreements across all of its entities. The Company inadvertently excluded the expenses related to the expanded relationship with IBS from related party disclosures for 2013 and 2014. For the year ended December 31, 2013, the Company previously reported cost of services related to the IBS services of $3.0 million, which is revised to $3.9 million in providing prior period comparative amounts in the footnote to the consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2015.

So what this shows us is that SiteLock is essentially owned by EIG, specifically their CEO, indirectly. So the companies have a vested interest to push whatever product will make their bosses the most money!!

Here is another mind f*****... SiteLock just partnered with GoDaddy too... so this means that GoDaddy will be paying SiteLock some sum (they are now public so we should get some good intel on this in the coming months) which will go into Hari's pocket as well... you little bugger..

Stay tuned...