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there — throughout my childhood, they always seemed to be juggling at least a couple of small business ventures, perhaps most notably a restaurant and a desktop publishing company. When a tour bus from Quebec would park outside the restaurant, its French-speaking passengers stepping off, I’d get a panicked phone call to come help out. My siblings and I — we all went to French school — would follow around the waiters, translating. I was exposed to my parents’ entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. When you love something, I learned, you pursue it fully. I also saw the particular challenges of small business ownership. At risk of stating the obvious, small businesses generally don’t have access to the tools and platforms that larger firms do. So, my day job as president of Newfold Digital, which owns Bluehost, is deeply rooted. I want to make sure companies of any size have the opportunity to create a dynamic online presence without breaking the bank. Today, the bar for a website has become incredibly high. If you were a restaurant or a corner ice cream shop or a nail salon in the 1990s or 2000s, you may not have needed one at all. You used to be able to get away with a parked url containing a cartoon construction sign and an animated character with a shovel declaring, “Coming soon.” Now, even one-person businesses on tight budgets need great websites. Artificial intelligence and a range of design-friendly tools have made the burden of design easier. But, often, companies want to work with experts to help them create a strategy and bring their vision to life. That’s what led us to launch our Bluehost Agency Partner Program. Our goal is to equip agencies and freelancers with everything they need to create exceptional websites for their clients, who range from massive companies to mom-and-pop small businesses.

s I grew up on the east coast of Canada, my parents lived very busy lives. They each held PhDs, and they loved the intellectual reward of their day jobs as scientists. But they didn’t stop

By Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE, as told by Shawn Shinneman

Our goal is to be the only platform small business owners need, whether they are a one-person business or employ 50 workers.

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a purus vitae lacus suscipit lobortis a sit amet quam. Vestibulum vulputate tincidunt enim, sit amet congue purus. Cras ultrices congue leo, ac pharetra leo ultrices ut. Pellentesque tristique nibh sed tincidunt pretium. Proin tincidunt tellus lacus, eget vestibulum turpis malesuada id. Nam ac eleifend maximus felis id ornare pulvinar. Nunc sit amet magna massa consectetur, blandit purus id, maximus elit. Cras massa hendrerit ex a sem faucibus dictum ligula. Quisque a mollis metus, vel tempor augue. Ut egestas venenatis odio non ultrices.

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At its core, the agency program is a mix of many of the things we already did well. We offer guaranteed, 100 percent uptime. We provide top-tier cloud hosting that allows businesses to scale their websites as they grow. Our commerce and SEO products for content creators and commerce businesses are as good as it gets. The challenge was in bringing together these benefits in a package so agencies understood them. I’m happy to say that we’ve already had hundreds of agencies sign up. A breakthrough came when we decided to create a limited-time offer to pay for the fees associated with switching a WordPress website to Bluehost. It was a sign of our confidence that we can deliver on our promises, and we saw people start to take notice. One customer who owned around 1,000 websites started small, migrating a couple over first, but eventually decided to migrate the entire stack.

In Jacksonville, after a series of meetings, I bumped into a Bluehost user in the lobby of our hotel, a woman named Jessica Griffin. She was selling ice cream, and I’ve never turned down a shot at dessert. She told me about the passion behind her business, Scoops of Favor, aimed at providing a better option in a lactose-free ice cream market she felt was lagging. I asked her who was building her online presence. “I’m working with this company called Bluehost,” she said. “Have you ever heard of them?” I had. Our leadership team spent the next several minutes picking Jessica’s brain, exchanging our ideas and hearing what worked about our experience and where we could offer more value. Jessica’s entrepreneurship journey, like so many others, started out part-time. Her headquarters was in her basement. Now she’s full-time and continuing to find success. It was a reminder of just how important this work is. Our goal is to be the only platform small business owners need, whether they are a one-person business or employ 50 workers. When we get it right, we help these businesses — who, collectively, make up nearly half of the economy — seamlessly scale and reach their goals. That is something worth fighting for.

Now, even one-person businesses on tight budgets need great websites.

Expectations of what a website should be will continue to ratchet up, so the technology available to smaller firms must advance in tandem. We have ambitious goals to help small businesses find success, empowering agencies and freelancers to create dynamic online experiences for those businesses. We want to be the number one player in our space globally, and I think we have the right platform and the right team to accomplish that. But for me, it always comes back to providing a leg up for the people who remind me a lot of my parents. Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the economy, driving innovation and growth, and sometimes all they need to reach their potential are a few innovative tools in one platform and ready access to support.

Click through to see how Bluehost helped one small business:

Driven by her own lactose intolerance, Jessica Griffin launched Scoops of Favor to provide anyone delicious ice cream, regardless of dietary restrictions. She started the small-batch creamery out of her basement in Jacksonville, Florida.

Building Scoops of Favor:

Growing the business meant creating an online presence equipped for retail. She chose Bluehost to host her website, and has worked with the Bluehost team to enhance design, optimize loading speed,and improve SEO.

The Need for an Online Presence:

As Griffin’s endeavor has grown from a part-time side hustle to a full-on business, she’s scaling up her website capacity accordingly. She’s currently on a Bluehost shared hosting plan but plans to move to Bluehost Cloud hosting to enable further expansion.

Enabling Future Growth:

Illustration: Richard Chance

By Ed Jay, President, Newfold Digital, as told to Shawn Shinneman

Why entrepreneurs and small businesses should have access to dynamic online tools.

FROM THE DESK OF:

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Diamandis had been getting showered in “no.” At the time he first came up with the concept — 1994 — there was no commercial market for space. The regulatory framework didn’t allow it, for one, but the average American didn’t pay that much mind, anyway. The enthusiasm accompanying the space race of the ’60s and ’70s had sputtered out. But Peter’s pitch found me at just the right time. It had been hard for others to grasp how his idea — to compile a chunk of money and incentivize people to create a commercially viable, privately financed spaceship — could make a marked difference considering the billions of dollars already backing NASA. That’s how people put it when they were being nice, at least. Others were more direct: “You’re crazy,” he’d heard. Or, “You’re going to get people killed.” I was then and remain today a massive believer in the power of entrepreneurs, the strength of the creative and motivated mind. I’d just sold my company and, as I told an interviewer back then, was pursuing my passion for space — working on a master’s degree in astronomy but already realizing there weren’t many opportunities for non-professional astronauts. Peter saw the article and tracked me down, and I felt so strongly about his idea that I eventually convinced my family we should back the $10 million initiative. If we could do it in space, we figured, we could do it with anything. We focused our energy on the biggest problems in the world, where governments and the private sector had failed to create a solution. Naturally, that took us toward conservation and sustainability. Climate change is the most pressing challenge facing our planet; it is at the root of so many other issues, which is why it’s become a throughline for our work.

If we could do it in space, we figured, we could do it with anything.

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The One That Started It All: Called the Ansari XPRIZE,the inaugural XPRIZE brought space exploration to private industry for the first time, spurring massive investment in the years since. The winners of the $10 million prize, which was awarded in 2004, would go on to license their technology to Richard Branson to create Virgin Galactic.

Increasing Access to Education: The Global Learning XPRIZE incentivized reliable and scalable edtech to address a critical gap in education — the more than 250 million children globally who can’t read, write, or do basic math. The $15 million prize was awarded in 2019. Millions of students have since benefited from the finalists’ technology.

Raising the Stakes on Carbon Removal: One of three ongoing competitions with nine-figure prize pools, the $100 million Carbon Removal XPRIZE incentivizes technology capable of gigaton-scale carbon removal, a key ingredient in the quest to sidestep the worst effects of climate change.

How a moonshot idea inspired 30 years of XPRIZE innovation.

Now, even one-person businesses on tight budgets need great websites. Artificial intelligence and a range of design-friendly tools have made the burden of design easier. But, often, companies want to work with experts to help them create a strategy and bring their vision to life. That’s what led us to launch our Bluehost Agency Partner Program. Our goal is to equip agencies and freelancers with everything they need to create exceptional websites for their clients, who range from massive companies to mom-and-pop small businesses. At its core, the agency program is a mix of many of the things we already did well. We offer guaranteed, 100 percent uptime. We provide top-tier cloud hosting that allows businesses to scale their websites as they grow. Our commerce products, like WooCommerce, are as good as it gets. The challenge was in bringing together these benefits in a package so agencies understood them. I’m happy to say that we’ve already had hundreds of agencies sign up. A breakthrough came when we decided to offer to pay for the fees associated with switching a WordPress website to Bluehost. It was a sign of our confidence that we can deliver on our promises, and we saw people start to take notice. One customer who owned around 1,000 websites started small, migrating a couple over first, but eventually decided to migrate the entire stack.