Laughing Squid Circuit Board by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – photo by Scott Beale
Laughing Squid is an art, culture & technology blog and a web hosting company focusing on WordPress hosting. It was founded by Scott Beale in 1995 and is currently based in New York City.
For more info see our FAQ and Wikipedia aricle.
Laughing Squid is made up of two complimentary entities, our blog and our web hosting services:
Laughing Squid Blog
We’ve been running a blog since 2003, where we post about a variety of interesting things. The Laughing Squid blog is run by founder Scott Beale, who is Publisher and Editor-In-Chief. He is joined by Senior Contributing Writers Lori Dorn, Justin Page and Glen Tickle.
Laughing Squid Web Hosting
Since 1998 we have been providing reliable, scalable and secure web hosting services to individuals, artists and bloggers. We are currently a 100% cloud-based web host with a focus on hosting WordPress blogs. Hosting is our primary source of revenue, aka the “business” side of Laughing Squid. If Laughing Squid were a mullet, web hosting would be the short part in the front. The revenue generated from our web hosting operations helps power the Laughing Squid blog.
The History of Laughing Squid
Laughing Squid was founded on November 16th, 1995 in San Francisco by Scott Beale as a film and video production company, producing documentaries on the surrealist painter Alonso Smith and The Cacophony Society’s Portland Santacon ’96 event. In 1996 Laughing Squid launched The Squid List, a San Francisco Bay Area events email list and calendar. For a while Laughing Squid offered publicity and web design services, but then started focusing on web hosting in 1998 as its primary business. Laughing Squid became a LLC in 2000, with partners John Law joining as head of special projects and David Klass joining as evangelist-at-large. In 2003 Laughing Squid launched its blog, which relaunched on WordPress in 2005. Laughing Squid moved its headquarters to New York City in 2010.
Here more on the history of the Laughing Squid name and the Laughing Squid Logo.
When Laughing Squid started out in San Francisco in 1995, it became part of a vibrant community, which includes events and organizations such as Burning Man, ArtCar Fest, Defenestration, Survival Research Labs, The Cacophony Society, SEEMEN, the extended universe of Chicken John, Power Tool Drag Races, Black Rock Arts Foundation, RoboGames, Santarchy (Santacon), Webzine, the original BarCamp, Maker Faire, dorkbot-sf, How to Destroy the Universe and Hi Fructose Magazine
Laughing Squid continues to keep close ties to many of these organizations.
