GoDaddy Files For $100 Million IPO 110
mpicpp (3454017) writes with news that GoDaddy has filed to make an initial public offering "This is the second time GoDaddy has tried to go public. It went this route back in 2006, but then backed out when it didn't get the pricing it wanted."
The SEC Filing indicates that they are not in the greatest financial condition. Quoting CNN: "GoDaddy hasn't made a profit since 2009. The company lost $279 million in 2012. It bled another $200 million last year. This year doesn't look much better, with another $51 million lost in the first quarter." Founder Bob Parsons, currently executive chairman, will be stepping down but remaining on the board of directors.
How (Score:5, Interesting)
How the fuck do you blow $200+ million a year being a registrar? Where does the money go? It can't possibly cost that much unless they are doing something very, very wrong. Where is the cash going?
SOPA support?
Not their core competency (Score:5, Interesting)
GoDaddy should stick to their core competency of strippers, pole dancing and parties(*) rather than this internet thing.
* Well thats the impression I get from their ads.
Not hard to blow a lot of cash (Score:5, Interesting)
How the fuck do you blow $200+ million a year being a registrar?
By buying pointless Super Bowl ads and selling your product for less than it actually costs to provide. It's not hard to lose a lot of money really fast if you sell a commodity product people want for less than it actually costs to provide it. I had a teacher once point out how easy it is to generate sales. Just sell a $2 bill for $1. You'll have all the revenue you can handle but you'll be out of business faster than you can say "Chapter 7 bankruptcy".
Where does the money go?
Go dig up the prospectus and it will tell you. I can't be bothered but my guess would be some combination of advertising, infrastructure and management compensation. Possibly debt service too if they went that route.
Re:like those are hard to see on teh intarwebs (Score:5, Interesting)
Their sleazy advertising is what caused me to actually stop recommending them to clients. I used to recommend them to clients for cheap hosting. But after they started to run ads that looked more like Hooters commercials (or ads for a strip club) than ads for a reputable hosting company, I dropped them faster than a hot potato. I'm not sure what kind of dumbass CEO thought he would attract more businesses and charities looking to set up websites by running Superbowl ads featuring half-naked women boozing it up at frat parties, but he definitely misjudged his audience.
Even their homepage ended up being a fucking embarrassment. I've seen porn sites that were more modest.
Since 2009? You don't say! (Score:5, Interesting)
Gee, I wonder what could have effected their profitablity since that year.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not profitable (Score:4, Interesting)
And they use it for a few months before realizing it is terrible and dumping it. Been there, done that.
With GoDaddy, my static content was hosted on the same server as a bunch of @&^#@&$ WordPress and PHPBB instances, and every time somebody searched on those sites, it tied up a slot on the server for an extended period of time. Run enough of them in parallel, and suddenly you have 15+ second latency between when the connection is established and when the server begins serving data.
I pointed out the problem, providing detailed time stamps for dozens of such insane periods of poor performance over the course of one or two days. They said they couldn't find anything wrong. Then, I asked them to move me to a different server that had mostly static content and no scripts, but they said no, and I said, "Bye."
Of course, to be brutally honest, I was considering leaving before I even finished pushing the content *to* GoDaddy's servers. That hellish experience was caused entirely by GoDaddy's utterly incompetent system administration practices. Instead of setting up one server for shell access and a separate server to serve the actual content, as far as I can tell, they used a single server for both tasks. To prevent users from abusing CPU resources, they set a time limit on processes. That sort of policy makes sense on a web server, but on a shell server, it makes uploading your web tree almost impossible. I couldn't use rsync because it wouldn't begin sending data before the timeout, and I couldn't use tar because it can't be resumed. I couldn't use scp because there were single files that took longer to upload over my slow DSL connection than the (IIRC 30 second) timeout. I can't remember how I ended up solving the problem, but I think it involved using rsync on a single file at a time. (No, I will not use FTP....)
But even that wasn't enough hell for GoDaddy. No, they also decided to prevent people from abusing the server by connecting to it too many times in a short period of time, so whenever I uploaded short files, I would exceed that threshold and it would refuse the connection. And as long as I continued to try to connect, it would never succeed. So to get my files uploaded to the server, I had to write an unholy script that alternated between multiple source IP addresses, copying files one at a time using rsync over ssh.
Unfortunately, this level of incompetence seems to be typical of GoDaddy from all indications. You'd have to be nuts to buy stock in this company. Their entire business model depends on a steady stream of suckers, and there are enough sites out there with similar prices and better ratings, so that stream is drying up. Unless they can hire some competent customer support people and competent IT people, they have nowhere to go from here but down the drain.