Shawn Blanc

Oh my. I’ve been a very happy customer with Media Temple for 6 years now, and I’ve happily and heartily recommended their services to anyone who’s asked. I even have a Media Temple banner on my site’s sidebar.

And so today’s acquisition by GoDaddy is a bit disheartening for a few reasons.

First of all, it’s always scary when a company you rely on heavily gets bought by another company. Suddenly the future is uncertain. Naturally, Media Temple says that nothing will change, but we all know that that’s what they all say. And so I take their statements with a grain of salt.

Secondly, the acquisition is disheartening because I have virtually zero respect for the GoDaddy brand.

However, I’m not going to make any hosting changes at the moment. There are several very fine hosting options out there — WP Engine, Digital Ocean, and MacMiniColo all come to mind — but I have 9 websites hosted across 3 different Media Temple servers right now (one of which is a new project in active development). Stopping everything to migrate servers and databases is neither important nor appealing to me at the moment.1

Secondly, if you read the links below from Media Temple’s FAQ and Virb’s announcement, they both talk about a “new GoDaddy” that has a desire to transform their brand into something fresh and different.

Brad Smith wrote in his announcement to the Virb customer base:

Throughout my conversations with the teams at GoDaddy, it’s wildly apparent they are on a mission to transform the company with fresh thinking, new advertising, and an inspiring new strategy. It truly is a “new” GoDaddy. I cannot wait to watch (mt) and GoDaddy shine brightly together.

If you’re a Media Temple customer here are a few more links of note regarding the acquisition:

• Media Temple posted an FAQ about what will and won’t be changing.

• Virb, the cool website building company that was acquired by Media Temple a few years ago, did not want to be part of the GoDaddy deal and has been sold back to its original founders.

• Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks shares his positive perspective of a Media Temple customer who has a good impression of GoDaddy.

• Checking out the latest design of GoDaddy.com, it has changed significantly. It’s a much more professional- and classy-looking home page since the last time I saw it.