GoDaddy selects Amazon AWS for cloud.
About a half year after it announced it was planning to move from its own infrastructure to the public cloud, GoDaddy and Amazon announced today that it has selected AWS. The move will offload significant infrastructure to Amazon. Here are my thoughts on this move:
1. Moving to AWS will give GoDaddy instant tech credibility
Many people blame website problems on GoDaddy’s constantly aging infrastructure. Moving to AWS eliminates the need to manage this infrastructure and also gives the company’s hosting plans the credibility of being on the market-leading cloud provider. I often hear people blame GoDaddy and its aging infrastructure for website problems. Once hosting is on AWS, the underlying infrastructure shouldn’t be an issue. (Of course, there’s a management layer on top of it.)
2. GoDaddy was right to abandon its own cloud efforts
GoDaddy has taken two stabs at offering its own cloud services to customers. These efforts did not jive with the company’s stated mission of helping really small businesses. These businesses don’t need an AWS-like service; they need simple hosting and site creation.
3. The deal has reciprocal elements that could help GoDaddy’s core business.
According to the release:
“GoDaddy and AWS are working together to incorporate some of GoDaddy’s domain technology and website building products—Managed WordPress and GoCentral—into the AWS experience to provide AWS customers with an array of tools for quickly finding the perfect domain name and building a powerful online presence.”
Amazon sells everything and already offers domain names through some of its AWS services. Why not also promote domain registration and website building through Amazon? Depending on how this is structured it could be huge for GoDaddy. It could also help the domain name industry.
4. The PR mentions domain appraisals.
I was a bit surprised that the press release mentioned domain name appraisals:
“GoDaddy is also using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P3 Instances—the most powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) instances available in the cloud—to substantially reduce the time it takes to train machine learning models and increase the performance of its GoDaddy Domain Appraisals tool that helps customers understand the value of their domains.”
I wonder if AWS wanted this included to promote its technology for making machine learning faster.
