Today ManageWP announced that they are joining forces with GoDaddy. That’s pretty big news in WordPress maintenance land, as ManageWP has been around for a long time and is one of the biggest names in the field.
In their announcement ManageWP touts the benefits of joining GoDaddy, amounting to scalability and access to an existing WordPress hosting environment. They say they are going to integrate tightly with GoDaddy and “provide a hosting solution that works perfectly with ManageWP.” They go on to state that they will continue to support other hosts, but it’s clear that priority will be given to GoDaddy.
Anyone who has worked in this market for any amount of time knows GoDaddy has a terrible reputation. From social issues, to policy, to reliability, they are consistently on the wrong side of the coin. In the announcement, ManageWP points to a 2014 article from ReviewSignal.com touting GoDaddy’s strong WordPress hosting performance, but fails to mention their abysmal 44% overall rating on the same site.
The reaction has been swift and overwhelmingly negative. If the comments on the post are any indication, ManageWP is in for a rough ride. Namanja Aleksic is the Growth Engineer at ManageWP, and he says that they chose to join GoDaddy not because they are a good company, but because they are trying to become a good company. How that benefits ManageWP clients in the short term remains to be seen.
Before we started Barrel Roll we were looking for a good option to support our own growing base of WordPress clients. At one point we were using ManageWP but found it to be too limited in terms of functionality, support, and feature development. Their new version, Orion, lacked core features of the existing system when it launched and that wasn’t acceptable to us. It sent us looking for a better alternative which led to the creation of Barrel Roll where we fully maintain WordPress websites for our members so they don’t have to worry about things like backups, plugin updates, and security.
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