We are excited to announce that we’ve joined GoDaddy, a company that is equally enthusiastic about product quality and customer satisfaction, has been a global sponsor of the WordPress community and already helps millions of small business owners create, grow and run their businesses.
This is an amazing milestone for us, and a testament to the dedication we put into making ManageWP the best WordPress management tool in the world. We’d also like to express our appreciation for the trust you’ve placed in ManageWP over the years.
How will the acquisition affect my business?
We do not plan to make any changes to the pricing model, feature set or the way ManageWP operates. For the past several years we’ve committed ourselves to providing you with the best possible service for your business, and we have every intention of sticking to this commitment.
Will ManageWP remain platform independent?
Yes. Although GoDaddy is the most popular hosting among our users (around 8% of all websites managed with ManageWP are on GoDaddy), the core philosophy of ManageWP is to help you manage websites, no matter where they’re hosted. GoDaddy respects that and fully supports platform independence. You can expect deep integration with GoDaddy hosting creating a truly unique and affordable managed WordPress hosting experience.
What does GoDaddy get out of the ManageWP acquisition?
First and foremost ManageWP itself. The Managed WordPress hosting market is lacking in the management department, and GoDaddy is looking to bolster their WordPress hosting with our features, like backups, staging, migration and more. Some of these premium features will be offered to GoDaddy users for free.
However, as you already know, ManageWP is not just about the dashboard itself. It’s also about the people behind it and their commitment. The fact that our whole team has unanimously decided to join GoDaddy and to keep working on ManageWP speaks a lot of what we expect from the acquisition, both for you and for us. In the past several years GoDaddy has brought in a lot of talented people and rallied them around the idea of building a company that would excel in the quality of service and support. We support this vision 100%.
What you can expect is to see tighter integration with GoDaddy WordPress hosting product (the managed WordPress hosting product is really good) and GoDaddy Pro program aimed at website professionals. We all expect to see improved product on both sides as a result of this acquisition, similar to how Media Temple acquisition by GoDaddy played out.
What does ManageWP get from the GoDaddy deal?
As a bootstrapped European company, we’ve reached a point where we achieved a lot of the goals we’ve set, but we want to take things to the next level. As some of you know, managed WordPress hosting is one of the things we planned. GoDaddy already has a mature WordPress hosting product, and it made much more sense to further develop it as opposed to doing it from scratch (although you’ll miss out an exciting new pricing model we were planning for our hosting, it would require 3D glasses for full shopping experience). With GoDaddy we’ll be able to tightly collaborate with experienced hosting veterans and provide a hosting solution that works perfectly with ManageWP.
GoDaddy with its significant scale and resources will help us put the product in the hands of hundreds of thousands of WordPress professionals while at the same time adding significant value to the product itself.
They are also very interested in helping accelerate internationalization of ManageWP. Although the WordPress Translation team has volunteered to help out, we couldn’t spare the necessary dev hours. With GoDaddy we’re expecting to make the whole process much faster and more in-depth.
We share a passion for the WordPress community. ManageWP team will continue to be active in the WordPress community as a part of GoDaddy. You will recognize the same faces, just different swag.
ManageWP roadmap
The roadmap remains unchanged.
- September: Automated Security Check
- October: Automated Performance Check
- November: Automated Client Report
- End of 2016: Public API that you can hook up to pretty much anything and remotely execute actions on your ManageWP dashboard
I know you have a lot of questions, me and my team are here for you. Whatever you think is worth discussing, just drop a line in the comment section and you will get an answer.
Stay tuned because the best is yet to come!
vichu roxx
Godaddy is not the GD before… Everything had changed. They have tried their best to bring up to the manage wp level. This decision won’t hurt you guys. I am sure. Just wait and see
Pavla Bartonova
Sad news. I was just about to become your new client. Not a friend of GoDaddy since their CEO trophy hunted elephants in Africa.
Vladimir Prelovac
No GoDaddy employee is happy about what the ex-CEO did in the past, way before we joined. Recognize GoDaddy for what it is today and it strives to do in the future https://www.godaddy.com/godaddy-cares
Jeff
He may no longer be the CEO but he’s still the company’s largest shareholder. Anything that benefits GoDaddy benefits him. He’s also still a member of the board.
Nik
MainWP’s shares just rose 200% 😉
Serious question.
Are you guys able to guarantee there won’t be any visible affiliations to clients that are a part of my managed services that run on ManageWP?
Nemanja Aleksic
We recently rolled out ManageWP as a part of the GoDaddy Pro program. This program is built for WordPress professionals, with the aim of helping pros be more successful.
GoDaddy has been working hard to improve their reputation in the WordPress community, and I gotta say that they’re on the right track. They are building a relationship with the pros in the community, and not just for the sake of being a good guy. Think of it like this:
a) If they treat you fairly, you decide at some point that you trust them, move 20 clients over time to GoDaddy, and become a happy camper
b) If they screw you over, they might get your 20 clients, but they will not get your next 20 clients. On top of that, you’ll make sure every pro in the community knows about this, and they’ll lose 20 pros, each with their own 20 clients. That’s 400 clients that GoDaddy would lose
ManageWP has always catered to the largest agencies in the maintenance business, so we know the importance of building an honest relationship with our users, and we’re taking that to the Pro program – and not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s the only way you can run a successful business these days (unless you’re Apple, in which case you can just remove the headphone jack and sell it separately 😀 )
I kinda went on a semi-rant here, does this make sense?
Tasos Koukouvitis
So angry and disappointed… just about i was keen to use your platform again… you got sold to one of the worst (hosting) companies out there… bad reputation, poor services, wrong attitude & dirty biz practices… not even fake reviews can save them and make a score better than 6 /10 … even most recent reviews are really that bad… was it really so difficult to find a descent partner?… with this decision u do harm us all and not only yourselves… maybe for just some more $$$… and yes of course its your call – your decision, but also its our right & duty in such cases to judge & speak publicly…
Nemanja Aleksic
I completely agree. We answer to you, our user, and it’s our duty to keep improving our service. If you believe you’re not getting a fair treatment from us, you have every right to call us out.
Bence
I don’t like this move. I used GoDaddy before as a domain registrar, I always hated their upsells after upsells, then some more upsells, then their fine print and hidden policies. I hope they are better now with the new CEO. I hope ManageWP won’t chage for the worse. Good luck to you.
Michael
I have used ManageWP for about a year now on Bluehost. I have also tested out the Orion based dash. You guys built an awesome product. However, I agree with most here…I am really concerned about GoDaddy as would be my clients. I hope it all works out well for your team and for those of us on this side of things. Cheers!
gmedia
Oh yeah and nice video!
gmedia
I am not a fan of GoDaddy. Currently working on a site for a client that uses them and it is horrible. I made an exception to do this one to my normal policy and will not be doing that again!
With that said, I know the Manage WP people have worked very hard to build something here. I have used the service for few years. I am very happy for all of you to see hard work pay off. I wish maybe Automattic had acquired you, but I will be hopeful that they let you do your thing and the investment will bolster the platform. I am not going anywhere, but will be watching how GoDaddy handles this. Congratulations!
sysadmin
We had 30+ sites in our ManageWP control panel, finished removing the plugin from all sites, and closing our account as soon as I’m done posting here. Having dealt with GoDaddy in the past, we want nothing to do with them. It’s a real shame that you sold out to GoDaddy, just seems like a cash-grab to me. Too bad, you had such potential.
Nemanja Aleksic
I’m sorry to see you leave, I wish you the very best in your future endeavors. What happened with GD that forced you away from their service?
GINGALLEY
What a sad day! GoDaddy is the worst company on the earth and ManageWP decided to join the Evil Corp! Pitiful news to say the least.
We actually have a clause in our terms that we will not support in any way, shape, or form GoDaddy or their crappy services.
Looks like we’ll be moving on soon too, but I’m sure you will be able to capture all the “suckers” that use GD’s sub-par services. It won’t be long before the changes hit MWP, I’m sure.
Good luck with that! 🙁
GINGALLEY
This picture tells it all… (The ManageWP office in Belgrade, Serbia.) http://zdnet3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/09/06/88f140dc-a0db-444f-a5b1-5e13d885e188/resize/770xauto/11024b08220021c7238c73d8f700e771/managewp-office.jpg
Nemanja Aleksic
Sorry for missing the comment earlier! I understand your sentiment in the previous comment, but I don’t get what our office photo has to do with it?
ignitetravelwebmaster
“I will add my voice to the many expressing severe disappointment in this development. I have thoroughly enjoyed Orion and intended to stay a loyal (paying!) client for quite a while. However, I will not be associated with a company like GoDaddy. Just won’t happen. I’m ambivalent about their “improvements,” and simply cannot stomach any of my resources living under their company umbrella or any of my money supporting their detestable business. Best of luck to you, ManageWP, but I’m out.”
This ^^^ we have been happy with managewp but your relationship with GD is not in our best interest and we will be moving our sites elsewhere to be managed for sure.
peakdigitalenterprises
I like your product but it has never been able to work with GoDaddy – their hosting service is very poor and inflexible. I’ve never been able to backup my godaddy sites on ManageWP and you’ve never been able to help me to do so so I conclude the only reason you have got into bed with them is $$$$$$ – I don’t blame you for that but cut the other BS, you did it for the money – GD is not a good hosting company.
Nevena Tomovic
Hey,
Thank you for using and enjoying ManageWP. We have had issues with hosting in the past, but that was an integration issue, which of course will now be resolved. The GD you know is not the same GD today, they have spent 4 years just working on improving their hosting and they have done a great job. It’s a great opportunity for us at ManageWP to expand our product, and take it to the next level. I can understand that you are skeptical and have some reservations, but stick around and you will see for yourself that ManageWP will not drop its quality.
Apart from that, you know we are here for you if you have any questions.
Regards,
Nevena
Mark Fayard
“The GD you know is not the same GD today, they have spent 4 years just working on improving their hosting and they have done a great job.”
Wishful thinking at best. You’ve got a couple hundred commenters here telling you otherwise. Wake up. I tried in July Managed WordPress hosting in July 2016 and had to cancel within 3 weeks. Constant failures and support constantly blamed me even though it was a base install with no plugins! I’m a WordPress developer by trade and can’t stand to be BSd by “support” techs.
https://codeable.io/developers/mark-fayard/
Adam
I was considering returning to ManageWP after reading a review of Orion – looks awesome.
But, after seeing this news, I won’t be signing up again.
This is partly out of principle, and partly because of the bad technical experiences I’ve had with GoDaddy (and Media Temple) over the years.
E.g. – They originally supported SOPA until they lost like 70,000 customers.
That said, best of luck to everyone at ManageWP, I really hope that you stay an independent platform over the long term.
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Adam,
I respect your decision. The only thing I have to say is that our team will not change, so you should not expect a drop-off in service. If you were happy with ManageWP until now – that should not change. Also, GoDaddy supported SOPA in late 2011. Since 2013. GoDaddy has a new CEO and management and the values of the company are quite different now, or at least that is my impression.
Craig
And what happened to Radiant Host? You guys should have stuck to developing your hosting platform- I couldn’t understand why you guys stopped, but now it all makes sense.
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Craig,
As we mentioned in other comments, managed WordPress hosting was among things we wanted to add with our service. This was a project I was personally very invested in so I was sad to see it go, but from the company perspective partnering with an existing product made more sense. Resources we wanted to spend into developing on that project will be moved to other ManageWP features and helping improve the GoDaddy Web Pro experience and their Managed WordPress hosting platform.
Sam
Time to short Godaddy!
marcel
My first reaction to reading the news was that this just “feels icky.” But reading through most of the comments, it appears hopeful that ManageWP will remain an independent entity under the GoDaddy umbrella. Clearly GoDaddy picked ManageWP because they are best-in-class. It fits with what they are trying to do with GoDaddy Pro as they obviously understand that WordPress is the present and the future of web development and they need a management tool for that. The concern for many is that GoDaddy will do some nefarious things to either the product, the customer data, or some combination of the above in the future. Perhaps if the GoDaddy CEO would write a public letter stating that they will not do X, Y, or Z to ManageWP, then that might help alleviate some concerns.
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Marcel,
We’ve had Jeff King, SVP of Hosting & GoDaddy Pro, comment on the client privacy question (a few comments below this one). I’ve also talked to him about giving you all the opportunity to cross-examine him without his lawyer (we call that an AMA), and we agreed we should wait until the dust settles a bit and we have something tangible to show our commitment.
Does this sound fair to you?
Manny
“Clearly GoDaddy picked ManageWP because they are best-in-class” This can be a double edge sword. They could have picked ManageWP because they are the best in class and want to offer these services to their customers as well, but me been in the computer business for over 20 years now. Big companies buy small companies for only 2 reasons: 1) the product is good and they want it for themselves so they can offer it to their customers. Which mean they can easily rip off the programs out of our hands if we are not GD customers. 2) the product is good and they buy it to control it and sell it to the public as a separate service altering the price and customer service, then causing the product to stop been that good.
As stated above “You can expect deep integration with GoDaddy hosting creating a truly unique and affordable managed WordPress hosting experience.”
This apply to my statement #1, they integrate this product with theirs and easily can force us to become GD customers or get out.
Here is another scary statement “The Managed WordPress hosting market is lacking in the management department, and GoDaddy is looking to bolster their WordPress hosting with our features, like backups, staging, migration and more. Some of these premium features will be offered to GoDaddy users for free.
In other words GD will manage the product, since ManageWP is lacking of management. Also they will offer this service to GD users for Free, we are not GD users. So for now we may be able to continue using this product as we are right now but if GD will be managing why will they agree to give us this product for the price we are paying right now?
“The fact that our whole team has unanimously decided to join GoDaddy”
This can easily mean they got purchased by GD, so GD will have full control and will over this product.
The problem here is that we can speculate all we want since we don’t know the terms of the negotiation or the agreement between companies and that is the scary part and for how long GD will let us use ManageWP before it want to turn us into their customers.
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Manny, thank you for your input, we appreciate it.
There will probably be some incentives for GoDaddy users like I mentioned. Using GoDaddy + ManageWP will offer some extra benefits but using ManageWP with another hosting provider will still be possible under our current pricing model.
To an extent I agree with your statement, although I do not think that the pricing needs to be changed. Not to forget that the people behind the product were as important in this acquisition as the product itself. The ManageWP team will remain in place.
“Here is another scary statement “The Managed WordPress hosting market is lacking in the management department, and GoDaddy is looking to bolster their WordPress hosting with our features, like backups, staging, migration and more. Some of these premium features will be offered to GoDaddy users for free.
In other words GD will manage the product, since ManageWP is lacking of management. Also they will offer this service to GD users for Free, we are not GD users. So for now we may be able to continue using this product as we are right now but if GD will be managing why will they agree to give us this product for the price we are paying right now?”
There are many WordPress Managed hosting providers out there. They offer a lot of great stuff when it comes to optimised WordPress single website hosting experience.
I think you misread this into “ManageWP is lacking management” and actually it was meant to say that ManageWP + a hosting provider is really the only true Managed hosting for WordPress since other hosting providers are offering more of a highly optimised WordPress hosting instead of truly Managed WP hosting, especially when it comes to multiple sites.
Rob Cooper
Nice shoes Vlad
Vladimir Prelovac
Lol, thanks. I wonder why more people did not comment on the video we’ve put together. I think its awesome 🙂
Anty
Im EU based and have 2 clients on godaddy hosting (they will be moved out in march ’17). I want to ask someone how can I contact godaddy support team without using phone call?
Thanks!
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Anty,
GoDaddy now provides ticketing support only for users who activate the GoDaddy Pro program https://uk.godaddy.com/pro
Program activation is free, and so far I haven’t seen any hidden charges in the program itself.
lemongrass
They do provide Ticketing Support (and if you’re really lucky a chat option, that is sometimes available most times not).
However I have found that even ticketed support where the auto-reply says `We’ll get back to you in a few hours’, takes at least 24 hours.
One ticket I lodged in early July, was responded mid August.
Pro itself is a good program, but is still rough around the edges – especially the logging into client accounts to work (after they have given you permission) and then suddenly being logged out and saying you need to sign in to prtect your account?
Ernie
James Dalman
Nemanja, Vladimir, and Team,
Not that you need ANOTHER comment regarding your partnership and acquisition with GoDaddy, but here it goes …
I want to encourage you and lift you up regarding your news. It is never easy to make a decision that greatly affects your business. I’ve not encountered a business decision to this magnitude in a while, but just making some of the decisions I have over the past year have been excruciating. I can only imagine what you are dealing with having seen all the backlash throughout the WordPress community.
While I don’t like some of my burning experiences with GoDaddy over the years, I can’t fault the ManageWP team for doing what they believe to be in the best interest of the company and your future. It’s easy for people to point fingers or say they would have done something different, when they’ve likely never operated a successful business in their lives. It’s easy to give input when you aren’t in the trenches.
All in all, I do wish you and your team the best. I hope that it does all work out and that the experience will end up being a great one. I also hope that we, as a community, not attack you personally and try to understand that you are trying to ensure a future for you, your families, and a product that you lovingly built.
Good luck!
Nemanja Aleksic
James, even without your impressive community track record you’re always welcome to chime in. I have huge respect for what you’ve done in the past with Happy Joe, it’s more than most of us would dare to try.
But we’ve found a way to try and contribute to the community in our own way. We couldn’t do it alone, so we found great people to team up. Yeah, people, because ultimately the perception of GD might or might not change, but its people will remain. And if they are half of what we believe they are, we will make this happen.
Thank you for your comment, it means the world to us.
Adam
I have not had as bad experiences with GD as other commenters. Overall I do NOT recommend GD as a domain registrar, web host, SSL certificate provider, etc to anyone that asks.
I’ve experienced numerous technical and backend issues with domains registered with GD. They never get any of these issues fixed. While you can contact customer support at GD often I spend waaaay more time dealing with these issues than I would if these domains were at another registrar, better managed domain registrar. What’s annoying is they did away with support tickets so now you have to call or us chat (available in the US only).
Will not be using ManageWP in the future. Hope with the buyout you got good stock options, cash, etc. You likely going to lose a lot of customers to competitors.
chris
I might remove all my sites from manageWP for privacy concern after I heard this news. it’s possible that I and my clients might get some messages / ad from godaddy in some day in the future for no reason.
Nemanja Aleksic
Theoretically you’re absolutely right. In practice that would be a terrible move:
We joined GoDaddy primarily to bolster the GoDaddy Pro program. This program is for professionals who build and maintain WordPress websites for a living. So let’s say you’ve got 100 client websites:
Scenario A: GoDaddy steals their data and reaches out to them directly. 10 out of 100 give money to GD, but in the process you give up GD for good. The end result? 10 new websites and one very angry professional who will steer his clients away from GD
Scenario B: GoDaddy builds an honest relationship with you. You move 10 out of 100 clients to GoDaddy. The end result? 10 new websites for GD and a very happy professional that will bring more clients aboard.
Say what you want about GoDaddy, but you cannot claim they are stupid. They’ve poured a ton of money and effort to repair their brand image in the past several years, and they are not going to let that go to waste over a list of 280,000 emails, which they cuold probably buy elswhere for a fraction of a single WordCamp sponsorship.
Sorry for going on a bit of a rant, does this make sense?
Andrew JAMES
Hi Nemanja,
I agree with your reply and will, whatever, remain with MWP until and unless I see anything ‘sinister’ going on.
Can I suggest that 99% of all of us that are questioning the ‘confidentiality’ issue would be delighted to see a statement from GD saying that they will never contact OUR clients, with any GD marketing? At least for MWP paying clients?
They can ‘spam’ me, I’ll just block them, it’s them taargeting MY clients that concerns me (and us all).
Jeff King
Good question. GoDaddy won’t market to your clients that aren’t already GoDaddy customers. If we already have a relationship with them (e.g. hosting or domains, etc) then they would get our standard marketing emails.
jjsararas
Thanks Jeff. I know the concerns go beyond ‘spam’, and into privacy. I had no trouble with a small group of scrappy Serbians – dedicated professionals, some of whom I call friends – having access to website and user data. However, I have no relationship with you or your company, and I am left deeply concerned.
I don’t accept the suggestion that you could simply dismiss the original user base as unimportant, and that you recognize the value in preserving those relationships. If that is the case, I challenge you to draft your new privacy policy and ToS for the partnership integrations and data access in clear view, with full transparency and even a level of consultation with the original user base (hint: this is exactly how MWP built the amazing product you just acquired.) Only then can you hope to possibly turn around some of the negative sentiment that’s been expressed here. Jeff, what can we expect in this regard? Here and now is a great time to outline some intentions.
I wasn’t in the negotiation (wish I was) but I feel as though you’ve won the lottery here. This team consistently obliterates expectations of customer service – orders of magnitude beyond any other SaaS product I’ve experienced. I mention that to highlight the gravity of the challenge you have ahead of you. While the consensus seems to be that GoDaddy has nowhere to go but up, ManageWP has nowhere to go but down, because they were/are already doing it right in all aspects. I truly hope you have the clout within your organization to be able to bring what you learn from them back to the hive.
Alin
Nemanja,
your argument is flawed, you should look at it from agency/consultant perspective, not from GDaddy’s.
From our perspective, the end result will be at least 10 upset clients which could lead to loss of business and countless hours spent on client anger management. Suffice to say, that’s not a risk any consultant will take, no matter how good you and your service might be. Like any small company, as you know it for sure since you have the same pedigree, we live or die based on our high level of service and client satisfaction.
Anyways, the whole debate in which you inserted this argument does not have anything to do with you, your company or your level of service but with risk management and business decision (very similar to your position when looking at GD’s offer – you knew their rep but decided it worth the risk; the rest of us, we don’t).
And, as a side note on your argument: you make the case for ONE consultant/agency from whom GoDaddy will get 10 more clients. But, if you multiply that with thousands of customers than the picture gets pretty different.
To add insult to injury, we already know this is the modus operandi for GD, they did it before and they do not care. And they do not care simply because they are calculating the risks and decide it’s ok and incorporate it in their business model.
Business models and corporate cultures do not change over night. Actually, history proves they NEVER change in the vast majority of cases. And when they do, if they do, it takes a huge amount of time and painful experiences for employees and customers alike.
It’s that simple.
A.
wepzanou
”Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in… ” Godaddy”
Godfather. (Michael Corleone)
Manny
Wow I joined less than a month ago and this happened. As soon as I saw GoDaddy name in your email, my stomach hurt. Of course as a business man myself I don’t know if this decision is for good or bad for your company but I can tell you from my experience and my customers experience with GoDaddy, this is a bad decision. I don’t know how far or deep the relationship is going to be. I know you guys are saying that nothing will change, but since we don’t know the details of the negotiation, who knows maybe me you guys sold the company and we will get a surprise in a few months. Is sad that you guys choose GoDaddy and praise that company so much when there are so many horrible stories and experience with that particular company. But oh well, if you think is good find , I will ride alone, but as soon as GoDaddy start putting their hands on our stuff you guys will lose a lot of customers but I know at the same time if GoDaddy offer this as part of their services they will gain a lot of customers so they won’t care if we stay as customers or not. Anyway, good luck!
wepzanou
So true Manny.
Nemanja Aleksic
That’s a fair sentiment, and it’s good that so many of our users reached out to us privately and publicly. It sets clear community expectations that they want GoDaddy to reach the ManageWP level of quality, and not the other way around. I know that’s not an easy task, but if we wanted it easy, we’d make an exit 3-4 years ago.
cvs
I will add my voice to the many expressing severe disappointment in this development. I have thoroughly enjoyed Orion and intended to stay a loyal (paying!) client for quite a while. However, I will not be associated with a company like GoDaddy. Just won’t happen. I’m ambivalent about their “improvements,” and simply cannot stomach any of my resources living under their company umbrella or any of my money supporting their detestable business. Best of luck to you, ManageWP, but I’m out.
James O
My company had 18 dedicated servers with Godaddy and we couldn’t get away fast from them. Brand new dedicated servers would crash within 2 months of setup. When HDs were replaced, they were replaced with faulty drives that crash in couple of weeks at most. Support was horrible. It woudl take them 8+ hours to replace a haulty hard drive. One time the technician working on the failing server finished his shift and left before handing over his tasks to his colleague. The result is we waited for 17 hours to get a hard drive replaced! You would expect some caring for a customer paying thousands of dollars a month but nope. We couldn’t wait till the end date of each of the servers to move out of Godaddy.
Based on that experience, this is horrible news. We already decided to leave MWP and we moved to another competing self hosted product. I am sorry that you joined forces with a company that lacks basic customer service skills 🙁 🙁 🙁
Ivan Bjelajac
I cannot comment on your particular experience but I know that bad support can be devastating especially when there is a problem with a critical feature or product.
Most of our team leaders started out as members of our Customer Happiness team so we do understand the value of great support that is willing to go the extra mile.
Scaling customer support is a hard task – for GoDaddy and for every other company.
Our support, engineering and product people are staying together on this project so you should not see any dropoff in customer experience. At some point I am sure we will also face some issues related to company growth – but I think we can handle them.
This is why I hope you will stay with us, or give us another shot at some point down the road.
Jonathan
Good for you guys. I am glad that you have been able to reap the financial rewards of your hard work.
I hope that ManageWP does indeed remain platform independent moving forward. My primary concern is that once ManageWP’s features are integrated into the GoDaddy dashboard that they will scrap the public facing product, making ManageWP a “GoDaddy only” feature. But that is a worst case scenario, and I am sure that in the short to medium term ManageWP will stay the course. Hopefully in the long term too!
Nemanja Aleksic
That’s the plan! As some have pointed out, it’s not something we can guarantee, but we’re a persistent lot and not afraid to fight for what’s right 🙂
steve
GoDaddy sucks. I hope they don’t touch ManageWP and completely f* it up. I’m going to continue to use the service for now. We’ll see if I stay.
If you were looking for a buyer for your company, you could arguably have done MUCH better.
Ivan Bjelajac
We are keeping the team intact and GoDaddy has been completely aligned with us about our product roadmap from the start of this process so I believe we can make this work. Thanks for staying with us.
Nemanja Aleksic
Whoa, people. So far we’ve been called rapists, murderers, and people impersonating our team left abusive comments. If this keeps happening I’m locking down the comment section.
We want to hear your feedback, and we want to hear it publicly – both the good and the bad. This is what the WordPress community is all about.
So don’t fuck it up for everyone for abusing the comment section for your personal quest of vengeance against ManageWP or GoDaddy.
Aaron
Welcome to GoDaddy’s ecosystem. You signed up with them, did you think the internet would react well to that, or spare you the vitriol that GD inspires in people. I’m sorry people are mean, you clearly don’t deserve ad-hominim attacks. But then, you made this bed…
Nemanja Aleksic
No man, it’s me that’s sorry. Sorry to hear that you believe there can be an ounce of justification for this kind of behaviour.
Syrehn
Except that time that they got hacked by someone from Anonymous and it took millions of sites down. I’d call that unreachable.
Jennifer Crego
Congrats to Vladimir and the ManageWP team! I haven’t been a fan of GD, but who knows, maybe this will be what changes my perception.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you Jennifer, I hope that we will be able to contribute to GoDaddy Pro and that you will love both ManageWP and future WordPress related tools we might produce.
Mark Fayard
That’s what you should have led with. Not all that other spin.
Nemanja Aleksic
Sorry, but that wasn’t my comment. One of the commenters decided to take it up a notch after his comment got deleted for being abusive.
King
It’s sounds like hyperbole, but like at least some others on this thread I felt this one in the gut. I just moved yet another client away from GD hosting this week because of actual problems and limitations with their hosting, which are just as real as the PR hole GD has been trying to dig itself out of for years. The infusion of capital is great, but as a loyal customer who has used ManageWP for years and appreciated its steady growth, it’s hard not to feel like the relationship will be ending — not now, maybe not even next year, but not too far down the road. Please look after our interests as long as you can. Thanks.
Ian
Hey ManageWP!
You should be judged on your own performance which so far had been excellent. Please keep that up in the future and I shall continue to be a very happy customer.
Every acquisition will bring some knee-jerk reaction but don’t let this get you down.
All the best for your exciting future.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you for your support Ian, we will not let you down. 🙂
InStudio
Totally agree.. So far I´m delighted with your job and I have full confidence in your team. Keep pushing
Ivan Bjelajac
We will give our best. If you ever have any issues with some of our decisions please do let us know.
Nemanja Aleksic
I’ve moderated a few inflammatory comments, as well as those that kept reiterating the same stuff in multiple comments. Please keep it civil, and focus on the subject.
Chris
It’s only a matter of time before things go bad. Anytime a large company buys out another company, the employees of the company being bought lose out big time, most of the time losing jobs. Not only that, support always suffers. Ask Arvixe, ASO, and any other remote hosting company bought by EIG. Oh wait, you can’t, they did away with all their support, the people that made them good to begin with. Give it 6 months, and things will worsen.
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Chris, I agree that this is how the story usually unfolds for the acquired team – but I believe that we will not go down that path. I have been told that “this is how things play out in the end” many times in the past. Many of those times we were able to overcome the obstacles and not just survive but grow.
I really believe that this will be one of those experiences where we will be able to show you that we can still do great work
despite some people doubting us.
Tony Cecala
Congratulations to the whole team! I’m sure it feels great to be recognized for your accomplishments. I look forward to a bright future and continued improvements on your fantastic product.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you Tony 🙂
Robert Stockwell
This is somewhat disappointing, as others have also indicated. GoDaddy is a very poor host in general; they are significantly behind in PHP and MySQL versions and vastly oversell their products beyond capacity, causing a litany of other issues (like unexpected downtime that me or the client has no control over). It will be a challenge to explain to my clients that I am not using ManageWP and GoDaddy together if they happen to see this. Personally, I wish you would have partnered with a proven quality host such as Rackspace, WPEngine, or even a cloud hosting provider like DigitalOcean. But I suppose you have to market to the largest crowd and get the biggest ROI, so you went with a well known, but mediocre host.
Ivan Bjelajac
Robert, thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Many people say that they would have preferred us partnered with another hosting company – but actually out of all companies that offered us different forms of partnerships over the years – GoDaddy has been the one company that tried to influence our roadmap the least. The autonomy that we are keeping with this deal was a major factor in our decision.
GoDaddy has amazing reach, they are not trying to tie our hands and I expect us to get a chance to influence their hosting and other GoDaddy Pro features. They have already hired some great people that we are looking forward to working with.
I hope that some of our brand will translate to GoDaddy brand too – and in a good way. We are confident we can make it happen.
Some people also mentioned GoDaddy being a publicly traded company will affect us. Many publicly traded companies, such as Apple, keep their product standards high despite the fact they are publicly traded. I am not comparing GoDaddy and Apple now – but it’s certainly possible to keep the standard high.
gus
If all the cool things from ManageWP remains the same, sounds good to me! Best wishes and keep doing this great job.
Ivan Bjelajac
Gus, ManageWP always promises and delivers cool things. 😉
Jacqueline Hill
Ohhhh nooooooo that is the worst news I have ever heard coming from ManageWP. Go Daddy. Ohhh nooooooo
qbuster
I agree. GoDaddy has a very poor reputation and my experience with mergers like this is bad. My provider is Dataflame which has been superb for the past 10 years of so – fantastic 24:7 support with typical responses in 2/3 hours. They were taken over a month ago with all sorts of promises – all that has happened is that my plan limits have been reduced (leaving me with no option other than upgrading to a plan that costs twice as much) and the support response time has increased dramtically and some emails aren’t even answered.
Let’s hope that this doesn’t happen to ManageWP – this particularly (if I read it correctly) that the wonderfully flexible new plan strategy apears to have been dropped.
Ivan Bjelajac
Jacqueline, I do in fact hope that this is the worst news you will ever here from us, because I expect we will be able to make this partnership a great thing when it is all said and done. 😉
As far as our pricing goes – we do not plan to change it, no worries.
We will definitely not reduce any plan limits either. We are staying on the freemium product route and hope you will enjoy the new features we are planning to build. 😉
darren
I do not intend to stop using orion. The support has been fantastic, I recently used managewp as an example to a software provider we use who was asking for feedback on their own support. I love the product, but the support is even better. We also use a program called glip, who were recently taken over by ringcentral. Their product hasn’t changed, but their support has changed dramatically, from getting replies in less than an hour, to now around 2 days. That, I hope doesnt happen to managewp in a few months time, as your support is easily better than anyone else we use.
Nemanja Aleksic
We’re definitely working overtime with this announcement and everything, so you can expect some delay in the next few weeks (we’re only human,despite some of the comments :D). The good news is that we have our own Customer Happiness team which unanimously remained with ManageWP, and we’re scaling it up.
The only possible threat would be if we don’t scale our CH team fast enough, but this is something we’ve anticipated and worked on long before the Orion launch.
Bill G
A company can only exist by virtue of its customers. Well, by reading all these comments it seems that the ManageWP management team just blew it. From a business perspective, selling a platform like MWP to a hosting provider which has the worst reputation in the field, is not really clever. And if you really wanted to sell, for sure all alternatives would have been better. Why did you guys not survey your customers upfront? Not a very smart move, guys..
qbuster
I to wish you had surveyed your customers first. I can understand the attraction of seeking support from a larger company but not one that has such a poor image with clients world-wide.
If it was additional funding you needed, I would have suggested you lay out your plans to a crowdfunding source – I think you would have been surprised how much backing you would have been offered on the back of the superb product/service and obvious technicals skills you have to offer.
LIke others, I am so pleased withwhat ManageWP/Orion offers that I will stay with you as long as it coninues to make financial sense but I am concerned about the predatory nature of you new (controlling?) partners.
Good luck(for all our sakes).
chello
Well, this is a disappointment. Selling out to this octopus of the internet, (who no doubt will become our competitor,) giving the same WP management features away with their hosting as a freebie! I have been trying to build a webcare business using manageWP for just over a year and was OK with the lack of maturity causing instability in the product . . . but just when I thought you guys had it sorted and I was feeling comfortable with what I could offer to clients in my business, you change it all like this????
Ivan Bjelajac
What do you have against octopuses 🙁
I know many of our clients and all I can say is that you guys add additional value to your customers. If you did not they would just learn about ManageWP.com and leave eventually. This is certainly not going to change that.
Chello
Really? Sure octopuses are cute, but not in business. Generally though it means they get to make ALL the rules to suit themselves – for better and for worse. They did not buy you to keep things the same, they bought you to help corner the market on managing and monitoring multiple wordpress sites for their hosting clients. You say things will not change, but you have already changed in many ways by doing this. So we shall see.
Nic
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AK907
I love Manage WP but I would NEVER use or recommend GoDaddy for their hosing or other services. Frankly I am very sad and dissapointed by this development. I echo all the negative comments everyone on this thread has said about GoDaddy’s services. As an independent web dev I have found GoDaddy to be one of the WORST web host and service providers. I can only hope they do not mess up a great thing in Manage WP.
Pacific
Regarding Go Daddy’s reputation I don’t like the way they have done business in the past. I only host with them. ManageWP has been a terrific help for my client management. Lets’ hope that the new owners don’t nickle-and-dime us to extinction.
admin
Bummed about this. The minute I see an up-sell notification slammed in my face trying to get me to join the GoDaddy hosting plan, I’m outta here.
Ben Fox
From everyone on the FlowPress team; Congratulations ManageWP! You’re going to love working with the team over GoDaddy! They’ve got a real passion for helping and working with our community.
Best of luck to you and your team on the next chapter!
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you Ben.
Mark
Bye bye ManageWP
Erik Blair
Aloha Vladimir,
Congrats! I’m very happy to remain a loyal customer of ManageWP! Met you at WordCamp Maui, and I’m looking forward to meeting your team at another WordCamp soon. Best of luck to you and yours… Erik Blair
Vladimir from ManageWP
Thank you Erik. I plan to continue doing great things together as a part of GoDaddy. Including visiting Maui again! 🙂
Matthew Allen
I understand the anger that people are expressing because they feel like something they love just sold out to something they don’t love. I don’t understand all the hatred towards GoDaddy though. I’ve been using them for years for domain registrations only (not for hosting) and I’ve had no issues whatsoever. The upsells don’t bother me – I just ignore them. I continue to register new domains with them and renew everything I have with them.
As long as ManageWP stays the same and my pricing doesn’t change – I see no reason to leave. The service has been a life-saver. When or if ManageWP starts to suck (for any reason), or if pricing changes – then I will look elsewhere. But I’m staying with. I’ll ride it out and see what happens. At least they have been open, honest and up-front about the whole deal. That’s a plus in my book.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you Matthew, hopefully you will stick with us for a long time. 🙂
hi
There is a reason only ~8% of accounts use GoDaddy for hosting… their service and also transparency in pricing over the years has been atrocious. They offer a subpar product at a nominal fee. In 15 years of interacting with GD, I have very literally NEVER had a positive customer service experience. Is that what you strive to be?? I understand the desire to “cash in” and allow deeper pockets to fund your development, but this is extremely disappointing. ManageWP was supposed to be a professional level tool for the smaller web developers/managers out there. GoDaddy does not and will not ever understand my companies needs as well as you have over the years. Wishing I did not just pre-purchase an entire year of service. I believe you will lose many loyal customers due to this move. Congrats on the payday & Bon Voyage to our privacy.
Earnie Rhyker
same here. Not happy about this move.
Ivan Bjelajac
Don’t get this wrong but I just have to say that the ~8% of accounts on ManageWP makes GoDaddy the most common hosting that our users actually use. Each individual host definitely has less users on ManageWP.
I hope we can help change that picture you painted about GoDaddy hosting support – at least when it comes to web professionals using their service.
Bob
Here is the problem… ManageWP may stay the same for a while… BUT… GoDaddy will now have all of our information. They’ll know which hosting services our clients are using and if we have contact info in our profile for our clients can market directly to them….. I can just image how this info will be used given GD track record. I wonder just how much the license agreement will now change…. and how much will let GD have access to…. Just doesn’t feel good…
starblogger
Agree with this. I think its no coincidence that those of us with blank contact information are being forced to fill it in when we next log in. This is a recent change as of last week.
Nemanja Aleksic
The Client flow has long been in the works, as we’ve outlined it in our product articles. It revolves mostly around the Client Report automation:
Let’s say you’ve got a client with a couple of websites, and you have a weekly scheduled report. Everything is fully automated, and you would intervene only if the system flagged something problematic in the report (e.g. a positive security check). But what happens if you add another website from that client? We want to raise that decision making to the client level by simply adding it to that client, and turning on the Client Report add-on.
We’ve lagged behind with the client flow implementation because we still have several things to work out, and because it’s a deviation from our website > tool flow, where we’re using the client > report flow.
I hope this sheds more light on this 🙂
leon
Not cool.
Andy
I can only echo the comments of others on here. I’m happy for you guys that you’re now cash-rich, but like many others here this is not our first rodeo and I do not see this working out well for ManageWP in the long term. It always starts like this – wide-eyed and the cashed up team selling the benefits of the new ‘partnership’. But it will all go bad because it always does. I won’t be cancelling immediately because we only finished migrating our client sites to ManageWP a month ago, but the search for a new service begins now …
moni
ManageWP and Orion has helped me immensely. I just hope ManageWP does not adopt the GoDaddy pricing model with constant up sells and “Sorry not included” etc. I will not host sites with GD if I can get my clients to avoid it… I always refer people to SiteGround hosting…they’re awesome for small – medium sites and the email is straightforward.
Ivan Bjelajac
We will not be taking away from current ManageWP features but we might add some additional benefits for GoDaddy users. However this will not affect the ease of use for our customers using other domain registrars or hosting providers.
Hendrik
Well, that started even sooner than the most pessimistic posts were anticipating earlier…
Jonathan
Hi Ivan, I hope that I’m misinterpreting this, but when you say, “We will not be taking away from current ManageWP features but we might add some additional benefits for GoDaddy users”, are you suggesting that ManageWP will be operating as a two tier system with GD customers getting priority over new features and developments? I’m finding it difficult to see an up side for all your current users who don’t feel confident in suggesting to their customers that they move their hosting to GD..
Nemanja Aleksic
Yeah, that was poorly framed. Once our API becomes public, GoDaddy will use it to hook it up to their service, pretty much like anyone else will (we have several other hosts already enquiring about the API). It’s essentially the same back end, but with an alternate GD front where they will foot the bill for some of the features, and put some of their other services on their dashboard.
I did notice one important piece is overlooked by a lot of commenters. The GoDaddy Pro program (which ManageWP will be a part of) caters to people like you – people who sell their services to others. It’s not for the small businesses, because frankly it’s way over their heads 🙂
Oh, and none of this is tied to hosting in any way – GD dashboard will, of course, nudge you to use their hosting, but AFAIK they won’t make it mandatory, and you can stay away from all that drama by sticking with your ManageWP dashboard.
Does this make more sense?
Ivan Bjelajac
Jonathan, sorry – I should have explained this better. As Nemanja said – GoDaddy will use some of ManageWP features as a part of GoDaddy Pro dashboard. These features will be ported trough our API.
Peter Mullen
Not great news to start the day. I’ve always loved using ManageWP. I’ve always felt safe and secure using the product as I trusted the company. That’s not the case anymore. I wouldn’t feel comfortable adding any new clients to ManageWP now as it’s in GoDaddy’s hands. This is very disappointing.
Steve Press
So fucking Dissapointing
Mark
Yep.
Anita
Double yep… it’s a sad day 🙁
Alexandre Duval
YEP ….really sad day
Billy Lawson
Yes I agree, This doesnt feel right to me either. ManageWP have been great over the years managing my sites and this move doesnt fill me with confidence going forward 🙁
cathy
Well that sucks – guess I should have switched to iThemes a month ago when you introduced your new pricing model. I don’t currently do business with GoDaddy and I don’t wish to give them any of my future business. I will be making the switch to iThemes next year when my subscription with you expires. 🙁
Ivan Bjelajac
Sad to hear that Cathy. Hopefully that will be enough time to show you guys that the service will not get any less reliable.
Ricky Onsman
That’s not the whole issue, Ivan. There is more at stake here than MWP features and reliability. You have aligned yourself with an entity that has built itself one of the worst reputations in the web industry. You can’t be a part of the GoDaddy empire and pretend you follow a different path. You want to put our money in their pockets, and that’s unacceptable.
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Ricky,
While I do believe GoDaddy in 2016 is very much taking a different path than GoDaddy prior to 2012. I can understand your concerns. I can only talk in behalf of the team I am directly managing and that is the ManageWP team. We certainly do not plan to change our way of doing things and we see a lot of opportunities to do more in the WordPress community after this move. I am sorry if us being a part of GoDaddy is a deal breaker for you in any way.
wepzanou
I had an account with them since day 1 in case this type of situation happened. Too sad.
Henk
Have been with you guys for many years now, until one month ago I still had a lot of sites on WP Remote and others – last month Orion won me over so now all sites have been moved to ManageWP.
I have very positive experiences with your helpdesk and had a very good impression when meeting Vladimir on the first WordCamp EU in Leiden.
But like most here I really have a bad feeling about the move you announced today… So just a month after putting nearly all of my eggs in your basket, I’ll be checking out the alternatives again.
That was a very short period of having peace of mind there…
Also I really hope this is not the way more WordPress services will go now the audience is big, and the only interested in money companies are ‘offering’ WordPress services
mrahmadawais
Congratulations ManageWP and GoDaddy on this nice strategic move. I have had a lot to say about this acquisition and I did that by writing an article on my blog. Dealing With GoDaddy ManageWP Acquisition & #WPDrama?.
I hope to see a much more empowered ManageWP with GoDaddy.
Cheers!
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for covering the flip side of all this, Ahmad. Some questions are harder to ask than others.
eoin.pricebenowitz
You said, and I quote, “I am very displeased with how a few folks have chosen to handle this situation”… I don’t think there is just a few.. if there was it probably would not have sparked you to write a blog post about it and use these comments to leverage the SEO value of the post (I hate when people do that, its called spamming, and it’s borderline black-hat). Since you know about this thread of comments, you would know that the ‘few’ is actually more like 95% of the hundreds of commenters.
Ricky Onsman
I read your post and since I can’t reply there, I’ll do so here. You know when you say “I understand, that there’s a bit of itchy history between you and GD. But hey? Whatever happened to empathy? Anywho, let’s not go there.” Yeah, well let’s DO go there. GD is famous for having NO empathy with its customers. Don’t just brush their awful business practices under the carpet. “Itchy”? Are you kidding? People have been severely ripped off by GoDaddy. That history won’t go away and, frankly, I don’t believe they care either way. Their idea of good business is maximising profit. And ManageWP is now part of their “family”. That’s not a family I want to be a part of.
Donna McMaster
When I saw the email subject line, I thought it was a strange joke. I wish I’d been right. I love you guys. Not just for the great tools, but for your top-notch support and responsiveness. I’ve been an advocate for a couple of years now, because you’ve saved me so much time and aggravation.
GoDaddy, OTOH, has been the source of so much time and aggravation over the years. I’m glad to know that Parsons is no longer in charge, but according to Wikipedia he still owns 28% of the company and is on the board. And like most of the posters here, I no longer do business with them and have managed to move all but one or two of my clients’ domain registrations from there.
I worked in Silicon Valley for about 20 years and saw many small companies bought by giants, including one that I worked for. The stories were always the same. Things were exciting for a while, then it became more difficult for the small group to make independent decisions. Productivity and morale suffered, and as soon as the contract ended the founders fled. I hear that you are hoping to help GoDaddy become a better company but the tail can’t wag the dog.
I’m not leaving in the near-term, but my heart is heavy and I fear for the future of your good service. I hope that you will find a way to write a different story.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thank you for adding your voice, Donna. And thank you for sticking with us, at least for the time being. I could not as for more.
wepzanou
I have the same feeling Donna ;-(
Catie
Surely, no.
This is like my very best friend announcing they’re marrying the arsehole in the office.
I’ve never had a positive experience with Go Daddy. And I absolutely echo everyone’s statements here. Slick marketing promises but total headaches and bad, bad support ticket outcomes i.e never a positive outcome. I was sucked in and trialled their managed WP hosting for a month or two. Total failure.
However, until I see ‘bad’, the trust still remains 100% with ManageWP.
Orion is simply fabulous. Total love.
So if there’s anything positive to come out of this outpouring of ‘negative’, it is to reiterate clearly to the Go Daddy Gods that ManageWP is a champion WP product and should continue to run its own show. Don’t meddle.
Sad. But I’ll be sticking around.
Because, aside from the person you’re marrying, I’m not letting my bestie go!
Good luck!
Nemanja Aleksic
Haha, your comment just made my day. Thanks for sticking with us, bestie! 🙂
On a more serious note, yeah, the feedback here is something that GoDaddy will definitely need to consider. I’ve been asked by several people why I don’t lock the comments or moderate heavily. This is why. Every single bad and good comment is a ManageWP user whose livelihood could be affected by the acquisition. And every single one of the deserves to be heard. So this comment section, right here? This is where the change starts.
So thank you once again, Catie.
Shane Lucas
Well I have to take my hat off to you Nemanja Aleksic. Good job on not moderating comments. That would just infuriate people more and give them the ammunition they need to move elsewhere.
I love ManageWP and Orion and won’t be going anywhere unless the service and support goes belly up.
To everyone that is freaking out about the acquisition, give ManageWP the chance to prove that things won’t change.
There is no use in wasting your time and investigating other options now if you are still happy with the service.
Well good luck guys. I hope it all works out well. Because if it doesn’t, there are going to be a lot of upset people (myself included) that are going to have a lot of work in front of them moving their sites to another management service.
And as you mentioned Nemanja Aleksic, send this blog post to GoDaddy so they can see how much work they have to do to improve their reputation. If a service like ManageWP can have such a massive backlash because of an acquisition, GoDaddy still have some serious issues.
Shane Lucas
PS: Looking forward to the automated client reports 🙂
Ivan Bjelajac
You will get them Shane 🙂
Billy Lawson
Me too 🙂
Hendrik
“There is no use in wasting your time and investigating other options now if you are still happy with the service.”
Yes of course there is. Most ManageWP clients are using the service professionally, they are relying on it with their business: Most know the bad reputation of GD, a lot have had bad experience with GD first hand. It would be stupid not to anticipate an impact for the MWP product down the road and it would be downright moronic not to evaluate additional options right now.
If they pull it of and the product and service remains good you might not need the alternative, but if the shit hits the fan you need an alternative right then. There’s a thing with cows, barns and doors that comes to mind…
ryanfurtner
This is the comment I agree the most with. My first reaction was ‘why the hell did I decide to base my business around this if flipping godaddy was going to end up with it, now I have to migrate to something better (again)!’. But, I love Orion and if they dont change anything, then I will continue to happily use the best WP management tool on the market. Still wish it was literally anyone but godaddy though.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you for sticking with us Ryan. 🙂 We will do our best not to disappoint.
AndrewJ
I echo this comment. I am about to launch 8 websites, offering support to the top Themeforest Themes, basede ENTIRELY on Orion as the underlying delivery product.
IF it doesn’t change, if GD don’t offer a Orion as a ‘commercial product’ for $0,99 per month to completely undermine those of us that add VALUE to your product, I’ll stay with you for the immediate future.
Nemanja Aleksic
The GoDaddy Pro program is aimed towards WordPress professionals, so it wouldn’t even make sense to pitch it as a product for SMB. You’re safe, but of course don’t take my word for it – keep a watchful eye on everything 🙂
AndrewJ
I echo this comment. I am about to launch 8 websites, offering support to the top Themeforest Themes, basede ENTIRELY on Orion as the underlying delivery product.
IF it doesn’t change, if GD don’t offer Orion as a ‘commercial product’ for $0,99 per month to completely undermine those of us that add VALUE to your product, I’ll stay with you for the immediate future.
Mark
Sad day. I just put all my own and client sites onto Orion about a month ago, and have been exploring its features while enjoying the overall ease of management. And hoping that some of the flakier things (this isn’t a bug report so I am not going into them, but for example the weirdly obscure navigation to get to what should be logically easy: Update All The Things!) would improve.
Instead, GoDaddy. Which I banned from my own sites and domains half a decade ago, and started dumping clients who insisted on using GoDaddy for any services that they needed me to support.
Yes, GoDaddy has gotten slightly better. And yes, the “new guy” Blake is the CEO, and not the slimy sexist and animal-torturing Parsons. But as commenters upthread noted, Parsons still controls the company as the Chairman. It’s still the same company. And you now report up to him, ultimately.
It takes a whole lot more than a couple of years of “Maybe they didn’t totally ruin MediaTemple” (though a lot of folks think they did), and more than a reasonably-professional “GoDaddy Pro” section of their site, to regain any respect. Right now it’s like “leaking PageRank” by the site you link too being of crummy quality. Well, the company you now are simply a subsidiary of, is still crummy, and their bad reputation is hurting you faster than your good reputation might help them.
Sad day. I am not going to do a kneejerk response of “close the account, move all the sites to new management service” – not yet. But I am highly unlikely to upgrade to the paid services, which I was seriously considering doing. I don’t want any of my or my clients’ funds going even indirectly to GoDaddy. Maybe in 5-10 more years of decent professional and technical behavior, GoDaddy might rejoin the world of respected internet companies. But not yet. And you’re too small to have much if any impact on that still-bad reputation.
Of course, I expect it was a heck of a great payday, and thus is a very good startup exit strategy if your goal was to cash out. Congrats for that, sincerely. But don’t expect any of us to believe that you still have any power to control ManageWP’s future.
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Mark,
That’s OK. You have your own set of principles, and I respect that. We’d be happy to provide the service on the free level, because that’s what we felt the community needed when we redesigned the pricing model. And if you spend the next five years going “GD sucks, but those MWP peeps are awesome”, we’d be happy with that 🙂
OH, and yeah, those couple of UX decisions are horrible, I admit, e.g. when you want to overwrite a plugin. We’re paying extra attention to UX, but as the scope of tools changed and all the feedback we got turned into actionable features, we kinda tripped over ourselves 😀 But hey, you live and you learn.
Richard Buff
I used to avoid GoDaddy but they’ve really stepped it up in recent years and seem genuinely interested in improving their reputation and their offering. I have no problem with this acquisition and it would be silly for me to invest any time in moving to a different product before I even saw the effects of it. Plus Mendel Kurland is a really cool dude 🙂
Bob
What is very interesting is how ManageWP folks are only responding to a few of the posts here… I give it about 1 1/2 years before you see the service go downhill. I remember when I worked for a large technology company that bought numerous entities … each time the bought folks were promised — “ahhh nothing will change… keep doing what you always have done… that’s why we bought you…”… 9 months plus into the purchase you could start to see the change in the “bought” staff… slowly they get eaten up by the buyer… slowly they either leave or are forced out because of non-compliance with the “mother-ship”… Yep nothing will change… you keep telling yourself that… that’s why they paid a few key people handsomely (no inside info I just know how these things work)… in 2 years (if that) the previous “owners” will feel stifled and move on (of course with a heafty non-compete clause)….
Sad day…. for ManageWP customers… Sad day in 1.5 years (at best) for the loyal employee in the trenches…
Godspeed and good luck….
No onto MainWP for a test spin….
Nemanja Aleksic
To be honest, there’s only so much of us, and the large majority of the team still needs to keep developing and supporting ManageWP. The rest of us can only cover so much, so we need to pick and choose the more constructive comments. Frankly, the “you sold out” argument that only those who haven’t met us could say.
I’m sorry to see you leave, but it’s your right and I respect your decision. If you ever change your mind, or hear that we’ve actually made a difference, I’d be happy to see welcome you back.
I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!
Debbie Tortorigi
Well another good company acquiesces to money and services will now go to pot. I’ve moved everything I can from godaddy and now another service will go. I’m happy you got funding, not so happy I have to leave.
Alex
That’s horrible news for us, but good on you! Definitely congratulations on the payout — it definitely reflects the growth of your company and the work you’ve put in.
As for me and my clients, we’re looking forward to finding an alternative to ManageWP 😀
sites
I hope ManageWP is reading these comments as 90+% of them are people / customers that are upset and frustrated. ManageWP must have known about the possible backlash and didn’t care anyway… that’s not good. So I’ll be looking for a new solution.
John
I cancelled my account immediately upon reading this news.
I have never dealt with a worse company in my professional life than GoDaddy, and will never do so again. One of my requirements for taking on a new client is moving them off GoDaddy completely.
Really disappointed, as I found ManageWP to be quite helpful and worth the subscription cost.
Kenbo
Wow! I know this is hindsight, but you folks should have run a poll with your customers, us loyal folks, first to get some feedback. At the least, we’d give you a cause for a pause for second thoughts. Really surprised. GoDaddy doesn’t have a stellar reputation for customer service. Anyhow, wish you folks the best, for me, I’ll hang in there with you until “it no longer benefits the both of us.”
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks, we’ll make sure that day never happens 🙂
Seth Spears
There are two hosting companies that I refuse to work with: Network Solutions and Godaddy. Before I begin working with a new client I always find out if they are hosted by either one of those companies, and if so, if they’re willing to move to a reputable host. If they can’t agree to do so, then I will not take them on as a client, as I have never had a positive experience with either of these hosting companies.
When Godaddy’s WordPress specific hosting rolled out over a year ago, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and purchased their new service for a client site we were building. We had so many issues with it (including terrible customer support claiming plugin conflicts) that we moved them over to SiteGround and immediately all the issues went away.
I think this is a very bad move for Manage WP, as Godaddy’s reputation is terrible because of how inferior their hosting and customer service actually is.
Moz
I hope this isn’t a done deal, that adding my concern here can influence your choice, and that this presents an opportunity for a new, independent player in the market.
Rick
“My team and I are going to make sure we deliver on our promise….”
This is naive. You CANNOT make promises as you’re no longer in control of your business. That’s what selling it means – you get money, you have more resources, but you give up control. While it would be idiotic on their part, GD management could utterly change the direction of MWP, revise the UI or even mandate that to use it we have to host on GD and there would be nothing you could do. If you wanted to keep control of what happens with MWP you should have not sold, however, you have.
Kimberly Kubalek
What it means is a lot money for you and we all get screwed. GoDaddy is about the most evil company on the planet. What a huge disappointment for all of your customers. We respected you, respected your product, and now – all that is gone. September 6, 2016 – the date you ruined your company. 🙁 Tragic.
USTECH
I totally agree 100% GoDaddy is horrible and ManageWP are sellouts, enjoy them ca$h while your product dies with GoDaddy.
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Kimberly,
I do not know do you remember me but we worked on quite an urgent helpdesk ticket you had with us a few years ago and you gave us a great testemonial for that chat. 🙂
At that time I was Head of Customer Experience in ManageWP (now Customer Happiness department) and I moved on to COO and then CEO role in the company. I am still staying on top of our operations as Managing Director.
I still remember working on your ticket and both Vladimir and myself regularly check into our helpdesk to see how are our customers being treated. Most of our team leaders started their employment as part of Customer Happiness team and all our new employees have to spend a period of time in this team to understand our customers better.
This is just another step in evolution of ManageWP and I really hope you will still be with us on this way. I understand that you guys all have some doubts but we always put customer experience first and that will not change.
Please provide us with your regular feedback like you did until now. That will help us improve the product and do our jobs better. We will not let the quality drop because that is the way we succeeded so far and we do not plan to change it.
If some of you do decide to leave we wish nothing but the best to you and your businesses, but I am sure that we can still help you manage websites in the best way possible and we will keep doing so.
Please don’t write us off based on doubt, we will pay you back for your trust.
Bob
Well how timely. I just started to move this last weekend to ManageWP… and will be promptly being deleting my account. I know that seems drastic maybe even knee-jerk but ManageWP held out so much promise for me to save time and be efficient. By joining GoDaddy you have now jeopardized they very reason I wanted to use ManageWP. I cannot afford to risk the time, effort and distraction that goes along with GoDaddy (regardless of the promised — GD promises a lot and seldom delivers). So I guess if it must be I only lost a few days. I am so glad I found out now instead of introducing report and information derived from ManageWP to my clients (which by the way all ran from GD when shown a path on how to do it — it is how my “business” actually ended up growing – by offering conversion/migration from GD services).
Congratulation on creating something that someone with money wanted to buy. My condolences in actually believing whatever was sold to you.
Regards,
Bob
A 2 day old ManageWP user.
managewp
Hey everyone over there at ManageWP. I have been a customer since nearly the beta. There is no other tool even remotely as clean and efficient as Orion out there. I have also found you customer service exemplary.
Although I would like to congratulate you on being seen with such value by a giant in tbe biz, I have to echo other commenters. I saw the email and was stunned. My jaw dropped. As a WordPress designer since the first year WP existed, I have had nothing but bad experience after bad experience with GoDaddy. I encourage every client that comes to me having bought Dominicans and hosting at GD to switch as soon as their contract comes up, if not sooner. The backend is NOT designer, developer or customer friendly. Their tools are convoluted and messy. Pages in their backend lead to random locations way too often. Just last week a client’s site was hacked. It was a redirect injection. Even though this action was made possibly by GD vulnerabilities, they offered my client a security package of an SSL license and some fake software they made up for $260/yr. What a scam. I was floored.
I also have a concern about the services I offer my clients being FREE to GD clients. This steps on our feet. The fact that you are now with GD is disconcerting. I will not bail on you all as you have been good to me. Very good. But I will be watching for any changes that interfere with my daily work.
Best of luck.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you for your honest feedback. If you ever have an issue with the service we are providing please do come forward and give us feedback and suggestions. We will certainly not become less responsive with this change.
Drew
Very disappointed. ManageWP is a premium service that is now being acquired by a subpar company that offers the worst web hosting and email hosting all around. I get it. Money talks. Don’t pretend this will improve your product or be better for your current clients. It won’t.
Jon Griffith
First thing I do with any website on GoDaddy is offer a migration. If the client refuses to do so I will actually stop working with that client as they will be the type to refuse good advice forever.
All that remains to be seen is how long until the ship sinks.
#ripmanagewp
Jose R. Lopez
I was really hoping this was some outdated april’s fools joke. I mean, I get it. It is probably a good boost in terms of getting capital onto the business to “do” greater things and reaching a larger audience. It makes sense for the business. What frustrates me is how CEO’s try to pass this as “we do it all for our customers”, “this allows us to do greater things” bla bla bla.
I have a strong feeling you are about to lose a big chunk of your customer base on this move. I am sure godaddy can afford it.
Will
Congrats to the WPManage Team. I am sure you weighed all your options before making this decision. I would be lying if I said I too was not totally disappointed. I have experienced similar scenarios in the recent past, and the small company just acquired promises nothing will change (and they probably do believe that), and that there will be far more improvements to come with the increased cash flow and resources post-aquisition. …it reminds me exactly of Diverse Solutions IDX being bought by Zillow. Diverse was a small, nimble, and cutting edge…and delivered one hell of a product …then, 5 years ago, Zillow gobbled them up…and they were NEVER the same…and now 5 years later, they have barely improved the key products that made them so great, and they deliver a fraction of the quality they once did. They have lost the majority of their long term customers, and their future is uncertain.
I do wish ManageWP the best, I am sure you all had these concerns too, and I am sure you are listening to your customers now. I really hope you can accomplish what most other small companies who were acquired by large corporations could not….continue to provide cutting edge greatness while living in a nest woven of mediocracy and poor service focused on the larger company’s interest, their bottom line and agenda, and not focused AT ALL on the customers you have earned through today. Please prove us all wrong!!!!! We WANT to be wrong.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thank you for the insight, Bill. The next step is probably as hard as the previous one. Maybe even harder, because if we failed before, we’d go bust. If we fail now, we’ll still be a part of a large company. It’s gonna be hard, but we’re now shying away from it.
Anita
Congratulations on your growth, but I can’t say I’m happy for myself or my clients-My stomach got a knot when I read the email announcement. Any developer who’s been around stears their clients away from Godaddy if they can. Your customers are WordPress developers, not the layperson who tries to build their own website. I just hopped on the ManageWP bandwagon and have the majority of my clients websites using your service. I hope Godaddy doesn’t change things but if they do I’ll start doing research to have a backup plan.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you for your feedback Anita.
I understand your concerns with the acquisition but we still plan to keep ManageWP roadmap going and we are going to remain host agnostic in terms that other hosting providers can still be used with ManageWP without any penalties. I hope that you will keep your business with us and that we will help you grow it even more.
We still plan to be as responsive as before and we are certainly going to stay the part of WordPress developers community going forward.
mel
Wow. I had been evaluating your services for the last month or so but you totally just made my decision for me. I can’t support a company that does business with GD. There is too many reasons not too. Hope the payout was worth it since you totally just tanked your professional reputation, guys.
Frank Gomez
I’m very concerned about this and want ManageWP because it is in fact a dedicated tool. To date I’ve ignored iThemes Sync and even WPMUDevs encroachment on ManageWP territory. I fear the day that GoDaddy will implement some restriction that destroys ManageWP for me. I hope that never happens.
Of course I’ll stick w/ ManageWP for now and hope that I can stay w/ ManageWP indefinitely. I hope that the product continues to improve. Avoid trying to make anything fancy or new, Just keep it working well, clean and simple. Usually changes to great software after a while become detrimental instead of positive. I hope everything stays positive.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks, Frank! We’ve outlined the roadmap so we could be held accountable. Of course we’ll make minor adjustments here and there, but we’ve always been trying to scratch that UX itch 🙂
andy
While many WordPress management tools exist, none hold a candle to Orion. In short, I’ll be sticking around for a while. I am curious if you expected all the “comment vomit” when this post was released? Ha.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you for your trust Andy. Well I can’t say we expected this many negative comments but we did expect some. We thought that we communicated well enough what are our plans going forward after the acquisition but obviously people are still unsure we will be able to keep our word to them.
Colm
Having read through the comments I can only say I had the same response as most people when they saw the subject line of your email… heart-sinking feeling and some swearing (different levels based on your previous experience with GD).
I’d like to congratulate you on the great work you’ve done to make a product and support experience that a behemoth like GD would be stupid not to try and purchase but I can’t for a second believe you’d misread so badly how you’re existing customer base would respond… therefore you knew what the immediate impact would be, sounds like probably a 60% decline and a further 20%-25% sitting on the fence but looking worried (I include myself in this group) if everyone follows-through on their comments. That can only suggest it’s a product purchase for GD for their mass-market customer base and you’re wearing rose-coloured glasses if you think you can change them.
That said I’m going to stick around and give you a fair shot… you’ve delivered to date and while I’ve low expectations of you being able to improve GD or that they won’t ruin your product you deserve a chance. However I will be looking at my options should things go the way most of the more experienced customers believe is inevitable.
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you for that. Fair shot is the only thing we are asking. If you ever feel like we are letting you down – please do contact us and offer feedback.
Jeffrey Friend
So sorry to hear the GoDaddy news. I’ve been with you for a long time, but GoDaddy has, and always has had, a bad reputation for poor service…I’ve experienced it firsthand. I also saw it happen at Media Temple. Originally they were awesome, but slowly over time their service faltered, then the GoDaddy buyout. I’m sorry, but I’m moving on. Best of luck.
Lori
I have been with you guys since the original beta and have seen the amazing amount of improvements over time and the awesomeness of your technical support. Orion has fixed the worst problems of Classic, and is now a tool that I trust as much as I can trust an online tool.
I have also had terrible experiences with GoDaddy’s hosting and support, and always add extra time to any estimates that I send my clients when they are hosted at GoDaddy because I know things will go wrong, not work, run out of resources, etc.
I congratulate you on your next step and hope it goes really well. Like others, I am not happy about it, but will stick around to see what happens. It is a strange position that we are in to trust one company so much (ManageWP) and one so little (GoDaddy), and then have the trusted company become part of the untrusted one.
My main concern from a business perspective is that you are giving away premium features free to GoDaddy hosting customers. That is a direct conflict with the people that offer ManageWP as a service to their clients. The services we provide now seem like they are worth less to our clients who host at GoDaddy. I would have felt better about this if only the free features would be available to GoDaddy customers for free, but understand why that is not the case.
Thanks for all of your hard work over the years. Despite my reservations, I wish you all the best in your new adventure!
Ivan Bjelajac
Thank you for this feedback Lori. I do believe that many of the things you are worried about will turn out to be a non issue in the end. You guys offer much more to your clients than just plugin updates and reports. You have earned their trust and I am sure this will not negatively affect your business. If you ever decide that you want to talk about this more – shoot us an email.
Jenny Lens
My heart sank reading your email and now your post. If you really believe this, WOW! Godaddy’s interface is designed SOLELY to sell ppl products and services they don’t need. The MOST convoluted website and backend. Plus WordPress users on which webhost get hacked more than any other webhost? Yeah, GoDaddy. Plus the bit about the elephant. IF you read what REAL professional web designers write, they ALL HATE GoDaddy.
SO there weren’t any other takers? People with integrity? I don’t care if they offered free building WP sites, I would never use them again. ARE YOU SERIOUS? Money talks. 🙁
Jenny Lens
I found MainWp and InfiniteWP. My needs are minimal. I’ll be no loss to your company. But staying will be a loss to me. I’ll research and try ’em out tonight and change. Thanks for the heads up. YOU think you can help GoDaddy? Good luck with that!
Dave
Jenny. I currently use MainWP and urge you to give it a go. I’m not affiliated at all.
They offer a lot for free and also offer a lifetime membership for unlimited sites. Nothing to lose.
debbie
Hello Fabulous ManageWP folks!
I want to start by congratulating all of you on this exciting new chapter for your company. I’m glad you will all continue to be a part of ManageWP!
Like so many who have posted, I am concerned that being owned by GoDaddy will have a negative impact on ManageWP. I sincerely hope that is not the case as I have found you folks to be very helpful & ManageWP to be a great service that has kept getting better since I’ve been a customer. It has become an integral part of how I manage my clients WordPress sites, and therefore an integral part of my business.
I am confident that your team did everything you could to make sure this is a beneficial decision for your business, and I can understand why you proceeded as it will enable you to do more that you could on your own.
I’m not thrilled that even by using ManageWP without Godaddy hosting, I am still contributing to GoDaddy’s profits since they now own ManageWP. However I would like to continue to use ManageWP, and work directly with you folks, so I do sincerely hope that GoDaddy enables you to keep doing things the way you have been, and that ManageWP continues to be a reliable, well-supported service.
Cheers to the positive outcomes from this change!
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Debbie, thank you for your trust. We will give our best to stay the same.
debbie
Let’s stay focused on that! 🙂
Duff
Congrats on being acquired by GoDaddy, sorry it had to be GoDaddy specifically.
kolhoffmmm
The promise of no changes I simply do not trust, I have been burned badly many times by bigger companies taking over smaller companies and promising nothing will change. Yeah it does not take long before they forgot that promise, after all GD probably paid big $$$ for managewp and they need to to get ROI
Cathy
Wow, so many people feel exactly as I do. I had been with Godaddy for 14 year! After I got myself and my clients well-settled in there, the sexist commercials started coming out. I wanted to move everything but it was going to be a huge job. So I rode it out and eventually Parsons was gone. I’ve never had hosting problems with Godaddy which is why I stayed with them. BUT this year they f’d me over seriously. Somehow suddenly, my DNS and that of a client got redirected to a petting zoo! After TWO weeks of going crazy trying to fix this, talking with several different techs, each of whom said the “other guy” didn’t do something right, I had to call it quits. I moved everything to Siteground – a much better hosting solution anyway.
Now aside from that, I ALWAYS worry when a product gets snarfed up by a Goliath. It will change. You may have “no plans” to change, but this product will change and it won’t be for the better. I truly believe you all got excited about money and prestige. You may have wanted the funds to grow your product, but I know, I’m gonna get screwed eventually. I’ve been in this business long enough to know how it goes. I too, just started using manageWP as part of a service I offer my clients. I have recently adjusted my business plan based on this tool and what I can do with it for my clients.
Well, time will tell, but I’m worried and not hopeful. Really just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
David
This is the last thing I would have expected – a pairing with the monster godaddy. Like most I am very unhappy about the news and have no respect for godaddy, not only because it is a corporate giant, but because of its support for SOPA and its terrible user interface. Whenever I inherit a website hosted on godaddy, one of the first things I do is to suggest to my client that they change hosts.
I love ManageWP, but will be considering alternatives if godaddy gets their hooks in too deep. You guys have been a great independent company and I’m sorry that economic decisions forced you into making a deal with the devil.
Jacqueline
P. S. I have no respect for that company due to how they hunt animals. Nor do I trust them. Any company that is one thing but also in the domain business is not to be trusted by any means.
Jacqueline
I am a former GoDaddy customer and left them for a reason (their ongoing spam with thier half-naked ladies pics and for their HORRIBAD UI customer account back-end . I just couldn’t get anything done without getting past their convoluted way to get things done, all in the name of upselling you at every turn. I hope ManageWP’s UI doesn’t end up this way or I will have to jump ship myself.
kevin
I will be staying with ManageWP as I do love Orion and think the new pricing structure works well (esp the bundles!). I am slightly concerned about what GD will do with our data (I didn’t have concerns with MWP). Also (and I think this may have been mentioned already), why would a specialist WordPress hosting service, ie GD’s – the one that Vlad says is “really good”, operate with a version of php less than that recommended by WP itself?
Philip
There is a thread on GoDaddy – but the long and short of it is that GoDaddy IS upgrading PHP, but has been waiting on some new hardware as part of the upgrade. While I really wish I was on the latest and greatest already, I respect them for making sure that their hardware can handle the new version and won’t cause other issues. I’ve seen all too often when someone upgrades Windows on an older machine and all of the sudden things stop working – PHP shouldn’t have that issue, but for example perhaps there could be memory or processing issues. I’d rather them do it right…. For sites who need a newer version I have a WHM/cPanel server where I have full control and if something gets messed up it is my own fault
Ania
Waking up to this news was like waking up to a kick in the gut. My business partner and I have built our company on ManageWP and on moving clients away from bad hosts like GoDaddy. We make a point of refusing to support unethical companies. To us, “unethical” doesn’t just include companies that safari hunt and promote misogynistic views, it also includes companies that knowingly provide a poor service or product. Even though GoDaddy has distanced itself from its former elephant-killing and sexist image, that doesn’t change the fact that they are well known for being a terrible host. A few of our recent clients are still on GoDaddy and EIG hosts, waiting for their annual hosting renewal, and these few clients cause 90% of our problems. Time-outs during updates, poor uptime, poor site speeds, etc., etc.
We had an emergency business meeting this morning, and we have so many questions and concerns about the ManageWP sellout to GoDaddy. Why on earth would a high quality product like ManageWP, especially with the recent release of the fantastic Orion, sell to such a low quality company? It’s like Harrods selling out to Asda Walmart and claiming the two companies share the same vision! Will the premise of ManageWP conflict with GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting? Was this a competitor acquisition? Will the future development of ManageWP be tied to GoDaddy’s offerings? Will GoDaddy unreliability now plague ManageWP? But most fundamentally and irreconcilably, how can we continue a business where we claim to offer high quality services based on high quality service providers while now supporting GoDaddy? If our clients discover that we are now associated with GoDaddy, we would be a joke. Our business model has essentially vapourized, overnight. This is gut-wrenching for us.
While selling out to GoDaddy might be an “amazing milestone” for the ManageWP team, this is certainly not the case for us or, gauging from most responses to this post, for most of your customer base. This seems like a decision based on a cash grab and not based on consultation with your customer base and their long-term best interest. Telling us that our business won’t be affected, “at least not in a bad way”? Well thanks for the glib and patronizing reassurance, but our business has already been affected badly, with our business model of not supporting unethical companies blown out of the water. Your decision has instantly affected us badly. Our only conclusion from our business meeting this morning is that we have to go back to the drawing board and re-research ManageWP’s competitors. Hopefully your competitors will see this as a huge opportunity and will step up their game immediately. If not, then we seriously have to consider ending our WordPress management services and focus only on our other projects, as we cannot in good conscience support a company like GoDaddy after years of preaching against it and other such bad companies. So thanks, ManageWP, for this amazing milestone.
mike
I agree, WHY would a company doing so well sell out to a company like GoDaddy?
GoDaddy has not purchased any company so far that they have not made worse for the former clients of those companies.
This truly sucks!
Maybe you should have ask us about a company based in the USA before making such a deal, seems we all knew this is a bad idea.
You could have kept your company like Google did and grew to be a powerhouse in the industry, now you will be just a footnote in one of GoDaddy’s failed efforts.
Boy this sucks!
account
Wow! Congrats ManageWP team!!!
I am truly happy for you and I sincerely hope that good things come out of your relationship with GD. As others have said, I hope your high standards continue and that GD continues to invest in what you have built so successfully.
Personally I want to avoid products and services that get taken over and then pinched for every penny’s worth of profit. I feel that’s what happened when Automattic bought Woo Themes – their support has never been the same and I no longer use their products.
My previous experience with GD hosting has not gone well. However, I have never used their GD Pro service. But irrespective of that, ManageWP will still work with my websites and my host of choice, so I am sticking around to see what cool things come out of this new partnership.
Congrats again and All the Best for you guys!
nathan
So, so sad. An awesome company being acquired by a horrible company. I will be leaving ManageWP for sure. There is no way I can support anything related or owned by GoDaddy.
As an owner of multiple businesses, I can appreciate the excitement of getting acquired, having new resources, etc. However, GoDaddy is selling your soul. Sad.
sterling
Congratulations ManageWP team. Like many others I had an initial negative reaction to the news, but now I think it makes sense.
The comments here clearly demonstrate GoDaddy’s image problem with professionals. If GoDaddy is serious about developing “pro” offerings, the best thing they can do is acquire reputable and respected companies like ManageWP and let them continue operating within their own unique culture (like Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos).
With GoDaddy’s resoures ManageWP could release new functionality quicker, as long as their development cycles aren’t tied up with integration in GoDaddy’s hosting platform instead.
The core ManageWP features are solid, but some features like the Client Report are barely usable. The Google Analytics doesn’t pull eCommerce data, and needs some customization options to be useful. Here’s hoping this news means that ManageWP will be able to beef up their features more quickly.
So hats off to the ManageWP team for reaching this huge milestone, and wishing you the best in your new relationship with GoDaddy!
Dan
Fire the guy that made this dumb decision. This is really bad news.
Are you going to kill more Elephants and exploit more women now?
I for one long ago voted with my pocketbook and left GoDaddy.
I am extremely disappointed that you’ve join at the hip with this awful company.
I will continue to discourage people from using all Godaddy products.
Bad move on The part of ManageWP, you did not do your homework
Shame on you
Dan
As an expert, influencer and trainer within the internet marketing community with a massive following and an established role with my audience to be someone that helps entrepreneurs decide what tools and services are good choices, I’m forced to un-recommend ManageWP now… Why? Because I’ve already told my audiences, students and followers that any product or service associated with GoDaddy should be avoided. Why? Because the horror stories I’ve lived through with GoDaddy would make your toenails curl, coupled with the never ending bad GoDaddy stories I hear from my audiences, coupled with the despicable acts of cruelty to animals, coupled with the degrading use of women in their ads.
If you are proud of your “merger” then please leave this Huffington Post link, as it is part of the history you are now endorsing.
I for one, really gave this some thought. I posted earlier. I waited an hour, and came to the same conclusion. Bad decision. I cannot recommend or support this in anyway. Sorry.
Marcin
GoDaddy, really? This is bad news, I hope this is just a dream and I’ll wake up from this nightmare. I really love ManageWP and I hope that I don’t have to do use this service trough ManageWp otherwise we will transfer all our clients to other platform I’m sorry. I hope I’m still dreaming…. (sarcasm)
Mark
As a business, this is a huge accomplishment. Congrats.
I’m surprised at everyone’s negative reaction. My initial feeling was disappointment, but once I read that nothing will be changed with the ManageWP platform, I was golden.
I hope everyone realizes that this does not mean you have to start using Godaddy hosting, right? Just continue managing your websites, billing your clients, and enjoying the ManageWP platform. If for some reason the platform takes a turn for the worst in the future, then at that time I’ll look for an alternative. Right now, ManageWP is too amazing and too valuable to be to get upset and leave.
Ali
I dont trust any company related with Godaddy.
eoin.pricebenowitz
I am willing to bet that there was no dialog because Godaddy asked ManageWP to be quite about it. If so, reading the majority of the comments here will tell you why. I hope I’m wrong, but I can’t see ManageWP keeping their loyal clients in the dark about something like this without being forced to.
Andrew
I had been seriously considering switching to ManageWP, especially since Orion has been so well received. But now? No way.
Nemanja Aleksic
I’ve deleted several inflammatory comments. Please remain civil.
Lubi
Same as most, I couldn’t even read the email straight away, the title made me get up and go and walk my dog for an hour or so to try and come up with a positive spin on these news when it comes to my business. Speaking from my personal experience with GD I just couldn’t find it.
I am totally stoked for you guys at the same time, your product is amazing, your support staff actually have brains and they are using them, at the opposite side of this scale has been my experience with GD support. I have been around from early Beta too, literally throughout your whole journey. I am not surprised this has happened, but like for most of your customers its a bit of sour lump to swallow…. 🙂
I am not going to jump ship immediately but I am almost sure that speaking to experts who think about the problem and speaking to (I don’t even know what to call GD support, insert appropriate phrase here) – are two very different things. I was so looking forward to growing my business with you guys 🙁 I felt like you had my back, you were experts at what you did, and problems were sorted from an intelligent, insightful place. The flip side of this is problem resolution with GD… In my experience I knew MORE than the support staff every single time. I had to spend hours reading their complicated, ridiculous guidelines and manuals to sort my problem out. For example hosting two sites on the same hosting account…. If I wasn’t so busy I would write a blog post about how to actually do this – it was a major exercise for a family member who just went on and purchased a hosting account with them tantalised by the price and then begged me to help as buying it was a very small part of the hurdle.
Anyway, I guess this is the world we live in and I cannot for sure say that if GD approached me with a pile of cash that I would say no either… I am happy for you, and I just hope that GD takes a note from your book and not the other way around going forward. I am sticking around to see, but boy do they have a point to prove to us all. I am an optimistic person 🙂 but my prognosis on retaining your current customers is pretty low 🙂 but hey, maybe you can start another awesome startup and this time you may not feel the need to sell it – you really did get it so right guys, thats super rare these days…
Nemanja Aleksic
Wow, thanks for taking out of your time to write your feedback. I know that a one liner would have been much easier.
I’m gonna repeat myself since we’re getting to 200 comments, but bear with me. You’ve been with us practically since day one, so at least you know that we did a lot of growing of our own. We’ve reached a point where we want to do more, but as a bootstrapped company we have our limits. But when we started talking to the GD people and started looking into the GD Pro program, we realized that this is it – this is the place where we can take things to the next level. But that doesn’t matter until we actually build something worthwhile and prove that we’ve made the right decision.
I appreciate that you’ve given us the benefit of the doubt, and it’s mighty big of you, since it’s your business that we’re talking about. My taem and I are going to make sure we deliver on our promise.
ACL WEB
Quite. Oh dear. There’s a reason why people don’t use GoDaddy – this shizzel smacks of Microsoft taking over Skype to take that forward and we know how that panned out…
Fortunately, I have a little time left on my contract, I’ll see how it goes and keep an eye on a replacement. Good luck everyone!
Emil Uzelac
Now let’s do this officially: Congratulations ManageWP and GoDaddy! Big news and super fantastic decision.
Lubi
Haha 🙂 Eric, you made me giggle 🙂 I think you meant “minority” though.. reaching for my popcorn 🙂
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks, Emil! We appreciate it. Most people congratulating us just opted to skip the comments and reach out directly 🙂
David
Yikes. I’m hopeful that you will not switch resources to GoDaddy servers? I’ve had endless nightmares this year especially as GoDaddy squeezes more and more resources from hosting accounts. I actually started using ManageWP specifically because GD hosting freezes and crashes daily if I try and run BackupBuddy on their hosting. If ManageWP relies at all on those resources it will rapidly become as feeble and unreliable as other GD products. Hopefully that will not be the case, I’ll keep a careful eye on how it all progresses.
Nemanja Aleksic
Orion is on AWS, including the EU and US storage buckets. It’s your business and you’ve got every right to keep an eye out on any changes. Now it’s up to us to prove that you were right to stick with us.
robhegner
I am not happy about the decision since I just got comfortable with Orion and think it’s great. The sell out to GD hurts. Please, Please don’t use GoDaddy servers. Stick with AWS.
I just don’t know what to say, I was really happy to find you guys for my WordPress management needs and thought you were the best solution. Now I guess it’s a wait and see but I dread having to move my sites to another service.
Was it really worth it?? I’m guessing that they courted you because you quite simply have the best solution, especially after the Orion upgrade!
We’ll see or “another one bites the dust – and another one is gone – another one is gone, another one bites the dust” (Queen). Hope you can keep it together. I’ll stick around a while longer and see what happens. Just wish I knew when I signed up it would go this route. Especially with Godaddy.
Now depressed, need a stiff drink!!
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Rob,
I completely understand. And here’s a little something for you, until we earn the right to play “We are the champions” 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a01QQZyl-_I
satori83
Jeez I have to side with the majority. Defintely shouldve polled the user base, but would it have mattered? When you get that kind of capital and could reach millions who host on GoDaddy because they don’t have a clue as opposed to the hundreds of thousands who make a living hosting and managing client sites it’s hard not to drink the kool aid. Maybe they went on a hunting trip together? All I know is I already lose some people because I tell them it’s and extra 1-2 hrs surcharge for GoDaddy because half the “developer” plugins don’t work, causing my job to be longer. Ask someone for help? i tell people call 3 times because you will get 3 answers, hopefully one didn’t just get hired from Walmart and knows what a server is. I too Would rather have seen a merger with someone like WPEngine, Synthesis, Page.ly, even InMotion?! But GoDaddy? No. Its the only table I avoid at Wordcamp. Media Temple tried to get me to sign up for some VPS’s and I said no. When they asked why I told them I was considering it for a while after reading Chris Coyier’s article but now they were bought by the devil im not taking that chance again. Remember the site NoDaddy anyone?
I bet this kickstarts a new wave of competitive products, hooray 4 innovation.
Nemanja Aleksic
From what we’ve talked in the past I got the impression that you’re a great guy, Scott. I appreciate your feedback, but the hunting comment is uncalled for. You have every right to call us out on our decisions, but I though that we’ve at least earned the right not to be hit below the belt.
satori83
I was not trying to hit you below the belt. I do love your product as all of us do or we wouldn’t be as passionate about writing in. The fact is that all of these things happened. The complaints about their reputation and service tarnished their brand for a lot of people. For me at least it boils down to the decision making within their corporate culture. Your values shine through, theirs not so much. It just doesn’t feel like the right partnership to us. Speaking honestly, I am still keeping my service, because I believe in YOUR company. Im just not sure how long we all can hold on if the integration with them gets too deep. I mean hey, I would love to host a bunch of sites on 1 plan for $3 with UNLIMITED everything, it just isn’t possible. But, I will wait to hopefully be proven wrong. I just wanted to express why myself, and potentially others, have such a strong loathing for GoDaddy. I <3 ManageWP, drink out of your coffee cup, and wear your shirts. So I apologize, I was not trying to offend you.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for following up, it really means a lot to me. I overreacted too, tbh. Many have pointed out that we’re no longer in control, but I’ll be damned if my team and I don’t give 100% to deliver what we’ve promised. So it’s mighty kind of you to keep a watchful eye and see what happens in the near future.
satori83
The good thing is most people while hating GoDaddy are sticking because of YOU, were just afraid of dilution through such a big acquisition. It seems like your values are on the other side of the spectrum, but maybe they will take a page from your book. I would have liked to see you guys build out your own integrated hosting! That would be sweet.
cathy
I was actually glad satori83 mentioned the hunting thing – it’s the #1 reason I don’t use GoDaddy.
lemongrass
Also, congratulations to the ManageWP team for the windfall and the sale of the company. I mean although I commented earlier about my thought on GoDaddy, they do know a good company when they see it (they just ain’t one is all!).
I also note ManageWP saying to trust us etc, I DO trust you and I love Orion over all the other options – unfortunately it’s your new owner I don’t trust!
Finally, in the PR release for the acquisition:
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/06/godaddy-acquires-serbias-managewp-a-multi-site-wordpress-management-tool/
it’s funny how the only photo they could find was a screen of GD’s mobile plugin with a 1 star rating.
Maybe that is a subliminal Venture Beat opinion of the acquirer?
satori83
That is PRICELESS! Great catch, I just shared that on social..lol. Pretty much sums it up.
Dan
This merger makes babies cry. ‘Tis a sad day for true WordPress evangelists. Our trust for GoDaddy infinitely approaches zero, and now ManagedWP has oriented it’s path to that destination. GoDaddy is KNOWN to be sharks of the web. They sell your domain names before you get the chance to make a business decision and pull the trigger. Anything you search becomes shark food. GoDaddy is the enemy of good. What a sad day.
kungfupanda
It’s sad.
It seems you’ve chosen money over quality.
Nemanja Aleksic
I think I’ve covered pretty much every concern here, it would be bad if I kept repeating the same thing. But in this case I’m probably sad that we’re going through the same routine we’ve gone through back in 2012.
We’re active members of the community, and it’s at least comforting that the people in the community that we know are either supporting us 100%, or are curious about what’s going to happen next.
martinj
I’m happy for the ManageWP team – you have built a great product and so deserve the rewards that this would bring. Have to say I’m more than a bit concerned for the future though. I’ve had bad experiences with Godaddy in the past, and judging by the coments already posted on here, I’m not alone. I’m very happy to continue with ManageWP for the time being, but if I start seeing things move in the wrong direction I will certainly vote very quickly with my feet. So, Godaddy – please be careful with this.
Omar
Congrats on your success guys, but as you can see in your comments, this is a horrible news for your users. GoDaddy will never be able to provide quality of service you do and sooner or later they will mess this platform up, by adding their stupid restrictions and large greedy corporation mentality. It’s a sad day for me. I have used many hosts in my times and GoDaddy was worse by far. They will greatly benefit from your platform. I hope you have made millions of off them.
Vladimir from ManageWP
The important thing to remember is that we are still the ones that will be providing the service. GoDaddy will not somehow ruin ManageWP, our game plan is to help improve GoDaddy.
jakob.bader
With all my respect Vladimir, you don’t seriously believe this…
satori83
With all the money GoDaddy has Vlad they could have improved themselves BY themselves at anytime over the last few years. They don’t fix anything, they throw $ at problems and bury them in marketing strategies around hot women and low prices! It’s like Walmart for servers…low prices and ads filled with animated smiling faces, meanwhile behind the scenes they cut corners, short their employees, put others out of business, and use children to attain low prices. It’s in the video The High Cost of Low Prices.
Ivan Bjelajac
I would actually argue that acquiring product-first companies like ManageWP is the best way to improve a business that was build around low prices. We look forward to contributing to GoDaddy Pro program and making it better for everyone.
Aaron
Said the cog to the machine…
When you dance with the Devil, you don’t change him…
Lubi
I, for one would love to give you the benefit of the doubt and see what happens. Maybe new GD CEO wants to see the light? Who would better to guide him? You can tell him I said so 🙂
Vladimir from ManageWP
Hah, yes! Everyone deserves a second chance.
debbie
I hope you are successful with that goal Vladimir!
Rick
You’re naive if you believe this and honestly, it’s a bit annoying to read. You DO NOT CONTROL your company anymore. That’s reality and any promises you make are provisional. You might have the best of intentions, but you cannot make promises because you’re no longer the ultimate arbiter of what MWP will do. Godaddy is. That’s why you’re seeing such a negative reaction, combined with all of the other times we as technical users have seen good companies sell to others and then stagnate or deteriorate (cf Nest being acquired by Google as a recent high profile example).
Nemanja Aleksic
Please note that any offensive comments will be deleted. I don’t have any problems with anyone expressing negative opinions, but please keep it civil.
Anty
Please note your loyal users before doing stupid things! … not after..
Anty
Whaaaaaaaaaaattttt? GoDady??? Are you seriousssssss?
Sorry guys but I cant consider you as serious partner anymore :(.
Happy ending!
ep2002
I have to agree. While I used to use GD for my domains, I moved from them yesars ago b/c they were too expensive.
As for hosting, I’d NEVER use them. They aren’t what I consider to be a top hosting company.
I like their 24/7 tech support & for the most part their staff is nice, but every time I get on the phone with them, I lose min. 30-60 mins. out of my life just getting my question answered.
IMO, their hosting is for people who are just starting their first site & don’t know any better.
Mike
I also actively push clients away from GoCrappy they have already taken a huge chunk of my hosting clients and do nothing but cause me grief, wasting my time trying to retain hosting and domain customers. I will be cancelling all of my ManageWP accounts and finding another solution. I’t really unfortunate that no one has the courage to say “NO” to being swallowed up by IT giants. Another waste of a good product.
Nathan Duvall
Wow, should’ve polled your user base for feedback about this acquisition before it happened. It’s like watching a train wreck about to happen. Maybe your interactions with GoDaddy have been above bar – they showed you a big, fat paycheck, so it’s probably hard to see anything but the good, but as the feedback here suggests, your users’ experience has been nothing short of abysmal. For the future students looking for case studies on what went wrong with a great company, look no further than ManageWP’s merger with GoDaddy. Sometimes that glistening hunk of gold you see in the distance, turns out to be a giant elephant turd.
Anty
Agree!
Francis
I second that. Highly disappointed.
eoin.pricebenowitz
I was ready to jump into Orion, then I got this email today, so now ive deleted all websites and requested my account be deleted…. so I guess i’m in agreeement too.
helenmclean
I admit, my heart sank when I read the news about the merger with GoDaddy. But I love Orion, it’s such a pleasure to manage sites using the new system. I have faith in the wonderful ManageWP team and will see where things go.
Nemanja Aleksic
The benefit of the doubt is all we ask. Thank you 🙂
Philip
While I maybe lone here – I actually have been using GoDaddy Managed WordPress for almost 2 years now and I’ve been very happy with it (have over 225 sites with it) I tried ManageWP in the past and the pricing model didn’t work for me as even then I had over 150 site and the features of ManageWP would be for me not my clients it didn’t present a good ROI
The new Freemium model is a bit better – but since GoDaddy takes care of the backup side of things not needed.
I’ve been using MainWP – perhaps the blend of ManageWP with GoDaddy will mean I won’t need that.
I don’t disagree with the statements about PHP on GoDaddy – or using the “Shared” hosting I’ve had a number of issues, but on the MWP offering (and a dedicated cPanel server) I’ve been very happy –
I’ve tried HostGator and BlueHost and quite frankly I feel like I’ve got what I paid for with little ability to actually speak to someone on the phone
Maybe I’m lucky – but just wanted to post this as I view this as a positive thing.
Nemanja Aleksic
Yeah, it’s basically a world of difference between regular shared and WordPress hosting. I have my personal website on shared GoDaddy for a year, it works fine but it’s very minimal. WordPress hosting fares much better – we’ve had a lot less trouble troubleshooting issues on it.
But yeah, the free ManageWP dashboard + GD WordPress hosting is a perfect combo for you 🙂
ep2002
@Phillip, it’s hard to find good hosting WITH 24/7 phone tech support.
5-6 weeks ago I moved from my hoster of 6 years b/c their tech support staff were complete morons & I started to have problem after problem. But I had these communication issues with them from the getgo, it’s just hard to make a major move like this.
I just switch to VPS & they told me it was managed, but it’s NOT fully managed, but I’m trying to work things out with them b/c I don’t want to move again
I’ve now come to realize that most hosters offer NO phone support & while I don’t want or need phone support every day, when I’m not getting anywhere with ticket support, I want to be able to call someone & talk to them like a REAL human being.
Lewis Farmer
Go Daddy is great with support and I often talk to them by phone. I am using both the WP and C-Panel hosting. No regrets compared to my previous hosting provider.
eoin.pricebenowitz
There is the problem right there… ” I often talk to them by phone”.. If hosting was any good, you would not have to talk to them at all.
greg
“The core philosophy of ManageWP is to help you manage websites, no matter where they’re hosted.”
Hard to believe the publicly traded web hosting company that now owns the thing shares that same core philosophy.
Aaron
Well this sucks.
I’ve been using MWP since it was in early beta and was actually kind of liking the new pricing model etc but if you’re now owned by GoDaddy we’re done. Aside from GoDaddy’s horror show of a corporate culture, their support for CISPA, TPP, etc and a human rights and equality record that would make North Korea jealous; GoDaddy’s technical services are beyond compare… in the worst possible way.
I’ve seriously turned down clients for using GoDaddy, why the hell would I use a service that is affiliated with them in any way. I’m sure this is a great move for MWP’s investors or whatever, but I thought this was a longer term startup. Feels like MWP grew up and was immediately taken in for the slaughter.
Ugh. C’est la vie, there are other options.
mgbutka
Looking forward to new innovations! I have been using GD for YEARS with no real issues and quick, efficient tech support when needed.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks! We’re also looking forward to playing around with new options once our API goes public and people have the chance to play around with it!
Andy
Oh dear.
Funnily enough this coincides with a request for payment details (even though you already have them) this morning….Bad timing 🙂
Sad to see that ManageWP is delusional enough to think that the GoDaddy hosting is great, reliable and worth teaming up with.
ep2002
@Andy
I never heard this, but just instinctively knew they would be terrible with hosting.
Yael
I’m not going to add much to this ongoing conversation except to highlight that out of a few hundred comments (I’m guessing), I only saw three that were happy about this.
That, I believe, says a lot.
What is a great success for ManageWP, unfortunately, is not a great success for what appears are the bulk of its (past) users.
Enjoy the paycheck though; that’s awesome!
Yael
Robb C.
I stand by ManageWP and their decision to go with GoDaddy. After all it’s their company and their right to decide who will be most beneficial to them first, then us who use ManageWP. I have hundreds of clients on GoDaddy servers and always get great support within minutes. Granted that some of the support team is a little green but so are other hosting companies that I use. Hostgator, Rackspace and others have their problems as well. Wish you the best and I’m staying for the ride and do believe that the ManageWP people will make sure all runs smoothly.
Nemanja Aleksic
Yeah, things can always be better – we at ManageWP keep pushing ourselves to be a better version of ourselves. That’s not going to stop.
Thank you for your support!
ianscktt
‘ManageWP joins the GoDaddy family!’, Is it April 01 ?
Maybe this is just a joke, right guys…right ????
Josh Hartman
Doesn’t sound like good news, I too have a distaste for GoDaddy. Would have preferred a merger with SiteGround or WPEngine. Hope the product doesn’t suffer.
Nemanja Aleksic
It’s up to us to make sure that does not happen, Josh.
rt
I will remain cautiously optimistic which is extremely tough to do considering the issues my customers have had while hosting with GoDaddy. I’ve lost count of all of the sites I have moved away from GD. Still, Orion is amazing and I’m sticking with you guys for the time being, hoping for the best. Please please please no GoDaddy branding, k? I also echo the comment about ManageWP services being devalued by being offered for free to GoDaddy customers. Not thrilled with that, but again I’ll stay optimistic. Congrats guys, truly, I wish you all the best and am along for the ride.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for being clear about your expectations 🙂
And it’s perfectly understandable – you trust us with your business, and any change could reflect poorly on your business. Now it’s up to us to justify that trust.
Ad de Jong
Could be a great thing if goDaddy let the ManageWP pple fix their tech.
Nemanja Aleksic
That’s the idea 😀
Samara Hart
WHAT?! This is the worst news you could have passed along. I am saddened to see another small business devoured by a corporate conglomerate — especially one that’s know for CRAP hosting and shady deals like GoDaddy. Kiss any agility in development goodbye and same with customer service. I have many sites on ManageWP and will be researching a new option. I don’t want GoDaddy anywhere near our sites.
mads
Hi,
If this is really true, that ManageWP will be part of GoDaddy-family, Im off….
Already I have some sites running on MainWP, so now its time to move the last sites that is left with ManageWP….
Sorry to say, but your product is (almost) as good as it can be…. But the GoDaddy repotation is close to being as bad as it can be… And will not take the change omn behalf of my costumers, to rely on services from GoDaddy…
Bye, bye, it was nice as long as you were ‘your own’, but after this, Im out….
🙂 Mads
maintenance
Not the best news from you guys, I do feel let down. Like many of the other comments, why did you not ask us, the other 92% of host users before this deal was done?
I too will ride this out to see how it goes, but I’m already investigating other options just in case
Eoin
Godaddy!? You mean you hooked up with possibly the worst hosting company in history and you happy about that? For those that may only have one or two websites, they probably don’t see the issues that come with hosting with GoDaddy, but when you have 35+ websites, working with GoDaddy is a constant battle, websites always down, email stops working (in fact, for no reason the other day an email account just disappeared which caused huge problems for a client). I ended up moving all our sites away from GoDaddy and any hosting companies that used GoDaddy servers. For that, and many other Godaddy related reasons, I will be moving my clients away from ManageWP and will find a more service with more reliable hosting. This is a bad move for ManageWP, especially since Orien is getting so good! This change in ManageWP WILL cause many issues down the road for a lot of your clients.
Lewis947
I have not had a problem with Go Daddy hosting in the past 5 years. I have both C-Panel and WP hosting
Chris Edwards
I am not a big fan of GoDaddy. I do use GoDaddy Pro to manage client domains since it is much easier than sharing credentials. I will however give ManageWP a chance. Orion is a great product and MainWP and others are no where near the level that Orion is at.
I hope it remains true that ManageWP will still run as it did before, just with someone new collecting the profits. GoDaddy’s hosting is not the best, but, they still do a great job with domains and other products and services. While some bash their support, I have to say I used their support at least once a week at a previous agency and it was great every time. I have had to deal with MangeWP support, and it was not as great as the support that I got from GoDaddy.
I really do hope GoDaddy leaves this product as is and lets the MWP team run as they always have, with the same pricing (or less).
mark
+1 to all the GD negative comments…
bummer news considering all the other (good) up-and-coming wp hosting services now available.
joshua
Oh my, I’m alarmed at this news! I know that GoDaddy has had a bad rap in the past, and I know that GoDaddy has been trying very hard to be better and make up for all the bad rap they’ve had, but I really just haven’t been impressed with GoDaddy even to this day.
I had a client on the GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting and I really really did not like it at all! Not only did I have very little control of the hosting platform and what I could do with it, but the server they were on constantly gave a Server 500 error. I ended up cloning the site to SiteGround EXACTLY as how it was (so I didn’t “rebuild” the website) and have not had any issues since! I also have not been impressed even still with GoDaddy support even still to this day.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t think GoDaddy is all that great yet. But keep trying I guess! I too will ride this out to see how it goes, but I’m already investigating other options just in case….
kevin
Can you guarantee that personal data (including website domains) will not be passed on to GoDaddy?
Scott Mooney
They’ve bought the company… of course they will ultimately have access to the data. What they can do with that data may of course be limited by user agreements/law. But they’ll have access.
Eoin
By law (in most countries), You are supposed to be told by the company being sold that they are 1) Selling the company, 2) Who they are selling it to, 3) The date the sale is planned, 4) The personal data that will be transferred, 5) Giving you the option to opt-out before your data is transferred and a few other things, but those are the basics.
When the company has been sold, and is in the hands of the new owners, the new owners much then contact all the clients informing them of the transfer and give an option to opt-out.
Most my work is with Lawyers (website development, content etc) and this topic comes up alot. It’s different from country to country, but the basic rules usually apply to most, particularly if it’s an inter-country sale.
Nemanja Aleksic
No data has been passed on at this point, but as the owner of ManageWP brand, GoDaddy has the right to access the data.
If you are concerned about GoDaddy getting into any of your data (although this kind of behaviour would be extremely unethical and would probably be acceptable only in 3rd world countries and Apple :D), I recommend removing your websites from the ManageWP dashboard. The backup data will be automatically purged.
sky
Really? You consider Apple to be a company that you can’t trust your data with? They are one of the few that I do trust. I appreciate the advice about removing all websites from the ManageWP dashboard, though. I’m going to do that today.
Haha
Haha you trust Apple, really what a shame.
April
Wow, the pricing deal is so complicated and frustrating enough. Now this? In the web world, godaddy is Soo frowned upon, their infrastructure is so hard to work within. Must have been a good buyout. Hope it doesn’t cost you a lot of your loyal developers and agencies. We will be meeting about this asap. So sad, although the orion pricing is ridiculous, the product was good. Beyond disappointed.
Mark Fayard
Did you ever consider querying your loyal customer base before allowing the GoDaddy cash dump truck on your property? Were there no other suitors?
Your sorely mistaken if you think GoDaddy has changed. I signed up for Managed Web Hosting in July and cancelled a few weeks later after never being able to upload a plugin via admin or FTP. Backend was unusable because of constant crashing. Tech told me me site and database needed to be optimized – IT WAS A BASE INSTALL!
GoDaddy’s motto has always been “Blame the customer, they’re always wrong.”
On cancellation day GoDaddy retention guy tried to sell me on move to cPanel – spare me!
I think your news would’ve been better received if you’d just been candid and said “We wanted the cash and took the cash, all the best to those who supported us through the years.”
Ivan Bjelajac
Hi Mark, I unfortunately cannot comment on the issues with other GoDaddy products.
All I can say is that ManageWP has been in touch with a number of WordPress hosts over the years – either because of customer issues, possible partnerships or simply exchanging opinions regarding WordPress and the community around it – and we were very comfortable with becoming part of GoDaddy based on what we learned about the new ownership and management so far.
We will see how this all goes – but we do plan to keep the team together and I can assure you that we will not be dropping the quality of our support.
We are happy with the acquisition but not just because of the money. I really think we will get a great chance to grow even more as professionals with these acquisition.
We are still going to be the same people that answered customer feedbacks for all you guys. If something changes or you have an issue you can still contact us in the same way and we will still reply in the same manner as we did so far.
lorian
Eurgh.
GoDaddy is a frustrating, intrusive and abysmal company. I actively migrate clients away from them.
I hate that an otherwise excellent tool is now tethered to such a globally detested corporation amongst web professionals.
Horrible news.
Karl
A move in the wrong direction for ManageWP (customers at least). It’s clear this is an easy exit strategy for ManageWP, but obviously ManageWP must not care for their customers anymore to dump them into GoDaddy. Like wtf? No due diligence at all? What a shame.
Craig
Rune- I just asked the same thing on Twitter with no response. ManageWP OBVIOUSLY does not host their site with GoDaddy! They host tManageWP.com with SoftLayer, Orion is hosted on Amazon AWS.
I’d like to see ManageWP stand behind their decision by hosting both their website and Orion dashboard with GoDaddy. You keep telling us GoDaddy is suddenly so great… Lets start migrating you off your reputable hosts and onto GoDaddy.
Nemanja Aleksic
Why would Orion be on WordPress hosting?
Craig
Not their Managed WordPress hosting, obviously. They have dedicated servers and a “cloud” solution- Surely that have a platform that will support Orion, to some extent.
I’m just saying… If you all truly believe in the quality of GoDaddy that much then why not move your own products/services to GoDaddy.
I know you guys won’t… I’m just trying to make a point.
I’m happy for you guys as a business owner. I’m concerned for MY business as a customer of yours. Something that stands out as absurd is ManageWP’s sudden blindness to the very well known and relevant issues with GoDaddy hosting and the almost comical rebuttals of “GoDaddy is getting better and they’re not going to change us”. Not even you guys honestly believe that. There is NO WAY the team who built this awesome service are that dense.
Congratulations to you guys, I really mean that- but don’t further embarrass yourselves by actually endorsing GoDaddy in any way… Unless you’re going to step up and migrate your products and services to GoDaddy.
Bob Dunn
First off, congrats to the team here and GoDaddy.
Secondly, as someone that mistrusted GoDaddy in the past, over the last few years they have really turned around. And yes, the CEO elephant killer and his attitude left many years ago. I am a tough sell, and people depend on my view on things in the WordPress community. It’s has been a long road, but over the last couple of years GoDaddy has earned my trust again and I support them as a viable host, and as a company that took the attempt to turn things around seriously.
I think this is a great move by both GoDaddy and ManageWP. You have my support and I look forward to seeing where things go.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thank you for your support, Bob. People here have had bad experience with GoDaddy, and I can’t blame them for reacting like this. We’ll keep doing what we do and keep being proud of our accomplishments.
Looking forward to an exciting future 🙂
Malcolm Moran
Many of us users measure our level of sophistication buy how far AWAY from GoDaddy we have managed to travel over the years. I always look upon GoDaddy users as the unfortunate masses. Advice to GoDaddy if you want to avoid a mass loss of clients: keep your hands off of our emails and our client contact information. If I see one email from GoDaddy (i’ve managed to purge over the years), I’m closing down my ManageWP account. I would advise other ManageWP users to take an oath to do the same thing. What a disaster.
andrea
Have to say, I’m disappointed. GoDaddy’s consistently sexist advertising and their former elephant-killing SEO did me in years ago, along with the difficulty of uploading WP archives from the dashboard without timeouts. While I’ll reserve judgement for the moment, I’ll certainly be checking out the alternatives.
sky
Ugh. I finally got everything moved away from GoDaddy, and now this. I’m so sorry for you guys. You really had a good thing going. I will be looking at the alternatives.
Lee
I’ll be sticking around for now, though I have to say I’m not entirely happy to have a company that advertises directly to my client base how they will sell them a domain and a website for like £5 a month, having an influence over a large part of my site management!
Bill G
Disappointing news. I totally agree with most professional users here. GoDaddy is absolutely not the hosting provider a professional user would choose. They have a very lousy reputation and now we can be sure that ManageWP will evolve in the same direction. Too bad and such as a shame for the good job you guys did.
Dustin
I love the ManageWP product and have nothing but good things to say about Orion. That said, I have no desire to associate myself or my company with Godaddy. I also echo Craig’s sentiment.
info
This is disappointing. Given my past experience with GoDaddy has always been frustrating for myself and my clients I’m slightly annoyed by this. Personally I do not recommend GoDaddy for anything and actively recommend my clients dont use them. Its also disappointing to know that GoDaddy will be offering some of the services for free, this devalues the service ManageWP and I provide to my clients. I will keep a eye on things closely but only expect this be detrimental to the long term success of ManageWP .
Rune Ellingsen
Do you host your website on Godaddy?
Nemanja Aleksic
The Classic version (including the public website) has been on Softlayer since forever. For Orion we realized that we need to move to the cloud to make things more scalable (remember the May DDoS attack? I didn’t even put a dent on Orion), so we partnered up with AWS and put everything except the website on the cloud.
Craig Marolf
NewRelic is not a web host. NewRelic is a software and server monitoring SaaS product. You’ve been a GoDaddy employee for just a couple of days now and you’re already giving people bad info.
Nemanja Aleksic
LOL, I just realized what I wrote. I’ve fixed it now, handling all this feedback really threw me off my game.
sky
LOL this^
gmourelatos
Come on Graig.
Give this guy a break, I bet he has been following and replying this thread non stop 🙂
Aaron
So “no”
The answer you’re going for is “no”, because like any professional that works on the internet you know to stay away from those bigoted, amoral, lackluster hosers. But hey, you’ve got a marketing line to tow now right?
Derrick
New relic? They are not a web host, so not sure what your thinking of.
Also like many here, I do have to say I used godaddy at one point, but no way am I paying ~$15 for inflated domain service due to a oversized marketing budget targeted at basically porno ads.
Their hosting is also a joke and they only are able to get users who have no computer experience at all as clients. I would actually run for the hills before the prospect of using their services. The only time I would buy from them is for a 1.99 domain transfer then I would move it out next year.
Regardless on how much the corporate structure will/will not affect your company and products, its the very fact that they have access/control over the service and data + their reputation that by association affects you.
shaun
I share the disappointments expressed here at the choice of bedfellow, but I’ll remain open-minded and stick with it in the hope that the standards of service remain unchanged, and that the product remains as reliable and useful.
Michael Wissekerke
wow i must admit the backlash i’m seeing here is pretty severe, good luck retaining your customer base.
Murat
Bad News, godaddy has never been good at hosting business, the one thing they do on avarage is “domain registration”
Also you talked about that godaddy will help you with the translation, this is a very very bad news, i live in turkey and the turkish translation is awfull !
Regis Chapman
Good news for you. Bad news for me. I can’t support a family of misogynist Safari hunting endangered species killers. Like so many here, I’ll be using another tool now.
W Guy Finley
Count me in the reserving judgment camp. I have previous experience with GoDaddy and echo a lot of concerns voiced about their customer service and corporate policies. I have tried their managed platforms and found them lacking. I’ve preferred running my cloud servers and ManageWP has been a great tool for my toolbox on managing this. If features start to go GoDaddy only or arrive there before elsewhere I’ll get concerned.
Philip Adriatico
Such a waste of a good product. Time to move out of ManageWP!
Cesar
I’m wondering why you guys didn’t send a survey or something asking us, business owners with years of experience working with WordPress, what do we think of this acquisition before going for it? GoDaddy is on the top of my list of not recommend services, I don’t even mention them to my clients, and now we’ll have to deal with them one way or another. I joined not too long ago to manageWP and it started to feel like a family. Now I feel like some big corporation just bought the condo where I live and will tear it all down to build a cheap mall.
I wish you guys the best, but this is a sad day.
Ijaz Rafi
I was surprised exactly like all others Godaddy? Seriously? The worst hosting and customer services ever. There is no doubt you are going to loose a large base of your paid customers and I am going to be one of them as well but I will follow wait n see at the same time.
We can’t expect anything good from Godaddy at all, Expensive, Non responsive, Can’t help their customers, SLOW Server what else you would like to hear about them?
Being a business if its me and didn’t get a single positive response from my customers as you can see ABOVE def I was going to think about this acquisition again.
Just image not a even single response to this post !!!!!!!
Good Luck ManageWP and Badluck to MananageWP Customers.
Chris
Congrats — I think it’s great for you guys and will continue using awhile longer to see how the product shapes to be, at least, Some people are just too quick to jump on the hate bandwagon.
Eoin
Let be honest.. This is way more than just jumping on the bandwaggon.. Most of the people commenting (including myself) have had first hand experience with godaddy’s bad hosting (including dedicated hosting). Forget the old CEO some people are talking about, its to do with their crappy service. I have had to pull 35+ sites off their servers (both shared and dedicated) because there wasnt a single day that went by that I didnt get a number of email and push notifications about websites that are down. Customer support could ever find the issue, except for one guy who told me there was ‘probably 500 wesites on that server’… After that, I moved everything. Putting the slow speeds aside, having that many sites on a single server was a huge security risk and a hackers playground.
David
Well crap! Not what I wanted to hear this morning. Definitely out on GoDaddy. I guess I’ll spend some time looking for a replacement. Any suggestions?
Eoin
Other than ManageWP, I also use the self hosted wordpress plugin, MainWP. Its not as pretty on the outside, but it does a dam good job and maintaining sites. Add some of its free and paid plugins and you actually get a lot more than what ManageWP give you (Mostly for free)
David
Thanks Eoin. I was looking at MainWP. I like what I’m seeing so far.
jakob.bader
Damn it, money turns your best friends into betrayer. What a shame, now I’m lost…
Frans Kemper
Bad news. I considered ManageWP as THE best in what it is doing and GoDaddy is definitely one of the worst in my own experience and that of many others. I can only hope that one of ManageWP’s competitors steps on the plate and create a high quality product such a yours. Bad move, but I guess the money made it worthwhile. And please do not insult our intelligence with empty promises that nothing will change. Believe me, it will. And besides this all, I do not like to be associated with people that shoot wild (and protected) animals for fun.
clyde
Congratulations! Looking forward to seeing how this goes.
How does this affect the free accounts that haven’t been moved to Orion?
I thought that would be happening in August.
Jenn
Well, that is too bad. I guess it is time to transfer my sites to a different provider. GoDaddy is known for their poor customer service so I have no desire to do business with them. I love the ManageWP product, but selling out to GoDaddy is a deal breaker for me.
BTW, when you say everything will remain the same, that is simply not true. Once the deal is down and the ink is dry, you have no control over what they do with ManageWP.
Shane
While I’m not particularly excited about this, I’m certainly not going to waste my time looking back at WPMU DEV or InfiniteWP until something changes. I love ManageWP’s backup and clone tools, and their platform gets the job done, plain and simple. As long as they do what I need, and do it well, I’m sitting tight.
Mike
Yikes, bad news. Godaddy hosting is right there along with EIG, awful. I would think a huge percentage of your current client base knows to avoid GD and hosts with reliable hosts like MT, WiredTree, etc. But then again I am sure this was a business decision and there were lots of dollar signs. I plan to ride it out but if we start seeing godaddy only features I am sure a lot of customers will jump ship.
Chris Edwards
MT is owned by GoDaddy. Was acquired back in October of 2013, and I would not say they are reliable by any means.
Mike
Chris, you are correct, I was thinking siteground not MT. I use WT and after a ton of research and awful experiences with ASO, dreamhost and GD WT, siteground and WP engine were the only ones I found to be reliable.
joshua
I have not been impressed with MT either. I really don’t like it to be honest and don’t think they are a good product. I didn’t know until now that GoDaddy owned them.. guess that explains that!
Luke Cavanagh
Media Temple is owned by GoDaddy.
http://mediatemple.net/blog/press/godaddy-acquires-mt-media-temple-to-accelerate-web-pro-expertise/
Ryan Schulz
I was pleased to see the new Orion platform & pricing model, but this news about GoDaddy makes me happy that we also use MainWP. Enjoy the payday though!
Kevin Gilbert
I’m going to reserve judgment, but like many others, I’m not excited by this news. I’m glad you guys are excited and that you were able to reach a level and get an infusion of cash. I think it’s well-deserved and I commend you all on your hard work to get to that point. I just wish it was anyone else other than GoDaddy. I can’t recommend them to my clients, I don’t use them any more, and I, too, fear what will become of this awesome tool with their input.
Luke
Well, this sucks. I just spent a good amount of time moving everything away from GoDaddy, only finding out that I’m being forced back in. I like ManageWP, but to me this is bad news.
Adam Walter
Congratulations on achieving every startup’s dream: to be acquired by a huge company with lots of cash. I’m not being sarcastic! Some (most) companies have this goal in mind from Day 1, and it’s legitimate. Other companies have chosen to go their own route and try to build something truly awesome and avoid the baggage and red tape of a large conglomerate parent company. Dropbox, for example, famously said “no” to Steve Jobs. If they hadn’t, Dropbox would have been absorbed into the Apple codebase, renamed “iCloud”, and sat in stagnation.
While I believe you that “nothing will change”, this will not be true in the long run. A few years from now, I suspect ManageWP will be absorbed into the mothership and slowly lose it’s momentum to become an even better tool.
RIP ManageWP
Nemanja Aleksic
So, you’re buying rounds this time next year if we prove you wrong? 😉
Adam Walter
Not next year. “A few years.” 😉
I totally believe you guys have the best intentions. I also want to believe you that GoDaddy has changed, but sometimes a company can’t shake its past, or it becomes too big for its own good. Microsoft, for example. Anyways, congratulations on the business success. I will toast to that!
Nemanja Aleksic
Fair enough, as long as the rounds are going 😀
Eoin
Buying rounds!?? This is the response you give to concerned clients?
I love managewp, and support has always been excellent. I do understand that you guys are excited, but there is a time and place for joking around… this is neither.
Scott Mooney
Agree… this is not good news for anyone other than current ManageWP shareholders.
AndrewJ
I share other peoples concerns but would add a security concern with GD having access to the hosting arrangements and ‘habits’ of my clients.
10/10 to the ManageWP team, but there are other ‘more ethical’ guys you may have chosen.
Frank
Pferdstr. 15
Ernie
Very disappointed. Another customer lost but as you are now GoDaddy you wont care. What does 1 web designer mean to a company that supports SOPA, and nickel and dimes their clients in an extremely inflexible hosting environment.
In your blog a few errors were made. Their Managed WordPress is crap and overpriced, their we want you to build your dreams be happg buy more stuff mantra gets old when you discover they overcharge for absolutely everything.
Oh well, hope the money was phenomenal off to find a new provider, and so soon after you introduced Orion.
Ernie
Ivan Bjelajac
Ernie we still care about that 1 web designer. I am asking you to stick with us for a while – I can assure you we will not make any changes to the worse.
Edward
What a terrible announcement… how on earth is this a good idea? This is such a sad day for me, after following MWP/Orion for so long and being excited for the future of the product. I love Orion so much, and would love to continue using it, so….
Hopefully GD doesn’t utterly destroy what the MWP team has built (I doubt it)… and I’m looking forward to the API being released, so that my clients will never have to know that I use a system owned by GoDaddy.
Michael Borgelt
You know the feeling you get when you see that an update messed up a website you are managing…shock and then a sick feeling in your stomach. That is how I felt reading this.
Steve
Does this mean that ManageWP backups are actually going to start working on GoDaddy-hosted websites now? One of the major irritants about using GoDaddy for WordPress sites is the nearly impossible to avoid “500 internal server error” errors when trying to backup a WP site hosted with GoDaddy. ManageWP is a terrific product/application, sad to see you get into bed with GoDaddy.
Nemanja Aleksic
Is it the old shared hosting, or the WordPress hosting? Also, this happened often in the Classic ManageWP dashboard – is it that, or are you using Orion? Send us a support ticket and we’ll help out 🙂
Aaron
Perhaps more importantly, are MWP backups going to be stored on GoDaddy’s servers now?
If that’s the case I have to delete it all right now because I’ll be damned if I’m explaining how sensitive data wound up on GoDaddy’s servers … oop, sorry, I miss-spelled “eBay”.
#SerousSecurityConcerns
Nemanja Aleksic
The backups, as well as the whole ManageWP Orion infrastructure are on AWS, with the option of choosing the US or the EU as the storage region.
Aaron
Thanks.
Well at least there’s this.
angel
Well, I was starting to think why support was not answering all my emails as before. I can see now that we are dealing with goddady support here.
It is not the best moment for me, but I am removing my sites from ManageWP as soon as I can.
And about the “nothing will change”, I always answer he same thing: you cannot make promises on something you do not own anymore.
It has been fun. Good luck in the future.
PD: in case somebody is interested, I am coming back to the Mainwp guys, which are doing a great job.
Nemanja Aleksic
Our Customer Happiness team is right where it was before, the same place it has always been 🙂
Thank you for trusting us in the past, and on behalf of our team I wish you the very best in the future.
Kevin Abrams
When this notification showed up on my screen, I literally said “oh no.” I love ManageWP and you guys are fantastic, but I feel like this is how a great companies die. I just spent 3 months moving everything from a large customer away from GoDaddy because they are to say it nicely not great. Sorry, I am not sure I believe the nothing will change part either.
Eric Groleau
Cancelled my account as soon as I saw this news!
David
I’m right there with you Eric.
greg
Ouch. Hurts to read that. Not sure if you wrote this assuming GoDaddy execs would be reading it, because those of us in the real world know from experience that GoDaddy is second-rate when it comes to hosting. I’m assuming within a year’s time the integration with GoDaddy will alienate those of us on better hosting platforms (by your own numbers, that’s 92% of your user base) by offering exclusives and ruin the UI with tease features “only available to GoDaddy hosting customers!”. I hope I’m wrong but I’ve read this book many times before.
Roony Alvarez
This is bad. As a long time GD customer, i can say (as everybody with experience) that their hosting is something to stay away from. I reckon is a great deal for you and as you stated, a testament to your hard work. But customer wise, it cannot be good. I moved all my sites away from GD because of their crappy servers and even crappier “customer service”, where a “dedicated” server crashes and all you get a canned “just sit tight” answer (even over the phone, where operators can also give you attitude on top of their lack of tech knowledge), while apps and sites are down. If anything, this has to be the worst aspect of their service.
As long as they dont come up anywhere in MWP i guess its fine, but definetly not something we as providers would like to advertise (remember the SOPA incident)… then theres the MWP white label thing of course…
All that being said, what prevents GD from making drastic changes in the features, price models, policies, whatnot in the future? nerf anything not GD hosted? pretty bleek IMO =/ btw I also had to move all emails away from them, cause on top of not being part of the hosting as everywhere else (basic plans) one day they had the nerve of sending a “cool” email where they say at the beginning “we have made great changes in your deluxe email plans” and then reading down state that they were gonna charge me more for half the email capacity. (i think to leverage their MS360 email plans). Bleek indeed.
Im pretty sure if you guys surveyed this in the community, there would have been a lot of negs and red flags popping up everywhere.
ty.
Jose R. Lopez
Sorry to see this, i guess I’m out to look for a new platform.
Timothy Bishop
I just moved to CMS Commander. Can’t really testify to them yet as they are somewhat new for me, but so far so good. Also, they offer a 14 day free trial.
Grayson
I rarely comment on these things, but GoDaddy? We work on all types of hosts day in and day out helping people with WordPress problems. Biggest cultprits? GoDaddy and EIG-owned companies. They have a terrible interface, terrible control panel, have a PHP version not even supported by WordPress (they asked a client to pay to be upgraded to 5.4 when they were giving them 5.2). You can’t associate yourself with GoDaddy and say they are doing good things. Those of us who are working on their platform regularly can tell you very differently. Their hosting is cheap, slow, and downtime is regular.The managed WordPress system is not even managed as it doesn’t have the resources capable of hosting WordPress, but it does have backups, so I guess that’s where they get you.
And then you can talk about their upsells. That’s what they are good at and they kill my clients with calls regularly to upgrade this or buy that. This is a true shame indeed.
You can talk about the millions of investment they have put in, but it’s not being seen or felt by the end user. They need to scrap it, rebuild it with PHP7, some SSD, and give people something they want to pay for. Not something they want to run from.
Nemanja Aleksic
Yeah, we troubleshoot these kinds of issues all the time. And I can’t discuss their plans publicly, but I can say that your last paragraph is something that should be addressed ASAP.
IMHO, it’s not a problem of running, but being agile enough. It was much easier for us to make snap decisions when there was 10 of us, than now. And GoDaddy is a juggernaut in the web hosting industry.
Grayson
GoDaddy being a juggernaut has nothing to do with it. Just because they are big doesn’t mean they provide a viable product. They grew big because of domain registration. Hosting was a nature byproduct of such. I have over 12 years of experience playing in hosting environments for large and small clients. GoDaddy wasn’t good years ago and I haven’t seen any measurable uptick in that performance.
Until they can get up to speed with other quality hosts, stop upselling everyone, make a viable email service, and reduce downtime, they are going to be at the bottom of the pack. Most keep saying try them out again. I don’t have to. I see it day in and day out on all of their plans. Managed is no better than shared, except for maybe uptime.
BrendaM
Excellent experience-based comment. Echoed by a majority of professional web people.
Timothy Bishop
I am saddened greatly by this news. If you seriously believe GoDaddy will not change things, you are nuts and have obviously failed to do proper research into their history. They are just like EIG (Endurance Group International), as soon as they aquire a company, that companies service goes to hell.
It is no diffferent with GoDaddy, a quick look at their history will prove me right on this. I am sorry to say that due to this news, I am closing my Manage WP Account and moving to CMS Commander.
Tony
I understand people’s apprehension but I heard a lot of the same when MT was bought out by GoDaddy but have seen no ill effects as a result of the buy out. (Other’s may have, but I personally have not.) Do I like GoDaddy’s services, absolutely NOT, but I don’t in any way begrudge ManageWP for cashing in on all of their hard work. Vladimir and Co. have earned my trust and it’s not going to fade because of a name… They’ve got my trust and patronage until such time as it’s no longer beneficial to my clients.
Congratulations.
Timothy Bishop
Really? I am sorry but when GoDaddy bought out Media Temple, I had an account with them. While the product/service itself did not change much at all, the customer service did. It became as crappy as GoDaddy’s own. I gave it time to see if it was just growing pains before I left. But in the end, I could not tolerate the bad attitudes or the “I am smarter than you” arrogance of MT/GoDaddy support reps.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thank you Tony for your support. It’s good to hear that we’ve earned your benefit of the doubt 🙂
seb.delrue
It won’t matter but i follow the other comments.
“ManageWP joins the GoDaddy family!”
Aie…
I don’t see it as a good news.
james
Ugh, say it aint so!!!
james
I keep coming back to this article, hoping you all have changed your mind! When I saw the email in my inbox this morning, I literally gasped and checked the calendar (nope, not April Fools Day).
Orion is an awesome WordPress tool — it’s well built and supported. We use it on a daily basis, and have been with you for a few years now. All of the amazing updates lately have been so great. I always look forward to new blog posts, and check them immediately! We send in lots of feedback because you guys always respond quickly and then work towards making things better. Up to this point… ManageWP = our favorite vendor and tool. You have done great things for the WordPress community and I thank you for that.
However, to hear that you guys sold out to Godaddy makes me feel sick to my stomach. I can totally understand the move from a financial standpoint (and I hope the price tag was huge). But why not select a better partner (one with better customer service, higher ethical standards, and more well-known / respected in the WordPress community) and then compete with the corporate giants like Godaddy?
Quality > Quantity
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi James, we’ve talked in tickets and feedback, thank you for helping us improve ManageWP, and for trusting us with your business. I completely understand if you want to take your business elsewhere, but it would be a shame if you didn’t stick around to see us bringing the ManageWP level of service at GoDaddy scale. I’m not saying that’s gonna be easy, but it’s something everyone wants.
Will
Aaaaaaaannnnnnndddddddd…. I’m out.
Will
(addition)
Ok, that was a knee jerk response because I really loved what you guys were building and developing. GoDaddy was not who I would pair you with, however I congratulate you for this because that’s a big thing for all parties involved. We must keep in mind that all companies can change. In the best interest of things, I hope GD will rebrand itself and step away from all the negative PR it has acquired over the years. I also hope that these features will help elevate GD to the company it wants to be and also give you more room to be creative and develop cool things for us. Good luck to you all.
Nemanja Aleksic
That’s mighty big of you, Will. Thank you for being with us so far, I hope you’ll keep an eye out on us in the future 🙂
Dennis
Great for ManageWP. Terrible for your client base. Enjoy the cash!
Anty
+1
Bill A
Is it too late do back away from this deal? Go Daddy is one of the few companies that stick out in my mind for poor service and truly offensive marketing. I wish you well but I’m truly concerned for your future.
kevin
Agreed 100%. This acquisition spells the death of ManageWP, I’m afraid.
Nemanja Aleksic
Yeah, those Superbowl ads were horrible. But the ownership changed since then, and Blake and the team are willing to own up to their predecessor’s mistakes. Check out this AMA their CEO did on Reddit, it really gives you an idea how things turned around:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3jd8nw/im_godaddy_ceo_blake_irving_ask_me_anything/
Canton
As someone who’s been happily using ManageWP for several years, I’m extremely disappointed by this new partnership. Long ago I committed myself to NEVER giving money to GoDaddy: Because they are a difficult to use and terrible hosting service. Because they are sneaky and reprehensible in how they price their products and lock in their customers. And especially because of their politics:
* Their CEO spent some of his fortune to shoot and kill an elephant a few years ago — and bragged about it (google it)
* They are consistently on the wrong side of Internet politics (e.g. supporting SOPA)
I sincerely hope their politics and bad customer relations don’t taint your own service. As for myself, I will have to do some soul-searching to decide out whether or not I want my future MangeWP fees to help fund the next GoDaddy debacle.
Andy
Couldn’t agree more with or say it better than Canton above on the exact same points and having also been with MWP for years.
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Canton,
We’ll be here and keep doing what we do 🙂
BTW for the sake of truth, I have to mention this: these two events happened way before the current GoDaddy team came. The first was the former CEO that sold the company in 2011, and the second was interim management that recanted their support.
Aaron
So… how’s the partnership going for ya? I notice that the apologizing for their awfulness portion of the plan is going well 😉
Andrea Gatley
Not happy about this at all. I deliberately removed myself from ALL EIG owned hosts, and now you do this?
I’ll stay with you for now, but as of today I’m looking for another solution.
Nemanja Aleksic
Fair enough, it’s always good to have a backup plan 🙂
In the meantime, we’ll keep doing what to you and prove to you that it was smart that you gave us the benefit of the doubt.
Andrea Gatley
I don’t think you guys understand the depth of the dislike most people have for GoDaddy and EIG. I will go out of my way to avoid giving them a dime. I’m already in the process of moving my sites to InfiniteWP.
I really wish you guys hadn’t done this, I’ve been a happy customer for a while now. However, GoDaddy isn’t going to be profiting off of me if I can help it. Sorry. It’s not your service, which I love. I just won’t tolerate giving money to a company as unethical as GoDaddy.
Nemanja Aleksic
Fair enough. I’ve always been a fan of voting with your wallet and drawing a line in the sand. I wish you the very best in the future endeavors, and thank you for trusting us in the past!
natebald
Congratulations!
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks Nate, we’ve optimistic about what the future holds 🙂
natebald
Yeah, no worries, I am sure you were well aware of this potential backlash and well prepared for it.
Nemanja Aleksic
http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/6e/6e6dd0040a164d590cc8f9ef58c95567a36030a237ba32e8a6960711ec9f2e86.jpg
🙂
Daniel
You sold your soul to the devil, guys. This is the beginning of the end for Orion. GD will tear it apart.
And just as Craig mentioned, the praise you heap on GD is unearned and undeserved. They are a cold, indifferent, greedy corporate machine.
This is sad news. I love Orion and don’t want to have to find another solution, but I’d be a total hypocrite if I didn’t.
Simon
Gutted
Ian atkins
Oh dear. Our personal experience of Godaddy is poor. Poor platform – their managed WordPress product is weak with a clunky internal caching system and low php version.
I hope you manage the association well, this is a professional service I subscribe to, not a mass market dilution.
As for the Godaddy CEO doing trophy hunts, morally questionable to say the least.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/843121
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Ian,
That’s not the GoDaddy CEO, it’s this guy 🙂
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3jd8nw/im_godaddy_ceo_blake_irving_ask_me_anything/
Hendrik
Right, Bob Parson is only the founder, largest shareholder with ~25% and the executive chairman of GoDaddy. The CEO works for him…
Roony Alvarez
…and thats a bs thread, a stunt.
Victor M Font Jr
What a bad idea. Time to move away from Managewp.
Hendrik
GoDaddy? Wow, I’m pretty sure you seriously misjudged your clients attitude towards this. This is probably the worst partner possible. I keep my fingers crossed that nothing changes for non GoDaddy customers since ManageWP is such a fantastic tool, but this is really bad news…
Acorn Internet
Big mistake!
Darren
Just a real shame, thats all I can really say. Its the same kind of ‘nothing will change’ post that goes out so often when this happens. So far my experience has been that it does of course change but unfortunately it hasn’t been for the better. The ‘deep integration’ with godaddy is the worrying part for me…..
Evan
Oh no – another phenomenal platform swallowed up by monsters like GoDaddy why plague web dev professionals with their ridiculously cheap prices, notoriously crappy hosting infrastructure, and terrible customer service.
Like Craig there is absolutely no way my clients will take my firm seriously with any affiliation with GoDaddy… I guess it’s on to evaluating InfiniteWP and Jetpack Site Manage. Anyone looking for a good comparison on similar solutions like ManageWP checkout this post over at WPMU https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/jetpack-manage/
Sure wish I would have known MangeWP was more into those shareholders over end-users when I started beta testing Orion day 1 and moved 50+ sites over….
Yey!
silverrockets
Thanks for the link, this is terrible news to wake up to. Like you, I’m in the beta-tested Orion and 50+ sites boat. I cringe at finding another solution, but I’ve used GoDaddy in the past, and they are indeed terrible. I’ve never had my email sold to spam lists as fast as registering a domain with GD (I can tell, as I used a unique email alias for the project.)
I love ManageWP but seriously, you should have asked around before committing. You may brush off this initial customer outcry, but I don’t think it’s going to abate any time soon…
Francis Mariani
I saw this article in Forbes in 2012, and have steered people away from Go Daddy ever since.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/09/10/5-reasons-you-should-leave-godaddy-and-how/#1d06b62830b5
Nemanja Aleksic
I’m calling your 2012 article and raising you with a 2015 article 😀
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/godaddy-isnt-company-think/
Roony Alvarez
dude..
Thomas
As much as I love ManageWP I am inclined to agree with Craig above, unfortunately. This wasn’t really welcome news for me, although I’m glad that ManageWP is now reaping the rewards of all their hard work building their product.
Bruce
I’ve got to echo what Craig said, associating with GoDaddy is probably not the best move at this point. They’ve got a huge hole to dig themselves out of with respect to web hosting and they’ve only just begun. I’ve got a couple of clients on GoDaddy and I’m not terribly impressed with their backend to be honest.
Overall, this is a negative development for ManageWP in my opinion…
Nemanja Aleksic
We chose to join them based on the rate they’re digging themselves out 🙂
But seriously now, we aim to help them turn GoDaddy into the best WordPrass host, and they are willing to share their lessons and help improve ManageWP. It’s a long road ahead, but we’re sharing that burden.
Craig Marolf
You cannot turn a publicly traded company into the BEST anything (with regard to service based companies), just the BIGGEST or MOST PROFITABLE- and that is all that matters to the company that bought you, regardless of what lies they’ve fed you.
I’m really glad you guys get to cash out. You guys have a great platform and deserve to be handsomely rewarded. I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t jump at the chance to be acquired by a company like that, despite feeling a bit “dirty” about it.
But you are out of your minds if you think you’re going to improve anything at GoDaddy. I don’t think anyone on your team has any idea what it’s like to work for an American publicly traded company.
And do yourselves a favor… Stop defending or promoting GoDaddy, you look foolish. Just be quiet and let nature take its course. Once your consulting agreements wear off and you’re not longer stuck being “acqui-hires” at the worst hosting company on the planet, hopefully we’ll see something great from members of your team again.
mike
Sounds like you guys “Drank the CoolAid” an American saying meaning, you believed GoDaddy’s lies. This is where a good survey of what your USA clients knew that would have helped you but too late for you now.
Craig
Welp- You guys have found a great way to upsell the white label feature. I’d be horrified if one of my clients saw “ManageWP” on their plugins list and then Googled it and saw any association with GoDaddy.
To say that GoDaddy is a good WordPress host is a joke. PHP 5.4? You can’t offer “WordPress hosting” and then not use the PHP version recommended by WordPress.org. If I opened a “Ferrari Fueling Station” but didn’t offer the octane Ferrari recommends than it’s just a regular old gas station. Their WordPress hosting is just “economy hosting” with backups.
Fortunately I’ll be able to further shield my clients my clients from ManageWP once the API opens up.
I love ManageWP and hope that things don’t change too much. As a professional web developer and managed host I can’t have any association with GoDaddy and maintain any semblance of credibility. Despite what they’ve said about their investment in Managed WordPress, it’s all garbage and it’s still substandard.
That’s what happens when you answer to shareholders and not customers.
Nemanja Aleksic
You raise valid points, and that’s where we come in. As Vlad mentioned, we’re not simply plugging in ManageWP into GoDaddy dashboard and calling it a day. We’ve met their team leads and we’re confident that they have the capacity to build a truly great managed WordPress hosting, and wećre happy to share the experience we’ve accumulated troubleshooting every major host in the world, and a lot of small ones.
I know that nothing I say can change your mind, but I just want you to know that we’ve entered this acquisition with clear expectations, and we saw the same dedication in the GoDaddy team.
Or as John Fletcher once said, “Deeds, not words shall speak me.”
Roony Alvarez
look. ive been with GD since uhh 2006. Ill give you one example: despite the threads, requests, explanations, pleads and cry outs, they never bother to change, modify, localise or otherwise improve in any way their email platform in almost 10 years. They havent done it and never will. instead, they chose to cut the service in half and charge even more, to leverage their partnered (and pricey) Microsoft email service, an then going as far as to present as a “great change”. maybe for them. it was just cost-effective and thats the kind of thing people despise about them. only their numbers count and we are always wrong (try it, call their support line and get them to help you. lol)
Nemanja Aleksic
I haven’t tried the GD GEM (I’m one of those people who equate emails with spam :D), so correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Mad Mimi acquired with the specific purpose of replacing the old mailing service?
Roony Alvarez
No, afaik. Remember im talking about reseller hosting, the one we offer in turn to our own customers. Thats the “business class” (workspace email), which is outdated. It works, but its not localized and it gets pricey for their offer. I dont know what email you get when you purchase the “essential corporate email” in GD website directly. They also have been gradually downsizing the services offered integrated with domains and hosting plans (always preceeded with “cool and exciting” emails.
Mike
Craig, you make a great point. I have moved quite a few clients away from GoDaddy after they were either hacked or had daily brute force attacks. As they now pay me for managed hosting, for them to see any affiliation with GoDaddy at my end would be really bad.