GoDaddy Purchases Media Temple

[HalfEatenPie]

Welp.  I'm definitely not a fan of this at all.  

This is an e-mail I got.

Greetings,

I am proud to share some momentous news with you today. GoDaddy, the Internet's largest platform for small businesses, has acquired (mt) Media Temple. We will continue operating as an independent and autonomous company and our mission will remain unchanged. However, new investments from GoDaddy will provide us the necessary resources to strengthen our focus on web professionals and will help accelerate our plans to expand internationally.

At Media Temple, we've always been on a mission to provide the highest quality service at the lowest possible price. When I co-founded the company in 1998, I saw an industry that wasn't meeting the needs of web designers all that well. At one extreme, there was expensive and overly-complex dedicated hosting that required customers to over-build their solutions. At the other extreme, there was incredibly cheap "unlimited" hosting that was untrustworthy and lacked class and transparency. At neither end was there a company truly qualified to understand and partner with the creative community.

Thanks to incredible customers like you, our model worked out. We've doubled-down on designers and have created a new platform to help people push the outer limits of the web. Now with 225 employees, Media Temple serves 125,000 customers making up more than 1.5 million websites in over 100 countries. We are proud to be one of Los Angeles' original startups, repeatedly recognized as one of the best places to work in the city — and one of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

Personally, working with GoDaddy on the acquisition this year has been unexpected, yet incredibly rewarding. Led by new CEO Blake Irving, the GoDaddy leadership team, which now includes Media Temple's President, Russell P. Reeder, is transforming the company with fresh thinking, new advertising, and an inspiring new strategy. It really is impressive, and so is their new mission: "Help small businesses easily start, confidently grow, and successfully run their online ventures."

Though our customers have traditionally been very different, both companies have similar priorities of providing excellent service experiences. However, we also understand and respect the vast differences and needs of our respective customer bases. Hence, Media Temple will continue to run as an independent business and is not being integrated into GoDaddy. Our customers should not experience any changes to their service levels, pricing, or the expert support we are known for. We're not moving our servers, and the phone number is not changing. We will remain in Los Angeles and will stay committed to being the most amazing hosting provider possible. In all seriousness, our mission to host great ideas feels like it's just getting started!

I am confident that Media Temple has made the right decision and I know the company is only going to get better from here. Please see our website FAQ to understand this news even further. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know at [email protected].

Thank you so very much for your passion, your feedback, and your support over the years.

Best regards,

Demian Sellfors

(mt) Media Temple Co-founder

Any reactions?

 

[drmike]

I don't use either company.   Lots of consolidations occurring and frankly, overdue.

GoDaddy seems to muck things up.  So should be fun watching to see if they take it over and mess up or if they just acquire and leave management in place.

 

[shunny]

Yea, I heard about that. Not really a fan of the takeover maaaan. Need to transfer out them domain.

 

[fizzyjoe908]

I read a lot of skepticism on whether or not GoDaddy will be able to cater to the more technical clients that Media Temple generally has and caters to.

 

[kaniini]

I think business is going to be good this month.  Yep.

 

[MannDude]

Man, I'd like to be that MediaTemple CEO right now.

 

[HalfEatenPie]

Well, I've experienced GoDaddy's "hosting" once before when a friend of mine decided he was going to go with them for simple shared hosting use. The product we were given was probably one of the most oversold server they had and could barely sustain ten or so hits at a time (granted it was a wordpress installation).

I'm not happy because I hate working with GoDaddy to begin with.

 

[raindog308]

Wow, is there a whole bunch of nonsense in that press release.

"One of the fastest-growing companies in the world".

Give me a break.  According to Wikipedia, they were founded in 1998.  In 15 years, they've grown to 225 employees?  That's adding a mind-blowing 15 employees a year.

Many, many companies have grown faster than that.

One of Los Angeles' original startups?  What does that even mean?  In the IT space?  There were plenty of startups in LA prior to 1998.

 

[datarealm]

Any reactions?

Quite excited.  MT's grid hosting is one of the few products in the shared space that compares to our load balanced shared hosting.  Being a savvier crowd, hopefully there will be a flow of clients who don't want to be under the care of GoDaddy and head off looking for greener pastures....

 

[jarland]

I don't know. I mean it's common thought that big business with crap product ruins their acquisitions. However, if you take where I work right now as an example, it's not always true. I think I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

 

[GIANT_CRAB]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuHUk5INUyU

GoDaddy has plenty of positive reviews, I think we can trust that MediaTemple will become even better.

 

[shovenose]

I made a 25% "NoDaddy" promo code that I'm advertising on Facebook - I thought it was a pretty good pun.

But in other words, this really sucks!

 

[datarealm]

Not a big twitter user -- but they have been lit up with almost all negative commentary and piles of hosts promoting tweets....

There've been a couple good articles posted as well.  This one was quite well written:

http://www.marco.org/2013/10/15/godaddy-mt

 

[wlanboy]

I read a lot of skepticism on whether or not GoDaddy will be able to cater to the more technical clients that Media Temple generally has and caters to.

That's true.

Media Temple was on the ride of the Rails community in the beginning and successfully gained the tag "they are able to do the nasty technical stuff". There are a lot of startups that paid the money to get the tech stuff done by them.

They do have nice products/services like CloudTech (security/performance reviews), ProCDN and their one click Grid hosting. Last one using the fency Parallels Plesk 11 including mangaged service.

So they did a good job at selling colorfull point and click hosting to the managers and creatives one.

Clearly a win&win situation.

But they have customers that will never ever want to be customers of GoDaddy.

So this will be a good scenario to what on "how to destroy a brand name".

 

[Coastercraze]

'Tis the season for mergers / takeovers I guess... I guess GoDaddy was hungry for some action themselves.

 

[kaniini]

I don't know. I mean it's common thought that big business with crap product ruins their acquisitions. However, if you take where I work right now as an example, it's not always true. I think I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

EIG couldn't ruin something that was already a complete disaster.  After all, the only way you can go after hitting rock bottom is up.

 

[WebSearchingPro]

I am however happy to see these lines:

Media Temple will continue to run as an independent business and is not being integrated into GoDaddy. Our customers should not experience any changes to their service levels, pricing, or the expert support we are known for.

 

[jarland]

EIG couldn't ruin something that was already a complete disaster. After all, the only way you can go after hitting rock bottom is up.

No disaster. A lot of people don't know what they're talking about. I see it first hand. But if you have any info to send back that direction to improve things, feel free to message it to me. I don't do a job just to do it, I'm either making a positive impact or I don't want to be there.

 

[HalfEatenPie]

So I'm just going to post this here.

http://www.marco.org/2013/10/15/godaddy-mt

In my opinion a pretty accurate and interesting description of the situation, although I will admit he states he never used MediaTemple's services. I think his opinion and stance on web hosting in general is a pretty solid analysis.