Packet Host

About Packet Host

Packet Host Inc., founded in 2014, established itself as a key player in the bare metal cloud hosting market. The company was the brainchild of co-founders, including brothers Zachary and Jacob Smith, alongside Aaron Welch. CEO Zachary Smith brought nearly two decades of experience in building and managing public cloud infrastructure platforms to the venture. His journey into tech is unconventional; he originally moved to New York to study classical double bass at Juilliard before immersing himself in the world of servers and web hosting. This deep-seated expertise was honed at Voxel, an early cloud hosting startup, which was successfully sold to Internap in 2011. After a year leading Internap's Cloud Business Unit, Zachary's vision for automating fundamental infrastructure led to the creation of Packet.

The firm's core business revolves around providing a bare metal automation platform specifically for developers. This service allows clients to provision and manage dedicated physical servers with the agility and speed typically associated with virtualized cloud environments, with premium server configurations that can be provisioned in eight minutes or less. Packet empowers developer-driven companies to deploy these bare metal servers at a global scale, supporting cloud, on-premise, hybrid-cloud, and edge computing solutions. The business model focused on offering infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), catering to clients who required the high performance and consistency of dedicated hardware without the overhead of managing it. The platform's unique selling proposition was its ability to automate the complexities of infrastructure, regardless of its physical location or ownership.

A significant milestone in the company's history was its acquisition by Equinix, the global data center and interconnection giant, in a deal finalized in March 2020 for approximately $335 million. This strategic acquisition was aimed at accelerating Equinix's strategy to help enterprises deploy hybrid multicloud architectures more seamlessly. Following the acquisition, the business began operating as "Packet, an Equinix company," with Zachary Smith taking the role of Managing Director for the bare metal business. The integration was designed to combine Packet's agile bare metal automation with Equinix's vast global data center footprint and interconnection platform, creating a more robust offering for enterprise customers.