GoDaddy Offers Small Businesses a Place in the Cloud
GoDaddy on Monday launched a pay-as-you-go cloud platform along with applications powered by Bitnami.
The tools, Cloud Servers and Cloud Applications, are designed to help small businesses — individual devs, tech entrepreneurs and IT professionals — quickly build, test and scale cloud solutions.
Provisioning takes 54 seconds or less, GoDaddy said.
Bitnami is a library for open source server application deployments, and the partnership will provide users with one-click installation for applications such as WordPress and Drupal content management systems, Odoo CRM, and OpenCart and Magento e-commerce tools, according to the company.
GoDaddy Cloud Servers users would pay only for what they use hourly, echoing Amazon Web Services’ model. Users can set monthly caps on usage.
The tools are available in 26 languages in 53 markets.
“There is room for a lot of players if they are careful and can generate decent margins,” suggested John Dinsdale, managing director at Synergy Research Group.
About Cloud Servers
The Cloud Servers offering is built on OpenStack and powered by purpose-built KVM. It uses a simple, powerful API and easy-to-user user interface to give devs complete control over their virtual instances, GoDaddy said.
The offering includes concise in-app documentation and feature snapshots so users can save their configurations and use them to launch new servers.
It uses solid-state drives across the board and has very fast I/O, according to the company.
The Cloud Servers offering is integrated with other GoDaddy products such as domains and DNS so users can manage and maintain new and existing domains and subdomains.
Customers have full access to multiple public-facing APIs.
“GoDaddy isn’t going to compete against the big guys,” said Lynda Stadtmueller, cloud computing services VP at Frost & Sullivan. “It just isn’t big enough to take on the Infrastructure as a Service, and doesn’t, I think, have the ambition or the size to offer the broad array of cloud-based products that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are able to bring to market.”
Instead, the company is “stepping out beyond its Web hosting business and telling its small- and medium-sized-business customers they don’t have to go to Amazon now. They can use its infrastructure instead,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
“This could work,” Stadtmueller added.
The relationship with Bitnami is helpful because “cloud infrastructure is hard, harder than a lot of IT and operations folks realize when they first step into it, and Bitnami helps GoDaddy offer prepackaged cloud instances,” she observed. “That makes it a lot easier to deploy the GoDaddy infrastructure.”
GoDaddy’s Positioning
Given its role in selling Internet domain names, GoDaddy has “an enviable position at the front of the line in terms of pitching their services to a variety of categories,” Al Hilwa, a research program director at IDC Seattle, told the E-Commerce Times.
There might be a niche for GoDaddy, which “is offering a little more handholding to the smaller businesses and even developers who may not be all that familiar or interested in the actual infrastructure deployment,” Stadtmueller suggested.
Most activity in the cloud space has been focused on the enterprise rather than SMBs, according to Global Equities Research’s Q1 report.
Here’s a sample: IBM acquired Ustream, which provides cloud-based live video streaming services to serve enterprise clients; and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with startup ConsenSys to assist financial institutions and banks in experimenting with the blockchain technology underlying bitcoin.
“Amazon.com’s AWS continues to lead the supercloud category, followed by Microsoft Azure. Together, AWS and Azure control 90 percent of the market,” said Trip Chowdhry, managing director at Global Equities Research.
“Customers are increasingly adopting Hadoop-as-a-Service, with AWS Elastic MapReduce and Microsoft HDInsight business increasing more than 150 percent year over year,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Nothing to Lose
For GoDaddy, “there’s very little to lose, and may be something to gain, because [these services] are an additional revenue stream that makes its offerings a little stickier. They already have the infrastructure,” Stadtmueller said.
GoDaddy “has to work its way up,” Synergy Research Group’s Dinsdale told the E-Commerce Times, “and there’s only one place to start.” 
Richard Adhikari has written about high-tech for leading industry publications since the 1990s and wonders where it’s all leading to. Will implanted RFID chips in humans be the Mark of the Beast? Will nanotech solve our coming food crisis? Does Sturgeon’s Law still hold true? You can connect with Richard on Google+.