Business Services Industry

Go Daddy Experiences Enormous Growth in Hosting

Business Wire, June 27, 2007

Trend Shows Large Gains, Prompting Industry Deals to Compete

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Customers are flocking to GoDaddy.com for their Web site hosting needs, creating major growth in the use of the company's Web hosting services. The development is part of a big Web industry trend, according to two new reports.

A new survey by independent Internet analyst Netcraft, LTD, shows domain registrars and search portals are marking large gains in Web hosting. At the same time, hosting specialists are falling behind.

"This month's data yields some of the strongest evidence yet of the power shift in Web hosting," said Rich Miller of Netcraft. "Go Daddy continues to amass huge numbers of users on its hosting platforms."

Netcraft recognizes GoDaddy.com as, by far, the number one domain registrar used for hosting. However, GoDaddy.com actually offers a wide variety of services.

"We believe customers are choosing GoDaddy.com because it's really a full-service Web company, offering not just domain registration, but also hosting, email, SSL Certificates for Web site security, tools to create Web sites and more," said GoDaddy.com President and Chief Operating Officer, Warren Adelman.

"Hosting is an important part of what we do, and we make it easy for people - including the owners of small and medium-size businesses - to go to GoDaddy.com and get everything they need to create and host a Web site," said Adelman. "We even offer an industry-first hosting community called Metropolis, where hosting customers can find free applications to set up a blog, share images and communicate through forums."

The monthly Netcraft Web server survey looked at responses from more than 122 million Web sites. Netcraft notes Go Daddy has seen "enormous growth" in shared hosting operations. The data also shows the overall Web hosting shift is affecting the entire hosting industry.

"This trend, along with the growth of social networks and image/video hosting services, is prompting deals in the hosting industry, as providers seek the scale and breadth of services to compete," said Miller.

For example, Netcraft recently reported on two separate mergers between companies that specialize in hosting. According to Netcraft, these deals were designed to provide the combined companies with the scale and resources to compete with "Internet titans like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Go Daddy."

Another independent Internet analyst, Tier1 Research, just released a report saying the mass-market Web hosting sector is in a critical period of transformation with Web service firms not normally thought of as "hosters" now successfully entering the sector. Like the Netcraft research, the Tier1 report also notes an increase in market consolidation to deal with the issue.

Despite other companies' merger efforts to keep up, Go Daddy continues to experience this major spike in hosting, along with a big jump in domain names under management. Go Daddy currently has more than 22 million domains in its portfolio. Go Daddy continues to increase its popularity with customers by offering new products, affordable prices and top-notch 24-hour-a-day customer service.

About The Go Daddy Group, Inc.

Go Daddy is a leading provider of services that enable individuals and businesses to establish, maintain and evolve an online presence. Go Daddy provides a variety of domain name registration and Web site hosting services, as well as a broad array of on-demand and other services. The Go Daddy Group, Inc. has more than 22 million domain names under management. Go Daddy registers, renews or transfers a domain name every 1.3 seconds. GoDaddy.com is the world's No. 1 domain name registrar according to Name Intelligence, Inc. GoDaddy.com is also rated the world's largest hostname provider according to Netcraft Ltd. During 2006, The Go Daddy Group registered approximately one-third of all domain names registered in the top six generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, including .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info.