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GoDaddy Sells To Investor Group
wiredmikey writes "Domain name registrar and Web hosting provider GoDaddy, announced it has agreed to receive a strategic investment from private equity firms KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal reported people familiar with the deal saying it could be worth approximately $2.25 billion. The Scottsdale, Arizona based company which has built its marketing around scantly-clad women, manages more than 48 million domain names."
I used to like GoDaddy but moved all my domains away from them in the past year.
Scummy domain registrar gets even scummier.
Does there exist a way to have your domain in safer hands, or is this really the best there is?
as an employee -- i cringe to see how our "Unique Corporate Culture" will come crashing down around us. Does this mean no more "Mario-Cart" during our breaks?
Cashin' out the chips and going home before the inevitable bubble burst. The press release makes it sound like a 'partnership'. Is that just hipster MBA speak for politely saying that we've just been completely bought and that lots uf employees will be hosed to keep the investors happy? Time will tell...
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
keep the godaddy girl!
Namecheap has the best interface I've encountered.
Moniker is so-so. The interface is somewhat clunky, and it doesn't register domains as fast as Namecheap. For multiple domains, it puts them into a batch job that starts executing a few minutes later.
Any other good ones?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I've used GoDaddy for many years but have started to shy away from them recently due to the girls being just a little over the top for a professional business. I found it awkward too many times dealing with businesses and their comments regarding the plastering of girls everywhere on the site, especially when I'm dealing with a female executive and the awkwardness when the girls display on the screen front and center. Another issue with GoDaddy is their site always feels sluggish, as if they are running their site on 10 year old servers.
"The Scottsdale, Arizona based company which has built its marketing around scantly-clad women" There it is. Now we do the traditional Wall street dance known as the hump and dump. Send the Go Daddy girls in.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
To my knowledge they were one of the very few SSL providers which immediately revoked (and redistributed) every SSL certificate made with openssl when the Debian SSL disaster struck in 2008.
And well; coming from Europe I have to say that the continuous examples as to how prude the US actually is always makes me chuckle. The banned superbowl commercials for example; when looking at those I often have a hard time understanding what the fuss is all about.
scantly-clad women,
By which, I presume, they mean SCANTILY-clad women?
Also, this seems like investing in MySpace. People already were tired of a lot of GoDaddy practices, including the crap site full of attempts to pile on "value-adds" at the end of a purchase. Those who weren't tired of that were getting tired of the CEO's antics. All this will do is coax those who have meant to get around to switching registrars to finally do it. The only people who will still keep using GoDaddy will be a rank similar to those who still use Network Solutions -- the group of people who even in 2011 may still not know you can register domains elsewhere and for less than $70/yr.
Personally, this "investment" is hilarious. This is even funnier than Zynga (a marketing and spamming company masquerading as a gaming company entirely dependent on 2011's version of MySpace for its success). This is going to be fun to watch in the next three years.
This is somewhat off topic, but I found this part of the article interesting: "The Scottsdale, Arizona based company [...] manages more than 48 million domain names."
According to http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/, there are now 95 million .com domains, 14 million .net and 9 million .org.
Given that there are 7 billion people in the world (of which a lot use the internet), and afaik many of them register domains, not to mention all the squatters and companies, I find this a surprisingly small amount of domains.
What do you think of this?
enomcentral was a former enom.com reseller. enom doesnt sell to retail. it sells to resellers like web hosts, domain registrars etc. but when a big reseller flopped (enomcentral) enom took over the control of the outfit with agreement in order to prevent domain owners from going down. now it belongs to enom. in order to not compete with its resellers, enom charges quite high prices at enomcentral. but, enom is the most reliable domain registrar on the internet. in everything ranging from renewals to copyright/dmca issues etc.
Read radical news here
Now all my GoDaddy... oh... okay.
I looked at GoDaddy many times for hosting, but I could always find a better deal with more features somewhere else! I don't know how they are now, but they used to be behind the times with PHP, video hosting, things like that. I also heard a lot of people complain that their servers sere always down.
Fuck GoDaddy and their shitty business practices. One more month and I'm free of them. I can't wait.
I had a good experience with http://www.dreamhost.com/ a few years ago. Employee owned company with good prices, good service, and active forums that DreamHost's employee's participated in regularly.
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
Going from relatively (about 3k employees) small company with dominant market share to a global small business IT company. Formula for success has been found for English speaking countries, they will probably start looking overseas for new customers. Don't think they are dumb enough to outsource support, keeping call centers in the US has been a major factor of their success. More locations will probably be built to cater to those local customers in their native languages. They wouldn't have 3 major investors if there wasn't a huge opportunity for growth. Remember, they host 1/3 of all the internet. Love/hate them, it will be interesting to see how they invest all that money.
Now to go thru the hell of domain transfers with private domain name servers. faaaaakkkkkkk Ive got over 20 of them.
it could be worth approximately $2.25 billion
I wonder if they will suffer another new kind of malfunction - cash malfunction, value slipping down.
I worked for GoDaddy in the past and it was an awesome company to work for. As a company, they seemed to actually care for the employees. Pay was decent, benefits were good, and they went out of the way to show that they appreciated us as workers and understood that the ground floor workers are, literally, what makes or breaks a company.
I can't imagine that environment being sustained through the buyout.
To bad, it was a good time.
For people who want to know about GoDaddy, an excellent site which details their behaviors is closing their doors soon --
http://www.Nodaddy.com
For your clicking convenience - lol
KKR Pioneer in leveraged buy-outs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg_Kravis_Roberts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Kohlberg,_Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kravis
Silverlake Partners
also tech investors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Lake_Partners
SKYPE
Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announce the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from E-Bay, valuing the business at $2.75 billion
From the Wikipedia
"Early investors in KKR included the Hillman Family and the Griffith family (who are also large shareholders in MGM and Time-Warner)[6] By 1978, with the revision of the ERISA regulations, the nascent KKR was successful in raising its first institutional fund with approximately $30 million of investor commitments.[7]"
This is a very selective selection of links and is in no way comprehensive.
What do you think?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
I knew this would happen, After the Elephant incident I moved all my 5 domains to namecheap TAKE THAT GODADDY !
PairNIC.
Pittsburgh based. And awesome.
So if the numbers are right, that comes out to $46.87 per domain. That seems like a LOT of money, given the normal cost of registering is about $12.00 a year....
When will this mindless overpaying and consolidating trend ever end?
Wake Up America!! We will be left with two companies providing all goods and services before two long... and no competition is NOT a good thing.
www.nearlyfreespeech.net will register your domains, host your website, forward your mail, and do it all without the soul-sucking experience you get everywhere else. Speaking as a satisfied customer.
Bob Parsons, for better or worse, is still the majority shareholder in the company. The investment groups mentioned several times they don't want to mess with the "secret sauce" at GD. I believe, and this is due to actually working there, that they're gearing up for some reorganization and the goal is internationalization. I think these investors are smart enough to see the potential GD has with its dominant share of domain names and hosting. Yes, I do hope we drop the up-selling crap in the main purchase path(doubtful). I hope our commercials start advertising our products and tone down the GD girls(doubtful). I hope we get a CTO with experience, vision, and leadership skills. It's what we lack most.
http://www.namesilo.com/
I have no points to mod up the parent, but I would like to ask the same question.
Does any other registrar support DNSSEC?
I've looked at register.com, 1and1, and dyndns, but godaddy was the only one that supported DNSSEC (and it was even simple to configure).
I've had the displeasure of setting up hosting for people who've purchased their domains from GoDaddy.
There's always some problem or another; Some basic task will just not work for no reason until you transfer the domain away from their greedy little paws.
Most recently it was the MX records of a local non-profit's site. The .com MX records would simply not correctly point to the hosting provider's MX records. Thankfully I quickly purchased the .org companion domain in the non-profit's name via their hosting provider, and we used the .org site's mailing instead (until the .com was transferred -- the hosting plan included 3 domain names). GoDaddy tech support said they were aware of the issue, had their techs working on the problem, and would notify me when it was fixed -- It didn't get "fixed" for 6 months.
I once searched and searched for a short catchy name to use for my software product that wasn't taken yet... I actually came up with a fitting name that didn't turn up any Google results or whois queries. I was already had the GoDaddy site open in a tab -- managing a client's domain -- so I quickly searched with GoDaddy to ensure the domain wasn't taken -- GoDaddy showed the domain was available, and at the lowest standard price too!
That night, at home, I couldn't register the domain via a different Registrar. I gave up after trying 3 other hosts, frustrated and upset. Two days later, I was at GoDaddy, and just impulsively entered the domain name I wanted -- It was shown as available?! However, the price had risen -- a 10 fold increase! I scratched my head, and a phone call interrupted me.
About an hour later I tried to register the domain from GoDaddy and it had already sold.
Apparently if you search for a domain on GoDaddy, they immediately reserve it. This prevents you from using another Registrar to purchase the domain, but it keeps others from snatching it away -- This benefit is utterly destroyed as they then advertise the domain you searched for as a "premium" domain to other shoppers and allow them to "back-order" it in the event that you don't complete your purchase before your "grace period" expires. Thereby ensuring that if you search for your domain on GoDaddy, you must purchase it via GoDaddy. (I've added their site to my hosts file blacklists at home).
Ultimately I tried contacting the registrant -- They turned out to be domain squatters who auctioned off domains via automated online auction sites, and wanted to sell it to me for even more money than they were auctioning it off at. I refused on principal; I would not fund such a practice.
As with other items that have a demand and (artificial) scarcity, a market was formed around the domain names. This is why new URIs are typically terrible...
I suppose I could register WhereHaveAllTheDomainNamesGoneDamnIt.com, but I think I'll just start spam searching crappy names like that to drive up their prices and cause some mischief instead.
Google bid for Nortel, what the hell does that have to do with GoDaddy?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".