Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Jobs, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, it is interesting that GoDaddy was foun-
ded by a former Marine who had already sold one company and came out of re-
tirement to start a new one.
The name “GoDaddy” was apparently decided in a casual meeting with em-
ployees who were not happy with the previous Jomax name for some reason. A
similar name, Big Daddy, was suggested but was already in use. (Had this been an
East Coast firm, the name might have been “Big Papi” after the Red Sox player
David Ortiz.)
The main business of GoDaddy is entirely dependent on the existence of the
internet and World Wide Web. It could not exist without these. After the web was
created and companies began to build websites, it quickly became obvious that
each site needed a unique name. In order to do this, it was necessary to create a
formal registry of names, which are called
domain names
.
The alphabetic or alphanumeric domain names are only the surface. These are
mapped to a mathematical and numeric internet protocol (IP) address that allows
automatic jumps from one domain to another. The analogy that comes to mind is
the relationship between human names in a phone book and their numeric tele-
phone numbers.
Note
The original Domain Name System (DNS) was developed in 1983
by Paul Mockapetris.
In the early part of the decade, the registry of domain names was kept by the
National Science Foundation (NSF). In 1993, the NSF decided to privatize domain
registration.
GoDaddy was not the first company to provide name registration: that was Net-
work Solutions. The domain name business now has a number of companies that
share the master registry and compete with each other. GoDaddy is one of the lar-
ger competitors, with about 50 million names in their registry.
DNS naming and control are critical aspects of the internet and World Wide
Web, but the specific mechanism is beyond the scope of this topic. Suffice it to say
that keeping track of billions of web pages is not trivial and the math is complex.
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