GoDaddy Acquires Sucuri

GoDaddy has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Sucuri Security. Sucuri, founded by Daniel Cid and co-founded by Tony Perez in 2010, is a website security platform that helps clean and protect websites. Details of the deal were not disclosed.

Like ManageWP, Sucuri will operate as a separate entity under the GoDaddy umbrella. Sucuri employees will transfer to GoDaddy while remaining under the leadership of Perez and Cid.

Out of all the companies that Sucuri could have chosen to be acquired by, why GoDaddy?

“Over the years we’ve seen them live up to their words to be a customer and product centric company,” Perez said. “As a product company it give us an opportunity to scale our product from a few hundred thousand domains, to millions. It’s something that we only ever dreamed of.”

The acquisition comes a few weeks after SiteGround announced its partnership with Sucuri and renamed its site scanner SG Site Scanner. It’s too soon to determine how this acquisition will affect Sucuri’s partnerships with hosting companies.

“I can’t speak for our partners, but I truly hope they will trust in us, Sucuri, and in me personally,” Perez said. “If we can work to deploy our technology for GoDaddy, at their scale, then I have nothing but confidence we can do this for every other partner out there.

“GoDaddy made this investment because they believe in what we have built as a team at Sucuri, the product solves problems, that doesn’t go away and I hope all our customers and partners will give us time to prove this in our actions.”

Both companies acknowledged that nothing changes for existing Sucuri customers and that they can expect to see numerous improvements in the near future. Perez and Cid see the acquisition as version 2.0 of the company.

Aaron Campbell, WordPress Security Team Lead who is sponsored by GoDaddy to work on WordPress full-time, says the move should help make more sites secure.

“GoDaddy is committed to offering great services to its clients,” Campbell said. “You know as well as I do that Sucuri is exactly that; we’ve seen them be quite an asset to the WordPress community over the years.

“They’re going to remain a standalone product, but I’m excited to see them become part of the GoDaddy team to make some great stuff together. Keeping as many WordPress users secure as possible is obviously my goal and I really think this will help accomplish that.”

Reactions to the news on Twitter have mostly been positive with many congratulating Sucuri and its founders.

On the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, reactions to the news are a mix between congratulatory and fears of Sucuri’s service declining. These are among the same grievances and fears expressed by ManageWP customers when GoDaddy acquired it.

ManageWP Customers Report No Noticeable Decline in Service

Since being acquired, ManageWP has maintained and improved service levels while continuing to add features. Its most recent feature gives customers the opportunity to create backups, restore, and clone multisite websites.

Bob Dunn, of BobWP, says the service has been stellar before and after the transition.

“To be honest, their services were great before and still are,” Dunn said. “I don’t manage a ton of sites, but for my needs, it has been rock solid since I first became a customer.”

Scott Buscemi, co-founder of Lumen Foundry, has had a similar experience.

“In all honesty, I haven’t noticed much of anything since they were acquired – and that’s a ‘win’ in my opinion,” Buscemi said.

“I’ve seen them push out a pleasant list of bug fixes and features that don’t affect me, so it’s great to still see active development on the primary system. GoDaddy has been working hard to get on the good side of developers and agency owners like me, so I can’t imagine they would go through the effort of the acquisition only to spoil the experience and turn things negative.”

Even those skeptical with the acquisition have reported no noticeable decline in the quality of service.

GoDaddy has not announced how it plans to integrate Sucuri into its products and services.

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26 responses to “GoDaddy Acquires Sucuri”

  1. Super thoughtful post and I can’t be more excited! Thank you!

    I would like to note that I found a small discrepancy in that I was Daniel’s co-founder in 2010 and we were honored to have Tony join us in 2011.

    Oh, make sure to update your WordPress instance ASAP!

  2. The fact that the founders stay in charge is the best guarantee that the service will not decline.
    Despite what we can say we all know how bad the reputation of GoDaddy is, and only by operating as a separate entity Sucuri can keep this level of quality. GoDaddy managers are probably aware of that

    • That’s what they tell you. And then a few years in GoDaddy will start to take over and quality starts going down. This is exactly what happened with all EIG hosts.

      The most recent example is A Small Orange, customers were assured that the original founders would stay in control. And that was true for about 6 months and it was all downhill after that.

      Now whether this will actually happen or not, we don’t know. GoDaddy just started acquiring smaller WP companies in the past few years.

      You have to keep in mind that GoDaddy is a business after all, a business that already has a bad reputation in the hosting world for providing low quality services.

        • Let’s clear up this thread. EIG owns bluehost, HostGator, A Small Orange, Constant Contact, and many others, many are small companies they acquire and then downsize staff. We see that kind of consolidation all across the web industry. GoDaddy is doing something very different, as they are investing in the better rising companies in the WordPress ecosystem and ramping up capabilities. Both are public companies, but their motives and operations are quite different.

        • No they don’t own EIG. But GoDaddy is about as bad as EIG when it comes to the quality of services they offer.

  3. It will be too soon to judge whether Sucuri service will decline (or not). Time will tell soon. Sucuri has been great at providing service and support. Good luck to the team for what’s ahead.

  4. Congratulations to the Sucuri folks. It’s great to see people who started something from nothing get their recognition (and pay day) while retaining the entity they built. Not seeing the brand eaten up and the further gentrification of, well, everything, is something that I couldn’t be more supportive of. I use ManageWP and didn’t even know it was a GoDaddy company.

    It’s a smart strategy by GoDaddy to preserve these brands largely separate from their own. In my view, nothing they ever do will ever resurrect their brand from its SOPA support.

  5. GoDaddy has been working hard to get on the good side of developers

    GoDaddy still doesn’t even support PHP 7. They run around sponsoring WordPress Beginner courses and adopting WordPress security companies, yet they refuse to even mention PHP 7.

    No pun intended, but PHP 7 is the big elephant in the room whenever GoDaddy tries to act like some supporter of WordPress sites. WordPress sites need PHP 7.

    BTW, GoDaddy had another “hardware failure” (their words) today, and many sites have been down over 16 hours (this info is from their customer service rep). I was unfortunate to have one site in that bunch. It’s still down, and they can’t say when it will get fixed. I hope that it’s somehow related to them setting up PHP 7. (Because their MySQL servers have been offline most of the day, and I understand this may mean they are prepping for PHP7. Maybe just wishful thinking.)

    GoDaddy is right up there with Comcast and Walmart. They’re making tons of money, but their service/quality stinks royally, and most consumers deeply loathe them. Sucuri needs to make money, of course, and to that end, this is a smart move for them. But, their reputation will be damaged by this move.

    • Nemanja from ManageWP here. PHP7 as a default is ~2 months away, according to some of the message boards. The GoDaddy Head of WordPress, Gabe Mays, talked on multiple occasions about the need to upgrade the whole GoDaddy infrastructure in order to make it PHP7 compliant, and that project is well underway.

      Some more info can be found on his AMA back in 2016:
      https://managewp.org/articles/13979/i-m-gabe-mays-head-of-wordpress-godaddy-ask-me-anything

      • If Gabe is overseeing it, don’t hold your breath. That’s almost a sure guarantee that it won’t be delivered on time, and when it does, it will cause outages on your site for at least 6 months.

        • This seems like a pretty personal attack for a forum like this.

          GoDaddy faces some interesting challenges of scale that other hosts simply don’t. The work that it takes to keep things moving forward consistently is immense. If you have a problem with current progress, past experiences, etc, that’s understandable.

          To call someone out by name and try to say they’re no good at their job, especially when you’ve not done their job, it’s not helpful or reasonable.

      • PHP 7 is almost a year and a half old (PHP 7.1 is also few months old), and GoDaddy is still not supporting it???

        I was willing to give GoDaddy a chance and test their servers, but now I am sure I will stay away.

        Having PHP 7/7.1, full HTTP/2 support and Let’s Encrypt is the very least modern hosting company need to offer to be even considered as a serious hosting company.

    • Not to mention they don’t let you harden the file permissions on WordPress managed hosting packages, only cPanel.

      • Hey Ryan! I’d really like to hear more about the file permissions you’d prefer. Please reach out to me!

        Default permissions on Managed WordPress are currently:

        444 – Core files
        555 – Core dirs
        604 – Content files
        705 – Content dirs
        600 – wp-config.php

  6. Congrats to all on the Sucuri team, well deserved! My only fear is that GoDaddy will “do a Twitter”, and remove access for other third-parties and make Sucuri native to GoDaddy.

    Hopefully, I’m wrong.

    • That hasn’t happened with ManageWP. I still use it natively both with sites at the free level and paid levels. Also, I use it freely as a GoDaddy Pro with clients there. ManageWP has continued to get better and provide awesome support, since their acquisition.

      There are plenty of GoDaddy haters spreading FUD—and believe me I have my own FUD about other companies in the WordPress ecosystem—but the industry is rapidly evolving, so the smart bet is to evaluate services by merit, cost, value, and sustainability.

      Sucuri certainly ranks high on merit, cost, and value, so if this extends those and provides sustainability, that’s a smart move. The hope is that Cid & Perez continue to run things successfully as they have.

      • There are plenty of GoDaddy haters spreading FUD

        What you call “GoDaddy haters,” are actually GoDaddy customers evaluating their services.

        • Actually, no, the GoDaddy customers I know and work with are happy users of their Managed WordPress services. People who spread FUD may be ex-customers and were dissatisfied, but ‘haters’ typically don’t evaluate, but would rather nitpick, carry a grudge, spread rumors and disinformation, or may be jealous of other’s success.

          Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. That’s fine, but not the same as a constructive discussion. I notice that GoDaddy reps are active here answering concerns. How professional!

      • What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t accuse customers who give honest reviews of bad experiences, of what you are accusing them of, e.g. being haters, nitpickers, jealous of other’s success. That doesn’t make sense because honest reviews and evaluations can be negative even if you don’t agree with them.

        GoDaddy has kept sites down for 4+ days and refused to say if or when the site will be up, and refuse to refund $200+ for services they can’t provide. Not only to me but to countless others with WP Managed hosting, if you look at Consumer Affairs reviews. Real people giving real, non-affiliated reviews is not disinformation nor FUD.

        You’re making baseless accusations of a whole group of people which is usually wrong.

        • Please do not put words in my mouth. I commented on haters spreading FUD, which is not “Consumer Affairs reviews, and I did say “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. That’s fine,” so please go comment there.

          When people say things about Sucuri like “their reputation will be damaged by this move,” that’s not a review of services, that’s an opinion, which I said is fine. However, I will say that attacking an awesome company like Sucuri is not healthy dialogue.

          I wish Sucuri well and I agree with Tony Perez, who is a hero in our industry: “I can’t speak for our partners, but I truly hope they will trust in us, Sucuri, and in me personally,” Perez said. “If we can work to deploy our technology for GoDaddy, at their scale, then I have nothing but confidence we can do this for every other partner out there.”

  7. GoDaddy is like Microsoft; acquisitions ≠ innovation. No amount of shopping will turn a terrible brand into something stellar, but congratulations to the Sucuri team.

    • Given they’ve [historically] pretty much sucked at WordPress compared to other hosts, they probably felt they should just buy the expertise as opposed to try and understand it… ;-)

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