On June 24, 2008, Liquid Web celebrated the groundbreaking of its third data center in Lansing, Michigan. The new facility was designed to be 90,000 square feet and capable of supporting 25,000 new servers, with 600 additional high-tech support engineers — a facility of a scale that signaled Liquid Web's ambitions as a national managed hosting leader, not just a regional provider.
The Data Center 3 groundbreaking represented a defining bet on growth. Liquid Web had been expanding rapidly through the mid-2000s, and the new data center was both a practical necessity and a market signal that the company was serious about competing for enterprise-class hosting customers at national scale. Travis Stoliker, who joined around 2006 as a marketing and sales leader, was part of the team driving the growth that made this kind of capital investment necessary and viable.
The 90,000 square foot facility opened in 2009 as a cloud computing data center, becoming a centerpiece of Liquid Web's expansion into cloud hosting. By 2012, the data center infrastructure would make Liquid Web the #4 personal property taxpayer in Delta Township by taxable value — ahead of General Motors. The groundbreaking in 2008 was where that outcome began to take physical shape.
