"We are excited to partner with the top rate management team at FireHost in an effort to accelerate the company's leadership position in secure cloud hosting," said Aaron Clark, vice president of The Stephens Group, LLC. "Web security is a critical issue of increasing importance, and FireHost has proven its ability to deliver customers a highly secure solution in an efficient and scalable public cloud environment."

FireHost, a secure cloud hosting company, announced on Thursday a growth investment by The Stephens Group, LLC, as well as earlier-round investors. This capital infusion validates FireHost's position that security is a top priority for businesses using the cloud and will help the company scale rapidly in the next 12 months, including an expansion to Europe. FireHost has strategically positioned itself as the premium managed hosting provider for websites and applications with critical data protection and performance needs. In a short period of time FireHost has managed to successfully secure tens of thousands of websites, and block millions of hack attempts for customers in 26 countries, including several Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 companies.

This investment comes on the heels of rapid customer growth and product innovation. In April of this year the company released the first independently validated PCI-DSS 2.0 compliant public cloud hosting. Since the launch, FireHost has attracted a vast number of large customers including Hewlett Packard, Johns Hopkins University, Farmer's Insurance, Johnson & Johnson, Duke University and Sotheby's. FireHost will use the additional capital to expand into the UK, further advance the hosting and security platform and broaden the investment in sales and marketing.

"FireHost has successfully ushered in its security-centered ethos to its cloud computing platform, and should capitalize on enterprise demand for secure cloud solutions," said Antonio Piraino, vice president of Tier1 Research. "This funding comes at an opportune time, as we enter a heightened era of cloud innovation, particularly around SaaS solutions, and with it an increasing need to speak to the security assurances of using those off-premise products for core day-to-day business productivity."

FireHost first gained momentum in 2009 when the company agreed to host the website of known former-hacker Kevin Mitnick, after his own site suffered a series of embarrassing hacks that were widely publicized. FireHost continues to successfully block thousands of hack attempts a day against Mitnick's site.