Highwinds Network Group, Inc. is a company that was founded in 2002 and offers IP services including CDN, cloud storage, IP transit, transport and colocation. The company headquarters are located in Winter Park, Florida, United States. Highwinds maintains Network Operations Centers in Winter Park, FL, Phoenix, AZ, and Amsterdam, Netherlands as well as offices in Costa Mesa, CA, São Paulo, Brazil and London, England. The Highwinds network, called RollingThunder, consists of more than 70 points of presence throughout North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Highwinds provides video streaming services to media companies including Blip.TV and Hudl, delivers online games for publishers such as Valve and CCP Games and distributes advertising assets for leading platforms including Facebook's LiveRail.
Financing announcements
On March 11, 2008, Highwinds announced it had closed a $55 million round of equity financing led by General Catalyst Partners and Alta Communications. The funds will be used to expand the Highwinds CDN and RollingThunder network. On May 4, 2011, Highwinds announced that it had secured a $50 million credit facility with Silicon Valley Bank and Comerica Bank. According to the press release from the company, the new credit facility allowed Highwinds to achieve a more attractive all-in cost of capital and was evidence of the company's impressive financial profile. On August 8, 2013, Highwinds announced that it had secured $205 million in new financing. The transaction was led by Cerberus Business Finance, LLC and Goldman Sachs BDC, Inc., an investment fund managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, L.P., with participation from the company's existing equity sponsor, General Catalyst Partners, and the company's management team. The funding positioned Highwinds for massive growth of its global CDN. On February 4, 2017, Highwinds was acquired by StackPath, a cloud services company. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. As quoted in their blog, "Highwinds' services and platform will be integrated with existing StackPath offerings and operations to create a single global platform with the industry's best security features and performance." Omicron Media, the former owner of Highwinds, maintained ownership over the Usenet portion of Highwinds and maintains their operations under the name HW Media. HW Media currently provides Usenet services to ISPs and resellers. HW Media is consistently in the Top 10 out on the TOP1000 Usenet Servers.
HW Media anticompetitive practices controversy
HW Media is well known for its reseller services and claiming to be the Usenet server with the largest retention. However, resellers of HW media fail to disclose that they work with the company. Most people who buy multiple accounts for increased binary completion end up buying multiple accounts from different HW resellers. This leads to people paying multiple times for the same service. This has drawn criticism from Usenet users that HW Media is trying to deceive customers by not making their resellers disclose their affiliation with HW Media. The list below is non-exhaustive list of HW Media resellers:
