The Team Behind the Bouncer
20+ years of IRC experience, distilled into a managed platform
that just works. Here's our story.
About ZNCHost
We're a team of IRC veterans with 20+ years on the protocol. We've been through netsplits, DDoS storms and enough misconfigured bouncers to last a lifetime.
We built ZNCHost because enterprise-grade managed IRC hosting simply didn't exist. It started as an internal tool for our own team, but turned out to be too useful to keep to ourselves.
Today we provide a rock-solid, privacy-first communication platform for individuals and teams who take IRC seriously.
ZNCHost is a brand of Blendbyte Inc., headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.
About Blendbyte
Blendbyte is the parent company behind ZNCHost. We build and operate custom cloud and hosting infrastructure for businesses of all sizes.
Our founding team started out as early cloud advocates across various tech companies and pooled decades of ops experience to launch Blendbyte in 2015.
Today we run production workloads from medium to large scale on our own purpose-built cloud systems, fully managed and worry-free for our clients.
New to the Protocol? We Got You.
A quick primer on the tech that powers millions of real-time conversations every day:
What is IRC?
More on WikipediaInternet Relay Chat is one of the oldest and most battle-tested chat systems in the world. It enables chatting in channels with a group of people or individual messages between users.
There are various big, public IRC networks available for different target groups to use, like Libera Chat, IRCnet, UnderNet, OFTC, EFnet, Rizon or QuakeNet.
To connect to those networks you can either use one of the popular IRC applications like mIRC, WeeChat, Konversation, Textual or HexChat or use web-based clients like The Lounge or KiwiIRC.
ZNC is an open-source IRC bouncer software. It sits between your client and the actual IRC server and therefore provides a layer of security in between and doesn't expose your IP address.
Furthermore it stays connected to the IRC server, even if you're not online. It will record channel and personal messages while you're away and will relay them to you upon your next connect.
It comes with a broad plugin universe (like notifications, automations, auto-logins etc.) that can enhance your experience greatly.
Open Source Runs in Our Veins
Usage of Open-Source Software
Our entire stack is built on open-source projects, with ZNC itself being the most obvious one. Without the OSS ecosystem, ZNCHost simply wouldn't exist.
Every member of our team actively contributes back: code, bug reports, documentation, support and community involvement across the projects we rely on.
Blendbyte Inc., ZNCHost's parent company, also supports the open-source space through monetary donations and free cloud resources for qualifying projects.
OSS Deals & Sponsoring
Running an open-source project that could benefit from managed IRC infrastructure? We offer discounted plans and, for the right fit, full sponsorships.
These spots are limited and we can't cover every project, but if yours is a good match we'd love to help out.
Head over to our dedicated open-source page for details and how to apply.
Our Global Network
Distributed infrastructure across multiple regions, built for low latency and high availability.
Don't see your region? Let us know and we'll look into expanding there.