GoDaddy gets foothold in more technical customer segment with latest acquisition.
GoDaddy has acquired Los Angeles-based webhosting company (mt) Media Temple, known simply as (mt), for an undisclosed price.
(mt) targets a more technical customer base than GoDaddy, and the two companies will remain distinctly separate. (mt) will continue to focus on a more technical/developer audience and will not take on any of GoDaddy’s branding.
GoDaddy says the deal will help it get a foothold in the web pro and developer market, and that the company will be able to rely on (mt)’s technical expertise to improve its own hosting operations. A key part of the deal for (mt) was that it could remain autonomous.
In a blog post on its website, (mt) tries to head off possible criticism of the acquisition given GoDaddy’s somewhat low reputation among techies:
GoDaddy has been transformed in recent months and is essentially a new company. If we did not like what we have seen, we would not have joined the GoDaddy family. They have overhauled their leadership team and attracted tech talent from the best-of-the-best. We love “the new GoDaddy” that CEO Blake Irving and his team have created, especially their new approach with advertising, product focus and UX.
(mt) has more than 125,000 customers and hosts more than 1.5 million websites. While many of these are small sites, large clients include Sony, Nordstrom, The Wall Street Journal, Starbucks, IBM and Volkswagen.
This is the GoDaddy’s sixth acquisition in the past 15 months.
I hope they wouldn’t store users passwords in plain txt format. 🙂
Very strange fit.
MT has supported the creme de la creme in design as its marketing strategy.
GoDaddy takes a low end, unsophisticated approach supporting cars and girls.
I think that’s the point. By keeping them separate it can get the creme de la creme in design while selling its GoDaddy services to SMBs.
GoDaddy is on a buying frenzy this year. They also purchased San Francisco startup Locu and Afternic this year.
I worked at Godaddy for many years and had a chance to speak with some of the mt employees at the latest Godaddy Holiday party. They seemed like pretty sharp guys. Their culture seemed to be different from Godaddy’s though so I wonder how well the integration will go. It sounded like they planned on keeping everything pretty separate, at least for the time being.