Cloudfest get out from under the corporate umbrella — NamesCon and

Events are no longer part of sizable domain and hosting firms.

NamesCon and Cloudfest are officially out from being under a big corporate umbrella.

WHD Event GmbH purchased the assets of the two conferences from GoDaddy the prior week. GoDaddy purchased the conferences as part of its buyout of Host Europe Group in 2017. Host Europe Group purchased what is now called Cloudfest in 2014 as part of another buyout. WHD purchased NamesCon in 2016.

Soeren von Varchmin, the leading face of the two events, describes the fresh owners as “hardcore fans” of the conferences.

Two of the fresh owners are original founders of Cloudfest: Jochen Berger and Thomas Strohe. They founded the hosting firms intergenia (sold to Host Europe Group and then GoDaddy) and PlusServer (sold to BC Partners). They recently invested in WebPros (cPanel, Plesk, WHMCS).

Serguei Beloussov, founder of Parallels and Acronis, is also an investor.

With the buyout, von Varchmin is moving into a fresh role as Chairman of the Supervisory Board. This will allow him to focus more on programming instead of operations.

Christian Jaeger — who once worked for Cloudfest in sales — has taken the CEO role at the firm.

The firm’s next big event is CloudFest, taking place online March 23-25.