Starboard Invests In GoDaddy: SMB Hosting Provider Under Pressure?

Activist investor Starboard Value has amassed a 6.5% stake in GoDaddy stock, and may plan to push the the cloud computing, hosting and domain registrar company to boost its business performance, The Wall Street Journal reported.

GoDaddy's market valuation is roughly $12.7 billion. The company has successfully extended beyond domain registration services to offer cloud and e-commerce services designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The evolution included acquiring Host Europe Group for roughly $1.8 billion in 2016.

GoDaddy has been particularly attentive to web developers, while also showing the WordPress content management community lots of love. The WordPress focus includes acquiring WP Curve in 2016 and Pagely in November 2021.

GoDaddy's revenue was $964 million in Q3 of 2021, up 14.2% from $844.4 million in Q3 of 2020. Read between the lines, and GoDaddy is growing faster than most MSPs in the SMB market, but not as fast as the major public cloud providers -- such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Starboard: Activist Investor Targets Technology Companies

Amid that context, Starboard apparently believes the web hosting provider can further boost its business performance. And Starboard has extensive experience as an activist investor. The company previously invested in and/or attempted to shake up domain registrar Web.com, Symantec and Commvault.

Still, Starboard has not announced any formal plans to engage the GoDaddy executive team to discuss potential business changes.