In the hosting industry, real strategic shifts are rare. Most providers talk about innovation, but only a few make moves that genuinely change their long-term trajectory. The decision by Bluehost to migrate its entire platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is one of those moments. It’s a signal to the market that even the biggest players are redefining what scale, performance, and operational focus should look like in 2025 and beyond.

For webhosting.today, this is exactly the kind of transformation worth examining. When a company with over 5 million customers, decades of running its own infrastructure, and a central role inside the Newfold ecosystem decides to shift to a hyperscaler, the rest of the industry should pay attention.

To understand what’s behind this move – from strategy and costs to innovation, AI readiness, and long-term positioning – I spoke directly with Sachin Puri, CEO of Bluehost.

Lukasz Gawior: Migrating a platform the size of Bluehost to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a bold strategic move. What were the main business factors behind this decision – cost, scalability, reliability, or something deeper?

Sachin Puri: At Bluehost, we are continuously innovating to raise the bar for our customers. We want to give small businesses the kind of speed, security, reliability, flexibility, and performance usually reserved for large companies and sold by the big players in this industry at a premium cost. This is the simple thesis for us to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as we are setting a new standard for what our customers can expect from their hosting and website partner. With our size and scale as a business with 5M+ customers, we are uniquely positioned to be able to make pristine performance accessible.

Lukasz Gawior: Before this migration, Bluehost operated its own infrastructure for decades. What changed in the market or internally that made you decide it was the right time to move to an external cloud provider?

Sachin Puri: Customer expectations for speed, reliability and global scale have evolved significantly over the last couple of years, and will continue to evolve in the Age of AI. Anticipating where the market is headed, we made the strategic decision to reinvent our foundation with a cloud platform built for the growth aspirations of our customers. This partnership ensures we’re leading the way in delivering high performance for SMBs as they look to future-proof their businesses.

Lukasz Gawior: How does working with Oracle reshape Bluehost’s position inside the Newfold group? Does it bring more integration opportunities across brands, or is this primarily a Bluehost-specific strategy?

Sachin Puri: Newfold’s global scale allowed us to build a deep, enterprise-level partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Bluehost is leading the migration because of its size, history, and strategic importance, but the cloud-native capabilities we’re unlocking create value across the entire Newfold ecosystem. This partnership future-proofs our foundation, enables shared cloud services where appropriate, and gives SMBs across all our brands access to higher performance, reliability, and global reach.

Lukasz Gawior: From a customer and product perspective, what’s the long-term vision? Will this migration enable new types of hosting or managed services, or is it mainly about improving efficiency and margins?

Sachin Puri: Our mission is simple: help small businesses succeed online with the speed, simplicity and affordability they deserve. By partnering with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we’re making enterprise-level scale and reliability accessible to every SMB on a global scale, and at prices that make sense for small businesses while also extending to offer solutions for ISVs and MSPs as well.
This seamless and smooth migration is a key part of the foundation for an AI-forward future enabling SMBs to harness the power of new and emerging AI tools and capabilities to compete, grow, and serve their customers better. We’re committed to ensuring innovation is available to all, regardless of size, and excited to deliver a new generation of solutions.

Lukasz Gawior: Many in the industry wonder about the trade-off between owning infrastructure and relying on a hyperscaler. How do you balance the operational freedom Bluehost had before with the dependency that comes with moving to Oracle?

Sachin Puri: While managing our own infrastructure offered certain advantages, partnering with Oracle unlocks new possibilities for high speed, scale, and extensive global reach. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we can focus on what truly differentiates Bluehost: innovation, simplicity, and superior customer experience. We have architected our platform to harness the power of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, while allowing us to innovate faster on our core roadmap, AI portfolio and service quality. This is about the desire to move faster and deliver more for our customers.

Lukasz Gawior: Major hosting companies are under pressure to innovate while staying profitable. How do you see this migration influencing Bluehost’s pace of innovation – will it make you faster, leaner, or simply more focused on core value rather than infrastructure management?

Sachin Puri: This partnership is a step-function change in how fast we can innovate. By freeing our teams from the heavy lift of managing infrastructure, we can redirect talent and investment toward the things that truly move the needle for small businesses: AI-native products, smarter automation, and a radically simpler digital journey.


We’re now innovating faster, operating leaner, and focusing our energy on becoming the SMB SaaS web platform of choice. From AI-powered domain discovery, to instant site and store creation, to branding, email, SEO, GEO, and marketing tools, we are building the full stack of capabilities small businesses need to thrive online.


Bluehost has always been a pioneer in this industry, and this partnership accelerates that trajectory, allowing us to deliver the kind of rapid, AI-powered innovation small businesses need to stay ahead.

Editorial Comment: Lukasz Gawior, webhosting.today

This move shows exactly, where the hosting market is heading right now. The real advantage no longer comes from owning infrastructure, but from how fast a company can deliver new products, simplify the customer journey and react to what small businesses actually need. Hardware is becoming a background element. Execution is what defines competitiveness. The providers who understand this shift will move faster and build more value, while the rest will hold on to a model that no longer gives them an edge.