Go Daddy develops its own hosted applications.
Go Daddy recently released a customer relationship management (CRM) application. The news isn’t that Go Daddy launched a web-based CRM app. It’s that Go Daddy continues to offer more online software applications and could easily become a small business hub for software-as-a-service.
A captive audience
According to Compete.com, GoDaddy.com is one of the top 400 trafficked web sites. Most visitors to the main GoDaddy.com site are small business owners, sole proprietors, or the technology team for these customers. This audience is perfect for selling online apps such as CRM.
Go Daddy has positioned itself as the leading domain name and web hosting provider through low prices, and its online applications are priced to entry-level customers. Its CRM application is somewhat limited, but so is its price (under $10 a month for most people). Small businesses have been priced out of competing solutions such as Salesforce. Salesforce is overkill and unnecessarily complicated for most users anyway.
Not a platform
A growing trend in the online app space is to offer a platform or hub for buying and provisioning applications built by third-parties. Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, for example, offers 800 applications ranging from sales & marketing to finance and human resources.
Go Daddy, on the other hand, builds almost all of its applications in house with a team of 250 developers. It offers everything from the aforementioned CRM to faxing, online calendars and online file management.
This doesn’t mean that Go Daddy couldn’t turn itself into platform. In fact, the company offers Hosting Connection where application providers can offer certified applications to the company’s web hosting customers.
Keys to Success
I have no doubt that Go Daddy can become a dominant force in the SMB online software market.
For now, customers who purchase Go Daddy apps access them through the same dashboard as domain names. I think there should be a second login that reaches apps, both for security reasons and ease-of-use. Go Daddy says it is planning such a system. Connecting to hosted apps must be very quick. Having used hosted CRM solutions in the past, I realize the need to login and find data quickly when the phone rings. Accessing e-mail quickly is important, too. Ever wonder why Google has a separate login interface for all of its applications? You need not login and then click around to find what you’re looking for.
It will be interesting to watch where Go Daddy moves in this market and if it can unseat some of the existing players.
Michelle Greer says
I don’t understand this approach. I do NameCheap’s marketing. We offer Open-XChange and customers can get their collaborative suite for free to try for four weeks.
NameCheap does what it does well. The more you put on your plate, the less focused you can be on creating something that is of value to your customers.
By partnering with Open-XChange and Comodo, NameCheap can continue to improve its interface and offerings, Comodo can focus on its SSL, and Open-XChange can focus on its webmail and collaborative suite. It’s a win/win for everyone.
dirtdaddy says
25,000 websites hosted on GoDaddy are blocked in China
First of all, sorry for my poor English. But I have horrible news for all site-owners…
Few weeks ago I recieved this message from GoDaddy:
Quote
…
As part of a continuing effort to provide the highest quality
service for our valued customers, your hosting account has
been migrated to a new server that will provide you with
increased performance and reliability.
Please note that it can take up to 24 hours from the time the
update was completed for any newly-published content to be
visible on your Web site.
DNS NOTE: Your account has been assigned the new IP address
72.167.131.126. The A record of your primary hosted domain
magazeta.com has been updated. You must manually update the
A record of any non-primary hosted domains not in your hosting
shopper account to point to the new IP address.
I living in China, my site (magazeta.com) is about China and most for expats living in China. After this message I can’t access to my site, I tryed to wait for few days, but it stlill unavailable for me. Than I try to access it trhough proxy … and It works!
So it means, that GoDaddy move my site to blocked IP in China (Great Firewall of China is another long story, but goverment didn’t block me, they blocked this IP – 72.167.131.126)
I asked GoDaddy to change IP-address for my site few times per day, but they only robot-like-auto-reply:
Quote
Unfortunately, we are unable to change the IP address for your hosting or migrate your hosting to another server per your request. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.
After that, I went to check how many sites on this IP address:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=IP%3A72.167.131.126&go=&form=QBRE
According to Live Search it’s about 25,100 sites on this IP, I randomly open 20-30 sites and all of them didn’t open here, in China!
So does it mean that 25,100 sites on this IP are unavailable in China, only be course GoDaddy changed IP to “bad” one?