Description
GoDaddy Inc. is an American publicly traded Internet domain registrar and web hosting company headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and incorporated in Delaware.
As of December 2021, GoDaddy has more than 20 million customers and over 9,000 employees worldwide. The company is known for its advertising on TV and in the newspapers. It has been involved in several controversies related to unethical business practices and censorship.
History
GoDaddy was founded in 1997 in Phoenix, Arizona by entrepreneur Bob Parsons. Prior to founding GoDaddy, Parsons had sold his financial software services company Parsons Technology to Intuit for $65 million in 1994. He came out of his retirement in 1997 to launch Jomax Technologies (named after a road in Phoenix Arizona) which became GoDaddy Group Inc. GoDaddy received a strategic investment, in 2011, from private equity funds, KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures.
The company headquarters was located in Scottsdale, AZ up until April 2021, when then moved to Tempe, AZ.
Company name
In 1999, a group of employees at Jomax Technologies were brainstorming and decided to change the company name. One employee said, "How about Big Daddy?" However, the domain name had already been purchased, so Parsons replied, "How about Go Daddy?" The name was available, so he bought it.[13] Parsons said that the company stuck with the name because it made people smile and remember it. The company changed its name branding from "Jomax Technologies" to "GoDaddy" in February 2006.
GoDaddy's original logo featured a cartoon-styled man with messy hair wearing sunglasses. In January 2020, GoDaddy unveiled a new logo with a simple, sans-serif type accompanied by a heart-shaped design that spells out "GO".
Company growth
In 2001, soon after Network Solutions was no longer the only place to register a domain, GoDaddy was approximately the same size as competitors Dotster and eNom.
In April 2005, GoDaddy became the largest ICANN-accredited registrar on the Internet.
As of 2018, GoDaddy is the world's largest web host by market share, with over 62 million registered domains.
In March 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that GoDaddy is migrating the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS as part of a multi-year transition.
