Matt Heaton is CEO of http://www.bluehost.com. He has been business minded since his days as a college student. At that time he had three computer hardware stores, which grew to need nearly thirty employees. These stores would be the beginning of many business ventures for Matt Heaton.
Matt developed his own website statistics tracking software which was first known as freestats.com and later upgraded to be sitetracker.com. He used ad sales to help pay for the software development. Incidentally, back in the day when Altavista was one of the big players in search engines, they used his website statistics software.
Soon Matt got into the business of offering free hosting services. Wanting to stand ahead of the competition, he offered 50MB of space as the name of his company implied: 50megs.com. He was able to provide hosting by collocating with freeservers.com who was later taken over by about.com. It was interesting to note that 50megs.com was soon serving 50,000 accounts and was run by Matt, his brother and a developer. When about.com took over freeservers.com they soon offered to by 50megs.com. Matt Heaton was able to work for about.com but quickly realized this was not something he wanted to do because he had a creative mind and wanted to do things in a more creative way. His next project became ocatch.com with free and paid services geared toward more novice computer users.
Ocatch.com has had more than 3 million accounts sold over the years. Matt and his partners saw a huge potential in the hosting industry. Rather than expand ocatch.com, they decided to leave it as it was and to start a separate hosting company with even more features and applications available to customers. This would result in the start of bluehost.com. Matt and his partners have custom created most aspects of their hosting services. BlueHost never looked back as it became one of the largest web hosting providers around the industry!
Matt Heaton is a successful businessman but he certainly doesn’t believe in all work and no fun. He has five kids to keep him hopping. Matt is a Utah Jazz Fan (as you will quickly learn if you browse his blog. Matt Heaton has a blog where he talks about BlueHost as well as himself and his interests. There are professional posts on this blog, as well as personal posts. In addition, he has thoughtful posts about getting where you want to be in life and making big decisions.
Mr. Heaton seems to be a very creative and insightful man. Surely in his years as a businessman he has learned a great deal along the way. He has spotted opportunities and seized them to the fullest. Matt seems to enjoy life very much and doesn’t mind joking around on his own. He appears to be very personable and enjoys connecting with BlueHost customers through his blog and other mediums. It is highly likely that he will see much continued success!
BlueHost Site Screenshot (http://www.bluehost.com)
