Archive for the ‘go daddy’ Category
A long time fixture at Go Daddy is moving on.
Christine Jones, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary for Go Daddy, will leave the company Friday after 10 years.
Jones managed all legal affairs for the company and frequently represented the company as a witness at congressional hearings. She was a key player at the company and the industry given her role in lobbying in Washington. She even had a cameo in GoDaddy’s 2009 “enhancement” Super Bowl commercial.
During her ten years at the company she watched it grow from a small startup to a multi-billion dollar company, including taking on an investment from PE firms last year.
But her tenure wasn’t always smooth sailing. Most recently, Jones got caught up in SOPA as she originally testified to congress in favor of the bill. GoDaddy later relented and changed its stance on the bill, but its position resulted in a good number of customers transferring their domains to competitors.
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Warren Adelman discloses new TLD applications and discusses the challenges of offering more domain choices to customers.
Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, has applied for three top level domains, CEO Warren Adelman told Domain Name Wire today. (News of the applications was first reported by Paul Sloan at CNET).
The company has applied for its own .brand domain .godaddy, as well as two additional top level domains (TLD). That’s a lot less than you can expect from at least one competitor.
“As the world’s largest domain name registrar, we wanted to have our own TLD,” said Adelman.
He thinks the company’s plans for the additional two TLDs will be more interesting. But he is mum on what those TLDs will be since the application process is still open.
Even bigger on the company’s radar for the next couple years is how it will offer hundreds of new TLDs to its customer base.
“No one can sell 2,000 TLDs,” he said.
Go Daddy already uses algorithms to determine which TLDs to show in domain search results. The company received a patent on its ranking system last year. Think of it like Google Adwords; registries “bid” for placement on GoDaddy.com and then are ranked based on a number of algorithms.
“We’ve done some work with it [the algorithm] and you may see it become more important in 2013 as a way for us to actually handle a fairly large number of new TLDs,” said Adelman. “All registrars will have to make decisions about how to best present TLDs to customers.”
With registry-registrar integration, Go Daddy will be able to offer its own TLDs to its customers. Although that may create a conflict, Adelman points to the company’s handling of .me as proof that it can be managed. The company helped commercialize .me, the country code for Montenegro.
“.Me started with an email I sent to the Minister of Communications in Montenegro,” Adelman said. Go Daddy has certainly promoted .me on its site, but it’s not the number one search result.
As for the company’s position on new TLDs in general, Adelman says it has always been cautious.
“We always voiced caution in the size of the rollout,” he said. “We said ‘Listen, there’s a lot of things happening simultaneously — new TLDs, IPV6, IDNs, DNNSEC. Perhaps there should be a more cautious approach.’”
Problems with ICANN’s new TLD application system are one example of unexpected challenges that can come up — and that’s just with applying. Adelman says ICANN will certainly have to explain the problems to the community at its next meeting in Prague. But he puts it in perspective.
“Every day I wake up and, generally speaking, the internet works. People kind of trivialize that accomplishment, but for the most part they’ve made sure the infrastructure is up and working and we can access IP addresses as part of the domain name system. They’ve done this in a complicated environment of various internet users.”
“2013 will be a wild year,” said Adelman.
That’s for sure.
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Domain registrar continues to apply for patents but hasn’t gone on the offensive yet.
Will GoDaddy’s patent strategy change now that it has taken an investment from three private equity giants?
It’s an important question for the domain name and web hosting industries because of the size of the company’s patent war chest.
A search with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows 65 issued patents for The Go Daddy Group and close to 200 pending.
These patents cover a broad range of technologies and business processes, ranging from whois privacy services to domain name suggestion spinning and domain hijack protection.
But to date the company hasn’t sued any competitors for patent infringement.
Karl Fazio, Associate General Counsel – Patents for Go Daddy told Domain Name Wire that might not change despite the new investment by KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures.
“We do have plenty of patents in our portfolio that are powerful and could be monetized if we chose to do that,” he explained, but added that he’s not aware of any plans to go on the offense.
“The new partnership [investment] doesn’t change the fundamental principles of why you have a robust patent portfolio,” he said.
The patent portfolio protects the company’s products and gives it “room to operate”. A strong patent portfolio also discourages other companies from suing it for patent infringement.
One company has tried. In 2006 Web.com sued Go Daddy for patent infringement. The settlement in 2009 included a cross-licensing agreement of the companies’ patent portfolios. The lawsuit was settled before Web.com acquired both Register.com and Network Solutions.
Although Fazio is not aware of any plans to go on the offense, you shouldn’t expect the company’s patent filing machine to slow down any time soon.
“As we are developing new products and services we intend to aggressively protect in the patent space our new technology,” said Fazio.
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Registrar has 50 million domains on the books. But how about over time?
This past weekend Go Daddy topped the 50 million domain name mark.
This number is kind of like a balance sheet: it means the company has 50 million domain names currently registered with it.
But what about the longer view? I asked Go Daddy for some indication of how many domains it has registered over time.
Since it became a registrar, Go Daddy has registered more than 225 million years worth of domain names.
A domain registered for one year and then dropped is worth one year, if it’s renewed for a year then it becomes two years.
Impressive numbers.
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A big milestone for the biggest domain name registrar.
The Go Daddy Group, which includes domain name registrar GoDaddy.com, is likely to cross the 50 million domain milestone next week.
The company hit 45 million domains registered just nine months ago in December.
The 50 million domains number represents the total number registered at a point in time. If you add up all the domains registered over time the number would be much higher.
As of the end of May GoDaddy.com had nearly 30 million .com domain names registered. (May is the latest month with actual data filed with ICANN.) That represents nearly a third of the .com base and more than three times as many as the nearest competitor, eNom.
Its share of newer top level domain names is even higher. In the same month GoDaddy.com had over 4 million .info domains registered out of a total of 7.4 million registered everywhere.
You can expect this number to jump when new top level domains are launched in a couple years.
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Redirects inserted into .htaccess files of 445 hosting accounts.
Internet security company Securi wrote a blog post yesterday noting that a number of web sites hosted with Go Daddy’s had been compromised.
According to Securi, the .htaccess file on these sites had compromised and a conditional redirect was inserted. Site visitors coming from a set of pre-determined search engines were automatically forwarded to a malware site.
I reached out to Go Daddy to find out what is going on. Todd Redfoot, Go Daddy Chief Information Security Officer, explained the situation:
Yesterday, Go Daddy’s Security Team detected approximately 445 hosting accounts were compromised. The accounts were accessed by using the account holder’s username and password. Visitors who tried to enter these sites via certain search engines were redirected to a site attempting to install malware onto their computer.
We are still investigating the issue, but so far, our security team is confirming this was not an infrastructure breakdown and should not impact additional customers.
We quickly removed the malicious code and will be assisting each of our customers to address the issue.
I had something similar happen to me several years ago. Since it was on a WordPress blog (not this one) I assumed it was a WordPress problem. As it turned out, someone had actually gotten a hold of the ftp password for the web site.
It might be difficult to detect this type of compromise since web site owners rarely visit their sites from search engines. If you host your site on Go Daddy I recommend visiting from Google to make sure your site isn’t compromised.
You may also need to ask a malware review with Google and major internet security companies if they blocked your site because of the intrusion.
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Go Daddy gets control of NoDaddy.com domain name.
GoDaddy.com now owns NoDaddy.com, Kevin Murphy reports for The Register.
NoDaddy.com was set up as a gripe site after the domain registrar suspended the registration of security mailing list SecLists.org.
Since then it has been a gathering place for customers and ex-employees of the world’s largest domain name registrar. They aired their grievances there, often times sending traffic to Domain Name Wire articles about various Go Daddy-related issues.
There have certainly been some legitimate complaints about Go Daddy over the years, and I haven’t been afraid to point out some of the company’s missteps.
But it also attracted some disgruntled ex-employees, including Toby Harris, who sued the company for wage theft. Harris claimed he lost over $1,300 in commissions as a call center rep because his manager claimed his call quality was low. (Many call centers have such rules — it’s easy to earn commissions if you neglect other parts of a customer contact.) Harris even sent out a press release about his initial lawsuit, claiming “Godaddy.com executives deny any wrongdoing.” Except that Go Daddy hadn’t actually commented on the lawsuit.
According to Murphy, Harris had become the top contributor on the site.
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Biggest domain name company transaction ever announced just before the U.S. holiday.
The Friday before a holiday weekend is usually a slow news day. But I heard some whispers Friday that Go Daddy was going to make a big announcement, hence my tweet around noon.
Indeed, a few hours later Go Daddy announced that it took an investment from KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures.
I talked with GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons Friday evening. Since most of my U.S. readers were already off drinking beer and buying fireworks, here’s a quick recap of what he told me. You can read the full details here.
-If you include options, Parsons owned 78% of the company and employees owned about 22%
-36 people will gross $1M+ from the transaction
-Parsons is still the largest single shareholder in the company
-Warren Adelman was promoted to CEO and Parsons will now chair the board
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Investment makes 36 millionaires, will help company expand overseas and acquire complementary businesses.
I just got off the phone with GoDaddy.com founder Bob Parsons, who explained the deal his company just struck with KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures.
Contrary to reports in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, this was not an outright acquisition. Parsons remains the single largest shareholder in the company in what he terms a “partnership”.
Before the deal Parsons owned 78% of the company and employees owned 22% through stock options.
Both Parsons and the employees benefited from the investment, with 36 employees getting $1 million plus checks.
All of the senior management invested in the deal and a number of people with options rolled some of it into stock in the company.
Why not just sell the company?
“I’m not dead yet, Andrew,” Parsons told me. “The reason I’m the single largest investor is because this is what I eat, sleep, and breathe.”
Parsons will remain with the company as Executive Chairman of the Board and company president Warren Adelman has been promoted to CEO.
“We cut a smokin’ deal with KKR, Silver Lake Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures,” said Parsons. But it isn’t just about the money, he said. “What excites me is what they bring to us as a competitor.”
He explained that the investors’ experience in overseas markets and technology will help the company grow. The company may also make acquisitions, such as to help the company offer a greater range of cloud based services.
“If I could pick three companies out of the blue [to partner with], these are the guys I’d pick,” he said.
Parsons would not disclose the amount of investment, but when I asked him about reports of $2.25 billion he said “it might be close”.
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- My Thoughts on a Go Daddy Buyout
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New York Post says web hosting and domain giant may be sold for over $1 billion.
The New York Post is reporting that Henry Kravis’ KKR is leading a group that is trying to buy Go Daddy for over $1 billion in a leveraged buy out. Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports the deal is in the $2B range.
A Go Daddy spokeswoman told the New York Post “”We’ve heard rumors like this before and when there’s something happening we will comment” and KKR said it doesn’t comment on rumors.
GoDaddy was rumored to be on the block last year but then later pulled out of the process.
I suspect Go Daddy is always entertaining offers, but this sounds more advanced than that. Of course, neither party that really knows will comment.
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