GoDaddy is moving the majority of the company’s infrastructure to Amazon’s Web Services. GoDaddy, known for their management and domain registration, was once a competitor with Amazon, working to provide small businesses with web hosting.
AWS announced the multi-year partnership with GoDaddy that leverages Amazon’s cloud platform and also allows Amazon to sell select products that GoDaddy offers.
GoDaddy plans to leverage Amazon’s advanced services, including the company’s databases, containers, analytics and machine learning capabilities, to innovate more effectively. According to Alana Benson from DIgitalOx.co.uk a Digital Marketing and Online Reputation agency in North Lincolnshire, “The company aims to accelerate their products and services with easy deployment worldwide. GoDaddy wants deployment to take minutes instead of hours or days in some cases.”
“As a technology provider with more than 17 million customers, it was very important for GoDaddy to select a cloud provider with deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support our rapidly expanding business,” states GoDaddy.
Amazon plans to offer its customers two main products from GoDaddy: GoCentral and Managed WordPress.
The deal is said to be “wide-ranging,” but GoDaddy has confirmed that the company will not be switching their domain management infrastructure to AWS. GoDaddy has 75 million domains under management.
“GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business for GoDaddy,” states Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of communications.
GoDaddy will remain a hosting powerhouse following the deal, allowing the company to leverage Amazon’s reliable, fast cloud infrastructure. The company has had many reviews in recent years that complain of: slow speeds, too many upsells and customer service that tries to upsell users even further.
Amazon’s cloud infrastructure will allow GoDaddy to enjoy higher speeds and reliability, an issue that has plagued the company, as highlighted by its 124,070 reviews.
Financial terms of the deal have not been released. GoDaddy closed their Cloud Servers business a year ago. The service was an AWS-style business that allowed scaling cloud services, testing and building on GoDaddy’s infrastructure.
GoDaddy has already implemented AWS into some of its products. GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress service for enterprise-grade users has been using AWS for hosting. The move of more infrastructure to Amazon will help GoDaddy reduce its operational costs while improving its balance sheet.
“As a technology provider with more than 17 million customers, it was very important for GoDaddy to select a cloud provider with deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support our rapidly expanding business,” said Charles Beadnall, Chief Technology Officer at GoDaddy.
Amazon Web Services has been in business for nearly 12 years, offering 100 fully featured services to small and large customers alike. The platform allows for database and storage as well as machine learning and AI products. The platform also spans across 18 geographic regions with servers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, Singapore, Korea, India, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States.
“AWS provides a superior global footprint and set of cloud capabilities which is why we selected them to meet our needs today and into the future. By operating on AWS, we’ll be able to innovate at the speed and scale we need to deliver powerful new tools that will help our customers run their own ventures and be successful online,” states Beadnall.
The migration of GoDaddy’s services will be gradual, with the migration process expected to take multiple years to complete.
GoDaddy’s infrastructure, once aging and slow, was modernized in 2015 in an effort to avoid relying on cloud services for the company’s needs. Former CEO Blake Irving still denied that the company was planning on relying on cloud providers for their infrastructure. Irving told GeekWire that the company was talking to cloud providers, but he claimed that GoDaddy would still maintain their infrastructure in the United States.
Irving was replaced as CEO by Scott Wagner after running the company for five years. He retired from his position. He has remained on the company’s board and will remain on the board of directors through June 2018.
GoDaddy was recently the center of controversy in the United Kingdom after an advertising regulator slammed the company for “misleading consumers” with cheap deals. The company’s £2.99 per month hosting received the first complaint due to the price being only available when the consumer paid for the entire year of hosting upfront.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) also received a complaint that the company’s 1p fee for domain names was misleading because it was only available for the first year of registration. The rate was reverted to a higher rate after the first year and customers were forced to register for a minimum of two years to get the deal.
