Isn't GoDaddy a pretty disgusting company? That's the vibe I'm getting from their Superbowl Ads and the fact that they're (like everyone in hosting) are mainly making money from the fact that people just keep paying for something they don't need.
I joined about a year ago, and the only reason I did so was because most of the executive team, including the CEO, was replaced about a year prior to me joining. The new CEO is Blake Irving, who seems like a great guy (I had dinner with him a couple months ago) and did an AMA on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/23v7f3/hi_im_blake_irv... . He also wrote an open letter to the FCC in support of net neutrality: https://garage.godaddy.com/godaddy/news/net-neutrality-ameri... . A lot of GoDaddy's senior leadership team these days is made up of people from Microsoft and Yahoo.
I would not have joined GoDaddy in its previous form, but it has made serious improvements to be a great tech company over the last couple years.
Huh. I kind of wish they had rebranded at that point, if that's what happened. I don't think any developer with decision-making power will go anywhere near the GoDaddy brand for years to come.
> I don't think any developer with decision-making power will go anywhere near the GoDaddy brand for years to come.
In the past I prefered Godaddy for pet projects because they used to have lower prices, but until recently they removed all their renewal coupons, so there's not a reason for me to stay with them anymore.
For serious projects I never trusted Godaddy because their process to order a domain is too shady.
Yeah, I think that was a huge mistake. They have literally one of the worst brands amongst the tech community. At this point their brand is synonymous with sexism, killing endangered elephants, and censoring the internet. They've been on the wrong side of pretty much any issue you could pick the wrong side of.
People who need hosting pay for it, but they usually pay a hosting provider for it, and shop around for one of those. The people who pay their domain provider for hosting are usually people who just accept the default add-ons in their cart and don't care about digging into the extra monthly costs, and then go on to either not use the domain, or hook it up to an actual hosting provider anyway.
If they didn't actually acquire any equity in the company, then GoDaddy didn't buy Nodejitsu. The difference to end users may be small, but the difference to investors is huge.
Looks like an acquihire. I love how failed businesses give a positive spin these days. Why not just say "we failed, sorry guys, we are going to get job elsewhere". They would have my immense respect had they done that.
Success depends on who you ask. This is failure for investors, but it might have netted the founders more money than they would have gotten if they exited another way.
Nodejitsu's Private NPM code getting released is rather exciting - there are certainly a number of paid and open source alternative's, but I would imagine Nodejitsu's version is quite good. That's an exciting consequence of an otherwise unexpected acquisition.
I've been using their smart-private-npm package to run our private npm since early last year. They did leave out a couple key components, but it has been completely solid since I set it up.
The only issue is keeping up with npm's API changes as its focus is not this kind of application.
Feel free to contact me if you're looking to set up such a package. It really deserves a blog post soon.
> But where am I supposed to go? I depend on Nodejitsu!
And that's what's going to eventually kill the whole startup business as we know it today. Very few people will want to invest in new companies when they are unlikely to still be there in a couple of years. Even when they actually do well!
This was always true in all industries everywhere. However, the danger is usually that the small company will run out of steam and go broke. Nowadays, the company can disappear if they happen to do exceptionally well - which just means they will get acquired.
This particular case seems to be an acqui-hire though.
This is less a problem with startups (except in the most stringent PG sense of the word) and more a problem with VCs. VCs aren't looking for a quarterly distribution of profits, they're looking for a 10x ROI in cash and stock. There is a huge incentive to sell, even when VCs have a minority stake. If you have VC investment and get an acquisition offer that will kill your product but give your VCs 15-20x ROI and you turn it down so you can chug along at 20% gross margin for the next decade, you will never ever get VC investment ever again.
This actually sounds terrible for their customers then! I guess they'll come back as one of those crappy GoDaddy add-ons they try to push on you for five pages before you can finish paying.
I have no affiliation with GoDaddy, but they've been making strides recently to change it. They acquired Media Temple in 2013 and most people do not even know it. I talked to a few people from MT and they said GoDaddy Corp has been mostly hands off.
For anyone who is affected by Nodejitsu shutting down its PaaS service we thought we might help and create an easy guide how to migrate http://go.c66.me/1ygYjfm
I'm happy to see Charlie Robbins, whom I use to work with a few years back, make an exit although it will be a sadder landscape out there with out nodejitsu as a separate entity.
If you looking for alternative, you can also try Cloud 66 (Heroku on any cloud or on your own server). Have a look at the guide how to migrate http://go.c66.me/1ygYjfm
