Press Room

– Canadian-owned and operated web hosting company HostPapa has officially partnered with Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and Jetpack, to launch the new and highly anticipated .blog top level domain. As a founding partner, HostPapa has transported their recently relaunched blog to the hostpapa.blog domain.

"The .blog gTLD shows great promise and will likely be the preferred domain extension online for blogs of all kinds," says Jamie Opalchuk, HostPapa's CEO. "And the fact that it's being driven by a strong, progressive company like Automattic means that it won't take long for a good portion of the online community to jump on board." HostPapa's recently relaunched blog, which is powered by Automattic's popular WordPress platform, is a hub of small business resources and valuable content which helps their clients make the most out of their online strategies.

Since blogging is a universal activity performed by individuals to large corporations, the interest in .blog has been high according to Automattic, particularly from the domain industry itself. Automattic has been working towards offering .blog domain names almost since the company's inception in 2005. Knock Knock, WHOIS There, a subsidiary of Automattic, was created in 2015 to manage the launch and development of the .blog gTLD. "We're very excited to be launching .blog with a quality web hosting provider like HostPapa," says Paolo Belcastro, .blog lead at Automattic. "Their blog is a very promising destination for tech tips and creative small business resources; it's a perfect use of the new .blog domain."

About Automattic

Automattic, Inc. is a web development corporation founded in August 2005 most notable for the free blogging service WordPress.com, as well as its contributions to WordPress as an open source blogging software. Automattic raised US$317.3 million in five funding rounds and in the last round, on May 2014, the company was valued at US$1.16 billion USD. Beyond WordPress.com, thier products include WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Longreads, VaultPress, Akismet, Gravatar, Polldaddy and Cloudup.