GoDaddy

GoDaddy is a US company best known as the world’s largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar, with over 62 million domains under management and more than 20 million customers, most of them very small businesses. It started in 1997 as Jomax Technologies, took the current name in 2006, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange as GDDY from a head office in Tempe, Arizona.

Shared hosting is sold alongside the domain business, usually bought as an addition to a domain already registered there. The plans are packaged for site owners rather than developers, and sit next to a website builder, email and marketing products in the same checkout.

It also owns a good deal of the market it competes in. The 2017 purchase of Host Europe Group, at €1.69 billion, brought 123 Reg, domainFactory and Heart Internet — European brands that still trade under their own names, though Heart Internet was sold on to Your.Online in 2024. Media Temple, bought in 2013 to reach web professionals, was retired into GoDaddy in 2023. Sucuri joined in 2017, and Neustar’s registry business in 2020, now GoDaddy Registry. This is the pattern the ownership field exists to make visible: a customer choosing between two familiar names can be choosing twice from the same company, and nothing on either website has to say so.