Nodejitsu joins GoDaddy | Hacker News Reader

Nodejitsu joins GoDaddy

blog.nodejitsu.com

64 pointsoakesm943 comments

Isn't GoDaddy a pretty disgusting company? That's the vibe I'm getting from their Superbowl Ads and the fact that they're (like everyone in hosting) are mainly making money from the fact that people just keep paying for something they don't need.

(Full disclosure, I work at GoDaddy)

I joined about a year ago, and the only reason I did so was because most of the executive team, including the CEO, was replaced about a year prior to me joining. The new CEO is Blake Irving, who seems like a great guy (I had dinner with him a couple months ago) and did an AMA on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/23v7f3/hi_im_blake_irv... . He also wrote an open letter to the FCC in support of net neutrality: https://garage.godaddy.com/godaddy/news/net-neutrality-ameri... . A lot of GoDaddy's senior leadership team these days is made up of people from Microsoft and Yahoo.

I would not have joined GoDaddy in its previous form, but it has made serious improvements to be a great tech company over the last couple years.

Huh. I kind of wish they had rebranded at that point, if that's what happened. I don't think any developer with decision-making power will go anywhere near the GoDaddy brand for years to come.

> I don't think any developer with decision-making power will go anywhere near the GoDaddy brand for years to come.

In the past I prefered Godaddy for pet projects because they used to have lower prices, but until recently they removed all their renewal coupons, so there's not a reason for me to stay with them anymore.

For serious projects I never trusted Godaddy because their process to order a domain is too shady.

Yeah, I think that was a huge mistake. They have literally one of the worst brands amongst the tech community. At this point their brand is synonymous with sexism, killing endangered elephants, and censoring the internet. They've been on the wrong side of pretty much any issue you could pick the wrong side of.

You'll probably be hard pressed to find GoDaddy fans here, yes. But I'm curious why you think nobody needs hosting?

People who need hosting pay for it, but they usually pay a hosting provider for it, and shop around for one of those. The people who pay their domain provider for hosting are usually people who just accept the default add-ons in their cart and don't care about digging into the extra monthly costs, and then go on to either not use the domain, or hook it up to an actual hosting provider anyway.

Short ver: quote from article: Nodejitsu products will run for seven months, then shutdown.

Can we please stop with the "joins" doublespeak.

GoDaddy buys Nodejitsu.

If they didn't actually acquire any equity in the company, then GoDaddy didn't buy Nodejitsu. The difference to end users may be small, but the difference to investors is huge.

If the consideration contained a stock component would it not be 'join'?

At least they didn't use the word "journey".

Or "awesome" or "ninja".

Looks like an acquihire. I love how failed businesses give a positive spin these days. Why not just say "we failed, sorry guys, we are going to get job elsewhere". They would have my immense respect had they done that.

> Why not just say "we failed, sorry guys, we are going to get job elsewhere". They would have my immense respect had they done that.

Because that is poisonous language in a large segment of the business and investment ecosystem, and the internet is written in stone.

Saying it might earn your respect, but your respect is worthless because you're not writing the checks.

Honestly what's it matter if they say either? The outcome is the same.

Are you saying they don't get any money at all from the deal?

Acquihire is about getting 'some' money but its not a successful exit.

Success is defined by the return, not the means of exit. To determine returns, you need to know how much was invested in nodejitsu and the sale price.

I would guess in this case the sales price would be in the range of the low 7 figures??

Yeah but in the world of BS multibillion dollar valuations this is probably still considered a fail...

If I could sell my company even for $10,000 it would be a huge success.

Success depends on who you ask. This is failure for investors, but it might have netted the founders more money than they would have gotten if they exited another way.

GoDaddy seems to be really into Node lately: http://strongloop.com/strongblog/godaddy-api-platform/

Nodejitsu's Private NPM code getting released is rather exciting - there are certainly a number of paid and open source alternative's, but I would imagine Nodejitsu's version is quite good. That's an exciting consequence of an otherwise unexpected acquisition.

I've been using their smart-private-npm package to run our private npm since early last year. They did leave out a couple key components, but it has been completely solid since I set it up.

The only issue is keeping up with npm's API changes as its focus is not this kind of application.

Feel free to contact me if you're looking to set up such a package. It really deserves a blog post soon.

> But where am I supposed to go? I depend on Nodejitsu!

And that's what's going to eventually kill the whole startup business as we know it today. Very few people will want to invest in new companies when they are unlikely to still be there in a couple of years. Even when they actually do well!

This was always true in all industries everywhere. However, the danger is usually that the small company will run out of steam and go broke. Nowadays, the company can disappear if they happen to do exceptionally well - which just means they will get acquired.

This particular case seems to be an acqui-hire though.

This is less a problem with startups (except in the most stringent PG sense of the word) and more a problem with VCs. VCs aren't looking for a quarterly distribution of profits, they're looking for a 10x ROI in cash and stock. There is a huge incentive to sell, even when VCs have a minority stake. If you have VC investment and get an acquisition offer that will kill your product but give your VCs 15-20x ROI and you turn it down so you can chug along at 20% gross margin for the next decade, you will never ever get VC investment ever again.

So, this is an acquihire? Is the price undisclosed?

Given all nodejitsu products are being shutdown and they are going to help with GoDaddy products, I believe that qualifies as an acquihire.

This actually sounds terrible for their customers then! I guess they'll come back as one of those crappy GoDaddy add-ons they try to push on you for five pages before you can finish paying.

Who wants to build a Elixir/Erlang service with me. We can make our whole goal to be bought by Godaddy. *joking

Deleted comment

I have no affiliation with GoDaddy, but they've been making strides recently to change it. They acquired Media Temple in 2013 and most people do not even know it. I talked to a few people from MT and they said GoDaddy Corp has been mostly hands off.

For anyone who is affected by Nodejitsu shutting down its PaaS service we thought we might help and create an easy guide how to migrate http://go.c66.me/1ygYjfm

I'm happy to see Charlie Robbins, whom I use to work with a few years back, make an exit although it will be a sadder landscape out there with out nodejitsu as a separate entity.

Thanks Nodejitsu for the T-Shirt I got in the mail a few weeks ago for supporting ScaleNPM. :) Hopefully you got a good price.

So what are the alternatives? I just want to deploy my node app without any hassle.

If you looking for alternative, you can also try Cloud 66 (Heroku on any cloud or on your own server). Have a look at the guide how to migrate http://go.c66.me/1ygYjfm

I really like modulus.io, I switched over to them from nodejitsu a while ago

Dokku on Digital Ocean. 5-10 bucks a month and couldn't be simpler.

Sounds really complicated to be honest. What I'm looking for is basically the following:

1. Sign up

2. git push

3. Application live

No configuration or spending time in the terminal more than step 2. Can I get that with Dokku on Heroku?

Nope! I guess what you want is Azure. It's too expensive for little projects, though.

RIP Nodejitsu

Reply on news.ycombinator.com