Media Temple, a web hosting company that works primarily with developers and creative professionals, has been acquired by the biggest player in the web hosting space, GoDaddy.
Media Temple, which also provides cloud services to its customers, will remain based in Culver City and will operate as an independent subsidiary of GoDaddy. President Russell Reeder will stay with the company while Media Temple Chief Executive Demian Sellfors will step back into an executive consultant role.
The companies did not disclose terms of the deal.
Sellfors, who co-founded Media Temple in 1998, said keeping the company independent was important to him when acquisition talks with GoDaddy began.
“I feel like we’re just getting started,” he said. “We’re given the time and space and permission to do what we love to do. It’s absolutely fantastic.”
Media Temple today has grown to 225 employees and more than 125,000 customers, including corporate clients such as Nordstrom, Starbucks and the Wall Street Journal.
The company bills itself as a premium web hosting service because of its 24/7 technical support services and prides itself in having tech savvy customer support that can relate to Media Temple’s creative clients.
Reeder said Media Temple will benefit from GoDaddy’s international presence and suite of services for small businesses.
“We’ve grown by word of mouth over the last 15 years,” he said. “There’s only so fast you can grow by word of mouth. This will help Media Temple do more globally.”
GoDaddy, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., has been experiencing its own transformation in recent months. Yahoo veteran Blake Irving took the reins as chief executive in January this year and has spearheaded an acquisition spree to pick up a number of small companies that will provide ancillary services to GoDaddy customers.
Irving said GoDaddy was especially interested in Media Temple because of its strong foothold among web developers and designers, a demographic that GoDaddy has traditionally struggled to attract.
“We found a talented, passionate group of people that were doing amazing things for their customers,” he said. “To be able to buy a company with 225 people that are like-minded culturally, incredibly talented and are servicing a customer base that is, frankly, pretty demanding, you just can’t go wrong.”
