GoDaddy investor relations material

The world's leading domain registrar

GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar in the world. The company also provides web hosting and other services for building and running a website and other adjacent services such as email hosting and marketing. GoDaddy was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons. In 2005 the company became the largest registrar in the world and later also became the largest web hosting company.

The domain name industry

To understand the domain name industry that GoDaddy operates in, it is important to understand the different roles that the registry, registrar, and registrant have. An individual or a company that is looking to buy a domain is called a registrant. To do so, they go to a registrar such as GoDaddy, which handles the sale of the domain names. GoDaddy may or may not manage the top-level domain and, in that case, has to work with a registry to be able to use their top-level domain. A top-level domain is for example .com, .org, and .gov. GoDaddy owns some of these, but another large registry is, for instance, VeriSign, which manages the .com domain.