GoDaddy

GoDaddy Inc. is an American publicly traded Internet domain registrar and web hosting company headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, and incorporated in Delaware. , GoDaddy is the world's largest web host by market share, with over 62 million registered domains. The company has around 21 million customers and over 6,900 employees worldwide. 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, taking its name from a road in Phoenix Arizona. In 1999, a group of employees at Jomax Technologies were brainstorming a new company name, with "Big Daddy" being a popular suggestion. However, finding this domain name already taken, "Go Daddy" was purchased instead. Parsons believed this to be a simple and memorable name. Jomax Technologies rebranded to GoDaddy in February 2006. The original GoDaddy logo consisted of a cartoon man with messy hair and sunglasses. By 2001, GoDaddy was approximately the same size as competitors Dotster and eNom. In April 2005, GoDaddy became the largest ICANN-accredited registrar on the Internet. GoDaddy received a strategic investment, in 2011, from private equity funds, KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures. In 2017, GoDaddy acquired the security platform Sucuri. In April 2017, GoDaddy acquired the Host Europe Group, including firms 123 Reg (at that point the UK's largest domain name registrar, with more than 3 million names registered and 1.3 million websites hosted), Domain Factory, and Heart Internet, for 1.69 billion euros ($1.82 billion). In March 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that GoDaddy was migrating the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS as part of a multi-year transition. In January 2020, GoDaddy unveiled a new logo with a simple, sans-serif type accompanied by a heart-shaped design that spells out "GO".