A Conversation with Ryan Gray, Founder of NameHero

Every hosting company has an origin story. Some begin with a business plan. Others begin with a problem that has to be solved.

For Ryan Gray, Founder of NameHero, that problem started early. Long before NameHero became a fast-growing hosting provider, Ryan was a teenager trying to keep a popular website online and learning firsthand what happens when ordinary shared hosting cannot keep up.

That experience helped shape the way NameHero thinks about performance, support, infrastructure, and customer trust today.

As part of the JetBackup Partner Spotlight series, we spoke with Ryan about how NameHero got started, what makes their approach different, why backups are essential to their hosting strategy, and how AI may reshape the hosting industry over the next three years.

Tell us about NameHero.com. How did you get started in hosting?

“I was actually ‘forced’ into the industry back in 1999 when my first website got really popular, and I was suspended for a bandwidth overage. The site had outgrown a shared hosting account, so I had no choice but to move it to a dedicated server. That’s where it started.

At 14 years old, I developed a love for Linux and figuring out how to optimize and scale solutions. I figured if I was running into this problem, I sure as hell wasn’t the only one. I saw the potential back then. I spent the next decade putting those skills to work across a number of successful online businesses.

By 2014, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the state of the shared hosting industry. My dad was using a shared host I had recommended for his small business, and he was constantly dealing with downtime, customer support that didn’t exist, and a slow website. Meanwhile, the sites for my businesses were scaling easily, always online, and blazing fast.

With the rise of cloud technology, I built a custom stack that scaled flawlessly, remained available, and remained secure. So I had the thought: if my dad is dealing with this and I’m sitting here with this stack, what happens if I merge the two and make it available to everyone? In January 2015, NameHero launched.”

NameHero’s origin story is rooted in a problem many hosting customers still understand today: outgrowing basic hosting and needing something more reliable, scalable, and responsive. Ryan’s early experience as both a website owner and technical operator gave him a clear view of the gap between what customers needed and what many shared hosting providers were delivering.

What market, niche, or geographic region do you primarily serve?

“Initially, we focused on resellers, web developers, and agencies in North America. A lot of other hosting companies were so overloaded on their existing infrastructure that they pushed back hard and severely limited those markets.

From there, we branched out to small businesses and individual blogs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw rapid growth across every vertical because informational websites were suddenly forced to bring their products and services online. Even local restaurants had to adapt to a brutal time by making ordering available through their websites.

Today we operate a physical data center in Lenexa, Kansas, with our private cloud also deployed in London, Toronto, and Mumbai.”

That focus on resellers, developers, agencies, and small businesses shows how NameHero grew by serving customers who needed more than a basic hosting account. These customers often manage important websites, client projects, and revenue-generating applications, which makes infrastructure reliability, performance, and backup access even more important.

What makes NameHero different from larger, more generic hosting providers?

“I personally built and developed NameHero’s entire stack based on real-world experience from multiple successful internet businesses that had to be online 24x7x365 and serve millions of visitors around the globe.

From racking physical hardware, to virtualization and software, to complex BGP routers, this stack isn’t static. It’s constantly evolving, and so are we. We move the needle a little every single day, and we’re always developing based on what the environment demands.

But our real secret sauce is our Superhero Team. They’re real people who genuinely care about our customers’ websites and businesses. I’ve always said we can have the best tech stack known to man, but without the right people, we’re nothing. People above profits, always.”

In hosting, technology matters, but people often define the customer experience. NameHero’s approach combines hands-on infrastructure knowledge with a support culture built around real customer outcomes. That balance is especially important in an industry where many customers only discover the quality of their provider when something goes wrong.

What was the first customer, project, or moment that made you think, “We are really building something here”?

“As we picked up our first 100 customers, I worked closely with a lot of them on their exact needs and the problems they were facing. Every single one of them had problems that were solvable, but they were being dropped by other providers because they were just a number in a system.

I knew our technology could not only solve those issues but prevent them, and that our people could explain it in a way that actually made sense. As we solved one case after another, that’s when I knew this thing was going to scale.

NameHero has since been featured as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the US by Inc. 5000 in 2022, 2023, and 2024.”

That early customer work became a proving ground for NameHero’s model. Instead of treating support as a cost center or pushing difficult cases aside, Ryan saw each problem as a chance to improve the platform, strengthen the customer relationship, and build a company that could scale without losing sight of individual customer needs.

What do your customers value most about working with your team?

“The promptness and effectiveness of the solutions. When a customer brings us an issue, it becomes OUR issue, and even when something falls outside our scope, we do everything we can to find them a solution anyway.

Our team loves solving hard problems. Customer care and feedback are the root of our fabric.”

That mindset is one of the clearest differences between transactional hosting and relationship-driven hosting. Customers value speed, but they also value ownership. When a provider treats the customer’s issue as its own issue, support becomes more than a ticket queue. It becomes part of the trust customers place in the brand.

How do backups fit into your overall hosting strategy?

“Backups are absolutely essential. We’re one of the few providers that give every customer one nightly and one weekly backup, complimentary. That doesn’t just cover our individual customers; it also covers the customers of our resellers.

We’ve always absorbed that cost because it’s in our customers’ best interest. Backups are like insurance. You don’t need them until you need them, and when you do, you’re damn glad you have them.”

For NameHero, backups are not treated as a premium afterthought. They are part of the customer experience and a core layer of protection across both direct customers and reseller environments. That is especially important for resellers, who depend on reliable backups not only for their own business continuity, but also for the trust they maintain with their customers.

Why did you choose JetBackup as part of your backup offering?

“Some vendors get it right, some don’t. For those who don’t, we build our own solutions. Backups are simple in theory, but actually running backups that are consistently valid and don’t crush performance across thousands of accounts is complicated.

The early vendors NameHero used had the same problem you see with a lot of our competitors in the industry: they stopped developing their technology. They went static, and that makes those two things really tough to pull off.

It got to the point where we were about ready to build our own solution, and then came JetBackup. I started testing it personally, and to this day, we don’t release anything unless I’ve used it myself. It hit the mark.

And it keeps hitting the mark, daily, weekly, consistently. JetBackup has saved our ass more times than I can count, and I mean that. It consistently helps us produce backups that are valid and run nightly without taking a toll on performance. It’s flexible, it’s easy to use, and our customers have full control over their data.”

At scale, backups are not just about copying files. They are about consistency, performance, restore confidence, and customer control. Ryan’s answer highlights a challenge many hosting providers know well: a backup system has to work quietly in the background until the exact moment it becomes business-critical. For NameHero, JetBackup became a solution that could keep pace with their infrastructure and customer expectations.

Where do you see the hosting industry going over the next three years?

“AI is going to change the way the hosting industry looks in a big way. A lot of companies aren’t going to make it, for the exact same reason my dad’s website was slow back in 2014: they’ll fail to adapt.

Websites, servers, email, and domains, none of that is going away, but the way we approach all of it is going to change. The companies that are constantly evolving will keep pace with the industry and see significant growth. It’s really that simple.

I’m not on the ‘AI is going to take all the jobs’ train. I think it’s going to change the job description, but it all comes down to adapting, developing, and progressing. Had I kept doing things the way I did in 1999, can you imagine the mess I’d be sitting in right now?”

Ryan’s view of AI is practical and aligned with the broader history of hosting. The fundamentals may remain, websites, servers, email, domains, and applications still need to be hosted, secured, backed up, and supported, but the way providers operate will continue to change. The companies that adapt their tools, processes, and customer experience will be better positioned for the next stage of the industry.

A Hosting Partner Built on Evolution, Performance, and Customer Care

NameHero’s story is a reminder that the best hosting companies are not just selling space on a server. They are solving real business problems for customers who depend on their websites every day.

From Ryan’s early experience scaling his own websites, to building a hosting stack designed for speed and reliability, to offering complimentary nightly and weekly backups for customers and resellers, NameHero has built its business around a simple idea: customers deserve hosting that performs, support that cares, and infrastructure that keeps evolving.

At JetBackup, we are proud to support hosting providers like NameHero that understand how critical reliable backups are to the customer experience. Backups are not just a safety net. For modern hosting companies, they are part of the trust layer that keeps customers protected, confident, and in control of their data.