Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has landed one of the most self-explanatory domain names on the internet. WebHosting.com spent years sitting dormant under AT&T’s ownership, quietly pushing traffic to an ATT.com subdomain. Now it belongs to the WordPress parent company, with a bare “coming soon” page as the only clue about what comes next.
DomainTools records show the transfer went through within the past week, with WebHosting.com moving from CSC to MarkMonitor and listing Automattic as the new registrant. AT&T never did much with the domain over the years, which makes the acquisition read less like a competitive strike and more like Automattic picking up an opportunity that had been sitting in plain sight.
The more interesting question is what Automattic plans to do with it. The company already owns a broad ecosystem of WordPress-adjacent brands, including Jetpack, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and Pressable, its managed WordPress hosting lab. What it hasn’t had is a straightforward consumer-facing hosting brand with a name that explains itself immediately. WebHosting.com does exactly that, and for a company whose entire ecosystem revolves around helping people build and run websites, it fits naturally.
The most likely direction is a hosting platform aimed specifically at WordPress users looking for a simple, branded place to migrate and manage their sites. Automattic has spent years building out the infrastructure side of that equation through Pressable and its other properties. A consumer-friendly brand sitting on top of that infrastructure could pull in a much wider audience than any of its current hosting-related brands reach today.
The acquisition price hasn’t surfaced yet, and it was likely a private deal. AT&T may disclose the sale in a future regulatory filing, which would finally put a number to one of the more interesting domain transactions of the year. For now, the “coming soon” page on WebHosting.com is doing its job: sparking exactly this kind of speculation about what Automattic is building.
