GoDaddy.com has replaced Danica Patrick with a real small business customer.

For most of last five years, GoDaddy girl Danica Patrick has graced the GoDaddy.com home page. Over the past few months GoDaddy has tried a couple different approaches, as you can see at Screenshots.com.

Today there’s a new home page design with another “girl”, but she’s not a celebrity spokesperson. She’s a real small business customer.

Sindy Alexandra, a stay at home mom and photographer, has taken over the home page. The page promotes GoDaddy’s updated web site builder, which the company hopes is a key starting point for small business customers. There’s a link to a video that explains how Alexandra used GoDaddy’s web site building tools to get online.

As the company tries to make itself the starting point for small and medium businesses, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more profiles like this on the home page.

Of course, if it turns out Danica pulls better than Sindy, then expect Danica to make a return soon.

(Hat tip: James)

Scott Wagner goes from interim to permanent at GoDaddy.

Domain name registrar GoDaddy today announced that Scott Wagner is its new COO and CFO.

Wagner took over as interim CEO of the company last summer when Warren Adelman stepped down from the CEO position. He then vacated that position earlier this year to make way for new CEO Blake Irving.

Wagner worked for KKR for 13 years, recently as a member of KKR’s portfolio operations team. He became involved with GoDaddy after KKR joined with Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures to invest in the domain registrar in 2011. Much of his work has been focused on the company’s international strategy.

Previous CFO Mike Zimmerman will remain with the company as Executive Vice President of Finance, a company spokesperson confirmed to Domain Name Wire.

Video gives step-by-step instructions for increasing security in your Go Daddy account.

Two-factor authentication is one of the best ways to make any online account more secure.

Go Daddy introduced two-factor authentication for its United States customers last year.

Once you set up the service you will receive a text message every time you log in to your account. In addition to your username and password, you need to enter a six digit code from the text message in order to access your account.

The idea is that, even if someone learns your username and password, they’ll also need your mobile phone in order to get into your account.

In this video, I’ll show you how to enable two-factor authentication at GoDaddy.com, and how it works each time you log in.

Domain registrar abandons plans for its own top level domains.

Go Daddy is abandoning its applications for the .home and .casa top level domains, the company announced today.

Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving announced the news at its Registry Days conference in Phoenix today.

The event is designed to start a dialogue with new top level domain applicants that may wish to sell their domains through Go Daddy — including applicants that have rival bids for the .home and .casa domains.

By abandoning its .home and .casa bids, the only two TLDs the company applied for that it planned to offer to the public, Go Daddy will eliminate two conflicts.

The first is with competing applicants for the two TLDs. These companies want to strike agreements to sell their domains through Go Daddy, but would have also been competing with the company in the application process.

Second, it will eliminate concerns about Go Daddy promoting its own new TLDs ahead of others in domain check results.

Go Daddy still owns a stake in the .me registry, however.

The company will continue to pursue its brand domain name .godaddy, which will not be offered to the public.

YourBigIdea.co drove more business activity than Bar Rafaeli’s kiss.

Go Daddy ran two commercials during the Super Bowl on Sunday.

The one that’s getting the most media attention is Perfect Match — aka “The Kiss”, in which supermodel Bar Rafaeli kisses ubernerd Jesse Heiman.

But is that commercial the one that resulted in a flood of business at Go Daddy on Sunday and the company having its biggest sales day ever on Monday?

It turns out more credit should be given to the not-as-icky YourBigIdea.co commercial that ran about 40 minutes later in the game.

Richard Merdinger, Vice President of Product Development – Domains at Go Daddy, tells Domain Name Wire that the .co commercial caused a bigger spike in domain availability checks.

He said the message of YourBigIdea.co — everyone has good ideas, many of them are common, people ought to go out and do something about it — was certainly a strong call to action.

Availability checks at Go Daddy were up all Super Bowl Sunday, and they increased after the Perfect Match commercial, but the company saw a more noticeable increase after the .co ad ran.

If you’re wondering what sort of impact the two commercials together had on Go Daddy’s business, here are some numbers.

Go Daddy measures results based on its marketshare for the TLDs it can measure. On Sunday it saw a 345 basis point increase in new registration marketshare overall compared to a typical Sunday. .Co saw about a 1200 basis point increase.

Of course, the long term business impact can’t be measured in a day. The more memorable one? The Perfect Match is still paying dividends.