Doc Pop’s WordPress News Drop: A Brief History of GoDaddy Acquisitions

Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.

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With GoDaddy’s recent acquisition of ManageWP, we thought it would be interesting to take a brief look into GoDaddy’s recent history of acquisitions. Specifically focusing on those that might be interesting from a WordPress perspective.

Love WordPress news but hate reading? This is Doc Pop’s News Drop.
(camera shakes)
Whoa, what was that?
(checks iPhone)
Huh, GoDaddy acquired ManageWP.
(looks at camera with expressionless face)
Today let’s talk about a brief history of GoDaddy acquisitions.

Founded in 1997, GoDaddy is a domain registrar and web hosting company — though I think they are mostly known for their domain registry service. With over 61 million domain names, they are the largest domain name registrar. Not content with just domain names, GoDaddy has been diving more and more into the website hosting, with a few recent moves into the world of WordPress hosting.

In October 2013, GoDaddy acquired Media Temple, a premium WordPress hosting company.
In a blog post, Media Temple said they “will continue operating as an independent and autonomous company.”, which appears to be the case. MT is still doing their thing and seems to have kept their own identity post acquisition.

In 2014, GoDaddy acquired Mad Mimi, a Brooklyn-based email marketing service sort of similar to MailChimp. A lot of Mad Mimi customers seemed upset at the time, but the company still seems to be alive and kicking.

In April 2015, GoDaddy acquired Elto, a startup that helped connect WordPress devs and site builders with small clients that needed websites. Elto’s site is down and their Twitter feed hasn’t been touched in over a year, but it looks like Elto was used after all and has become the core of GoDaddy’s Pro Connect service.

On Sept. 1, Manage WP announced they were recently acquired as well. With the deal, GoDaddy Pro users will get access to some of the MangeWP premium features for free. Acquiring the popular website management platform could mean GoDaddy is taking a developer focus.

So if GoDaddy is focusing on the WordPress space, who do you think they’ll eat up next? I wouldn’t be surprised to see more popular plugins, like YOAST SEO, getting acquired in the next year or so.

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