Newfold Digital, the Jacksonville company behind Bluehost, HostGator, Network Solutions and Crazy Domains, announced on September 24 that Sachin Puri becomes chief executive on October 1, 2026. Sharon Rowlands, who has run the group since its formation and Web.com before that, moves to executive chair. Puri joined as chief executive of Bluehost Group in May 2025 and has since taken over Network Solutions Group as well, so the appointment hands the whole company to the person who already runs both of its operating units. The release calls it a “planned transition.”
What Puri takes over is not the company Rowlands took over. The September release counts approximately 6 million customers; the December 2025 financing release said “nearly 7 million,” and the 2021 formation release 6.7 million. S&P’s January estimate, which we reported at the time, was 5.8 million subscribers, more than a million fewer than in 2023. The debt that financed the group’s creation was pushed out to 2029 in a liability management exercise completed last December, with $100 million of new money from the owners, Clearlake Capital Group and Siris Capital Group. The org chart is the least of what changes on October 1. The question for six million customers and for every competitor selling against Bluehost is whether an operator who has spent sixteen months moving sites to Oracle Cloud and attaching AI products to a shared hosting brand can do the same across the group.
- The change: Sachin Puri, chief executive of Bluehost Group and Network Solutions Group, becomes chief executive of Newfold Digital on October 1. Sharon Rowlands becomes executive chair after what the release calls “more than six years” as chief executive. The release does not describe how duties divide between the two.
- Puri’s record: joined May 14, 2025 as Bluehost Group chief executive; prior roles at StubHub, McAfee, WP Engine and Liquid Web, with HP added on his company biography. Under him Bluehost moved nearly a million customers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by November 2025 and signed DigiCert for SSL issuance across both groups on September 10, 2026.
- Rowlands’ record: Web.com chief executive from January 28, 2019, succeeding founder David Brown; chief executive of Newfold from its formation on February 10, 2021, when Clearlake bought Endurance International Group for about $3.0 billion including debt and combined it with Siris-owned Web.com.
- The balance sheet: Moody’s cut the corporate family rating to Caa1 in February 2025 over a $380 million revolver due in February 2026, then to Caa3 on September 19, 2025, “as debt maturity approaches.” A liability management exercise completed December 8, 2025 extended the major maturities to 2029 and raised about $100 million of new money; S&P upgraded the company to CCC+ on January 26, 2026.
- The subscriber line: about 6.8 to 7.0 million in 2023, 5.8 million in January 2026 by S&P’s estimate, a fall of roughly 17 percent.
Sixteen Months From One Brand to Both Groups
Newfold split itself into two operating groups in the spring of 2025 and hired Puri to run the first of them. The May 14, 2025 announcement described “two distinct business groups,” Bluehost Group and Network Solutions Group, and Rowlands said then that “With Sachin at the helm, we’re confident the Bluehost team is positioned to deliver exceptional customer experiences and build on its WordPress expertise while expanding platform choices that drive flexible digital success and power commerce for customers.” By September 10, 2026, when Newfold announced its DigiCert agreement, Puri’s title was already chief executive of both groups, and it was he, not Rowlands, who was quoted.
The most visible thing he did in the interval was infrastructure. On November 5, 2025, Bluehost said that nearly a million customers had been moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with 4 to 5 times faster median response times and up to 30 percent lower cost per customer, and that the migration of all Bluehost customers would complete in 2026. Puri told us in an interview that month that freeing his teams “from the heavy lift of managing infrastructure” would let them “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.” The new release repeats the theme. Ben Kruger of Clearlake and Sandeep Guleria of Siris, speaking for the board, say the transition “reflects the Board’s confidence in the leadership he has demonstrated in advancing our strategic vision, deepening our customer focus and driving Newfold’s AI transformation,” and Puri’s own line is that the direction is “to make it easier for customers to establish, operate and grow their businesses by bringing together trusted digital identity, reliable infrastructure, security, AI and human expertise.”
The performance data available to anyone outside the company is mixed. In Google’s field data for June 2026, which we published as a platform league table in August, 41.7 percent of Bluehost customer sites passed all three Core Web Vitals, up more than 15 points in two years, while HostGator sat at 38.7 percent, the floor of the mainstream table, against 80.1 percent at Wix. The Oracle migration is the obvious candidate for Bluehost’s improvement, and HostGator, which is also a Bluehost Group brand, is the obvious next test.
What the Debt Deal Bought, and What It Did Not
Rowlands built Newfold and is leaving the chief executive’s office with its capital structure reset but not repaired. The 2021 formation stacked Endurance’s acquisition debt on Web.com’s. Moody’s Corporate Family Rating went from B3 to Caa1 on February 14, 2025, with the outlook moved to negative, because the $380 million revolver due February 2026 had $223 million drawn and, in the agency’s assessment, the company would not generate the cash to repay it; behind the revolver sat a $2.3 billion term loan due February 2028, $515 million of 11.75 percent secured notes due October 2028 and $500 million of 6 percent unsecured notes due February 2029. On September 19, 2025 Moody’s cut again, to Caa3 with a stable outlook, “as debt maturity approaches,” and no later Moody’s action has been published. The restructuring newsletter Pari Passu records the answer: a liability management exercise completed on December 8, 2025 that “extended all major maturities to 2029” and raised $102 million of new money with participation above 90 percent. Newfold’s own December 9 release called it a “recapitalization” and Rowlands said it would enable the company “to accelerate innovation and invest boldly in the future of our core brands.” We wrote at the time that the money was a bet on time rather than growth.
The same newsletter puts the owners’ side of the ledger on the record: $570 million in dividends taken out in 2021 and 2023 against roughly $1.2 billion of initial sponsor equity, and 2024 revenue of about $1.4 billion, down about 1.2 percent. S&P’s January upgrade to CCC+ followed the exchange, and its subscriber estimate of 5.8 million came with a diagnosis we reported on January 30: reduced marketing investment, slower product development, brand dilution and weak competitive positioning against GoDaddy, Wix and Squarespace. MarkMonitor, the enterprise brand-protection registrar, was sold to Com Laude in a deal that closed on December 31, 2025. The new chief executive therefore starts with maturities three years out, a subscriber base that has shrunk every year of the public record, and no enterprise registrar to sell next time.
Two Settlements and a Licence That Come With the Job
Two legal arrangements that predate the appointment will shape how Puri’s registrars and hosting brands operate. On September 3, Domain Incite reported that Newfold had settled Meta’s 2021 cybersquatting suit against its aftermarket subsidiary with an undisclosed payment, the transfer of the disputed domains and “trusted notifier” status for Meta, a fast track for Meta’s takedown complaints through Newfold’s abuse process. And WP Engine’s third amended complaint against Automattic, as we reported in February, describes Newfold as a hosting company that already pays Automattic for use of the WordPress trademark, the arrangement Automattic was seeking to extend to ten hosts. Puri came to Bluehost from Liquid Web, where he was chief growth officer, and before that was chief marketing officer at WP Engine, the company on the other side of that case, from August 2022 to March 2024.
For competitors, the appointment settles one question and opens another. The settled one is continuity: the person who set Bluehost’s Oracle, AI and DigiCert direction now sets it for Network Solutions, HostGator and Crazy Domains too, and the board has said as much. The open one is what an executive chair does at a sponsor-owned company between a completed exchange and a 2029 maturity wall. Rowlands’ bio lists board seats at Pegasystems and Everbridge among others, and the release says only that she “played a defining role in Newfold Digital’s history.” A working chair with the owners’ confidence is the natural counterpart to a chief executive whose experience is in operating brands rather than negotiating with lenders. Whether that division holds is something the next refinancing, not the next product launch, will show.
