Ireland’s Largest Independent Host Joins a Fast-Growing European Roll-Up

Blacknight, the Carlow-based, 100% Irish-owned domain registrar and hosting provider founded in 2003 by Michele Neylon and Paul Kelly, announced on June 16, 2026 that it has joined Your.Online, the European group of founder-led digital service providers, becoming the group’s eighthacquisition or company join in just over six months. Blacknight serves more than 90,000 customers through nearly 60 employees, holds ICANN accreditation and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, and operates its own infrastructure from data centers in Carlow and Dublin. Both companies describe the deal as a partnership rather than a takeover: brand, leadership, and day-to-day operations stay exactly as they are.

What Stays the Same

Neylon remains CEO and Kelly remains CTO. Customer relationships, service delivery, and the Blacknight brand continue unchanged, according to the announcement. “This is not about changing who we are, it is about strengthening the foundations for the future,” Neylon said. Kelly framed the move in similar terms: “Becoming part of Your.Online allows us to continue investing in innovation and resilience.” Neither company disclosed financial terms.

What Blacknight Gets in Return

The stated rationale is access to capital and resources for infrastructure, cloud services, and security investment that would otherwise take longer to fund independently. Koen van Deudekom, General Manager at Your.Online, framed Blacknight as a known quantity rather than a turnaround target: “Blacknight has built an exceptional reputation over more than two decades.” The structure mirrors how Your.Online has folded in other companies: the acquired business keeps running itself, and the center supplies money and back-office scale where it is useful.

From a Dutch Hosting Trio to a Pan-European Group

Your.Online’s own history explains the appetite for a deal like this one. The group started in 2017 when three Dutch hosting companies, Realhosting, Yourhosting, and Versio, joined forces. It spent the following years adding hosts in Spain and France before a 2023 merger with Gandi, the globally recognized ICANN-accredited registrar with more than 2.5 million domains under management, gave the combined group its current name. In 2024, Your.Online was consolidated alongside three other Strikwerda-backed companies into Your.World, the family office’s wider holding structure spanning web hosting, online productivity, and managed IT services; the same year brought Your.Online’s first moves into Germany (1blu), the UK (Heart Internet), and the US (Pair Networks). Sweden followed in 2025 through Inleed. Backed throughout by the Dutch family office Strikwerda Investments, Your.Online’s own portfolio reaches across roughly ten countries, with Gandi among its best-known names. Blacknight is the first Irish name on that list.

Where Blacknight Fits in Your.Online’s Pattern

Beyond the long arc, Blacknight is also one entry in a much faster-moving recent list: ecomDATA, an Austrian managed-hosting specialist; Dtch. Digitals, a Dutch digital agency; UK2 Group, a UK-based hosting and domains group; Shellrent, an Italian host; NordLEI, a Scandinavian legal-identifier issuer; Sansec, a Magento and WooCommerce security company; and Yoast, the SEO and AI venture joined by founders Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt. That run of deals, all disclosed since December 2025, is a pace that has little precedent even by this group’s own standards.

A Different Scale of Acquisition

Most of Your.Online’s recent additions have been narrow, specific capabilities bolted onto a larger structure: a compliance product, a security tool, a regional reseller base. Blacknight is a different kind of asset. It is a national incumbent that owns its own data center infrastructure, holds Ireland’s leading position in .ie domain registrations, and has spent more than two decades building the kind of customer trust that is difficult to acquire through marketing spend alone. That standing was reaffirmed in March 2026, when Blacknight won the Technology Award at the Guaranteed Irish Business Awards. Notably, Blacknight was itself an acquirer before becoming part of Your.Online: it bought the Irish hosting provider MyHost Internet Services in March 2023, a deal its leadership described at the time as the start of a deliberate growth strategy. Three years later, that strategy has led to Blacknight joining a larger group rather than continuing to acquire on its own.

Why More Independent Hosts May Follow This Path

The pattern extends beyond Ireland. 1blu in Germany, Heart Internet in the UK, Pair Networks in the US, and Inleed in Sweden each followed the same shape: a hosting provider with a strong domestic position keeps its brand and leadership while a larger group absorbs the cost of infrastructure, security, and compliance investment. None of the companies involved have framed this as a response to competition from hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, whose budgets for data centers and security investment far exceed what any single independent host can raise on its own. But the pattern raises a question worth watching: as that gap widens, how many more regionally dominant, independently owned hosts will treat joining a group like Your.Online as the way to keep operating on their own terms, rather than risk falling behind providers with far deeper resources.