Endurance is cutting 90 employees in Austin, affects Site5

Endurance International Group, a publicly traded company that operates many hosting providers, will be laying off employees at its office in Austin, Texas. The move will impact around 90 employees that provide customer support for three of its hosting subsidiaries: Arvixe, A Small Orange, and Site5.

The announcement came on January 24, a few days after Endurance told employees it would close its Bluehost headquarters in Orem, Utah. Endurance’s website says the company employs “well over 300” employees in Austin.

Now the corporate office in Austin will focus on professional services, while its office in Houston will be the primary Texas office for customer support, alongside Endurance’s facility in Tempe, Arizona.

“Approximately 90 support agents are affected by the consolidation in Austin impacting the Endurance brands: Arvixe, A Small Orange, and Site5,” an Endurance spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

The cuts will be staggered across April, May, and June, according to a memo that was obtained by VentureBeat. The people losing their jobs will receive a month’s worth of salary, two weeks’ worth of regular severance, and a week’s worth for every year of employment, as well as three months’ worth of COBRA, according to the memo.

Arvixe, founded in 2003, offers Linux and Windows hosting, managed WordPress hosting, dedicated managed servers, traditional virtual private servers (VPS), and domain registration. A Small Orange, which also dates to 2003, offers much the same, in addition to a website builder and design services. Site5, which provides VPS and “unmetered” web hosting, goes back to 1999.

But these entities for years have faced competition from public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. There are also more modern venture-backed hosters, such as DigitalOcean, to contend with. Texas company Rackspace ultimately went back to specializing in managed cloud and hosting and wound up going private after attempting to compete head to head with AWS.

Endurance acquired A Small Orange in 2010 and Site5 in 2015. The 2014 Arvixe acquisition brought 150,000 domains to Endurance.