The company, previously making news because of its sexist ads and a founder with a penchant for hunting endangered animals, has gone an extra mile to revive its image in recent years. In April 2015, GoDaddy became a public company and is now geared up to make some fresh money by gaining some visibility in cloud computing.
“With the launch of Cloud Servers, GoDaddy aims to extend our lead as the number one trusted provider of Cloud Hosting solutions for individual developers and technologists. We’re looking to make it easy for developers to serve small businesses with the technology they want,” said Jeff King, SVP & GM Hosting, Security at GoDaddy.
“By offering a powerful, yet simple cloud offering that integrates domains, DNS, security and backups all in one place, developers can save time and exceed their clients’ expectations.”
Boasting about 14 million customers worldwide and managing over 60 million domain names, GoDaddy would now offer a one-stop shop to small enterprises and business owners. And what would the shop cater to? Well, quite a handful. A place to buy their domain name, build their online presence, gain customers and also manage their business.
Interestingly, GoDaddy’s cloud product is built on open source OpenStack and powered by purpose-built KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization. Perhaps what is more interesting is the fact that GoDaddy has hit a deal with Bitnami, the leading library for open source server application deployments.
Bitnami, a name that almost every cloud vendor is well-versed with, offers a cloud application marketplace that is set up on top of the infrastructure of choice. GoDaddy’s partnership with Bitnami hence would provide one-click optimized installation for application solutions like CMS (eg: WordPress and Drupal), CRM (eg: Odoo and OpenERP) and eCommerce (eg: OpenCart and Magento). It is interesting to note here that Bitnami itself is agnostic and also gives users the option of hosting with AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Google and others.
“As a GoDaddy technology partner on Cloud Applications, we’re excited for GoDaddy’s international customer base to take advantage of our capabilities – joining the millions of developers and business users who save time and effort with our library’s consistent, secure and optimized end-user experience. We’re proud to partner with GoDaddy in serving this global market of advanced SMB-focused developers,” said Erica Brescia COO and Co-Founder at Bitnami.
GoDaddy’s new leap comes at a time when the launch of a new Bluemix Garage in Nice, France and a Cloud Foundry Dojo in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina by IBM is already making news. There are currently more than one million developers using Bluemix and IBM is drawing 20,000 new developers to the Bluemix platform each week. So we can easily assume that GoDaddy has a tough confrontation lined up.
GoDaddy Cloud Servers are pre-integrated with GoDaddy’s Domains and DNS services. The new cloud offering from GoDaddy would be made available in 26 languages in 44 countries/territories and 53 markets.
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