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.

Me, I haven’t really noticed any change in the quality of the service (and I was skeptical)

— James Cook (@jm_cook) March 22, 2017

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