For over 17 years, Nublue has specialised in high traffic hosting platforms and hosts hundreds of online stores and CMS applications across the UK & Worldwide. Starting out as just two brothers with a dream back in 2005, today, as part of the cti group Nublue employ a team of hosting experts whose skills span from cloud hosting architecture, application performance optimisation to server security, cloud server administration, and award-winning support.
Nublue was born from a vision created by brothers Michael and Tom Ashworth back in 2005. A time when online retail was maturing and becoming more integrated with everyday life. The vision – to provide a ‘user led’ approach to ecommerce hosting. Nublue was to become a hosting agency that really understood how users were buying online, who their clients’ customers were and what would motivate them to complete their online journeys all the way to checkout, and beyond.
This core motivation of the business has helped Nublue grow and develop a reputation as a hosting agency who provide high performance, secure hosting and help their customers to build better online businesses.
We had a number of successful ecommerce stores in our portfolio, winning the team a prestigious Big Chip award in 2006. We were well versed in various systems such as OSCommerce and Interspire Shopping Cart. But with a new open-source cart on the market, Magento, our team saw the potential to provide an even more bespoke service. Following its beta launch in 2007, we adopted it as our platform of choice and committed fully to becoming experts in Magento hosting services.
We launched one of the original Magento web hosting products and started creating bespoke server configurations as a Magento hosting partner in 2009.
Our work is acknowledged with a number of industry awards including BIBAs and a Red Rose Award. Our growing reputation won the team hosting contracts with leading UK retailers like Toni & Guy, Penfield, Lowe Alpine and TH Baker.
To accommodate our growing team of hosting experts, we moved to new premises in Lancaster City Centre, continuing to be an accessible ‘big city provider’ from outside of the big cities. We never did like following the norm.
As part of our ongoing commitment to mastering the Magento platform at the highest level, the Nublue team became certified Magento 2 solution specialists.
2018 saw an exciting development for our hosting team as we started using Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) for our Cloud Hosting solutions. For the web’s most ambitious stores, clients can now take advantage of Amazon’s world leading AWS infrastructure, managed with exceptional support from our friendly, pro-active hosting experts.
In May 2019, Nublue became a part of the cti group, an award-winning network of leading agencies and specialists including cti digital, supercharged commerce, Ixis, Mosquito and Worship. The breadth and depth of knowledge in the group ensures we are able to facilitate services with some of the world's best technical and creative talent. Through our integrated network of agencies we can connect clients to services including design and development, digital strategy and experience consultancy, enterprise-level commerce, ecommerce route to market strategy, growth acceleration and ITIL lead application support.
Since September 2020, we are Approved Suppliers under the Government’s GCloud-12 Supplier List. This represents another step in our growth as a trusted, effective supplier of hosting solutions.
Across the cti group, nublue now provides and manages a consolidated Hosting service for all our fellow brands - including cti digital, Ixis, and Mosquito Digital. This means we provide our highly rated, award-winning support and hosting expertise to all areas and industries within the group.
