The business known as Network Solutions was founded in 1979 by Emmit J. McHenry, an entrepreneur who was born in Arkansas. The business started out as an engineering company but, over the next thirty years, evolved into one of the largest Internet Organizations in existence. In 2000, VeriSign acquired Network Solutions for around $20b (the most expensive Internet acquisition in history). In 2004, the company purchased InQuent Technologies, a Canadian provider of website hosting and email services.

Today, the company trades under the company name of Network Solutions with Tim Kelly as the CEO (since April 2009). The company has its largest presence in Herndon, Virginia, although there are Network Solutions’ offices all over the world.

The mailing address is Herndon, VA – Corporate Headquarters, 13861 Sunrise Valley Dr. Suite 300, Herndon, VA 20171.

At last count, Network Solutions had around 900 employees and hosts more than 350,000 Web sites. Its data centres are based in Herndon in United States.

The host uses a Linux platform and offers shared and VPS hosting.

Network Solutions also offers a wide range of other Internet related services, such as domain registration, website design and online marketing.

It has won the following major awards and recognitions:

In 2008, for the third year running, Network Solutions was given an award by the JD Power and Associates Certified Call Center Program for an outstanding level of customer service.
Two American Business Awards: Best Customer Service Executive 2007 and Best Turnaround Executive 2006.
At the beginning of 2009, hundreds of thousands of sites hosted by Network Solutions suffered when the company’ DNS servers were hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

There have also been several controversies related to Network Solutions:

the company has been accused of ‘domain name front running’. This happens when a visitor searches to see if a domain is available via the Networks Solution website. If it is, it is ‘reserved’ for the customer for four days and then released again. However, those lists of searched for domains are publicly available, which means many of them are bought within milliseconds after those four days are up, and are then sold back to the innocent customer that searched for them in the first place. More info here: http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/01/network-solutions-steals-domain-ideas-confirmed/
in 2008, Network Solutions came under fire for pre-censoring an anti-Islamic site that was due to host a newly released movie. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/networksolutions_precensors_an.html
in 2010, Network Solutions has faced some serious hack attacks http://news.techworld.com/security/3221030/network-solutions-hacked-again-after-mass-wordpress-blogs-attack/?olo=rss