It really is Go Time for GoDaddy. Amazon’s cloud services provider AWS and GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, may have competed in the past when it comes to working with small businesses to provide them with web services, but today the two took a step closer together. AWS said that GoDaddy is now migrating “the majority” of its infrastructure to AWS in a multi-year deal that will also see AWS becoming a partner in selling on some products of GoDaddy’s — namely Managed WordPress and GoCentral for managing domains and building and running websites.
The deal — financial terms of which are not being disclosed — is wide-ranging, but it will not include taking on domain management for GoDaddy’s 75 million domains currently under management, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to me.
“GoDaddy is not migrating the domains it manages to AWS,” said Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of communications. “GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business for GoDaddy.”
The move underscores Amazon’s continuing expansion as a powerhouse in cloud hosting and related services, providing a one-stop shop for customers who come for one product and stay for everything else (not unlike its retail strategy in that regard). Also, it is a reminder of how the economies of scale in the cloud business make it financially challenging to compete if you are not already one of the big players, or lack deep pockets to sustain your business as you look to grow. GoDaddy has been a direct victim of those economics: just last summer, GoDaddy killed off Cloud Servers, its AWS-style business for building, testing and scaling cloud services on GoDaddy infrastructure. It also already was hosting some services on AWS prior to this: its enterprise-grade Managed WordPress service was already being hosted there, for example.
The AWS deal also highlights how GoDaddy is trimming operational costs to improve its overall balance sheet under Scott Wagner, the COO who took over as CEO from Blake Irving at the beginning of this year.
“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, CTO at GoDaddy, in a statement.
“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,” he continued.
AWS said that GoDaddy will be using AWS’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Elastic Compute Cloud P3 instances, as well as machine learning, analytics, and other database-related and container technology. Race told TechCrunch that the infrastructure components that the company is migrating to AWS currently run at GoDaddy but will be gradually moved away as part of its multi-year migration.
“As a large, high-growth business, GoDaddy will be able to leverage AWS to innovate for its customers around the world,” said Mike Clayville, VP, worldwide commercial sales at AWS, in a statement. “Our industry-leading services will enable GoDaddy to leverage emerging technologies like machine learning, quickly test ideas, and deliver new tools and solutions to their customers with greater frequency. We look forward to collaborating with GoDaddy as they build anew in the cloud and innovate new solutions to help people turn their ideas into reality online.”
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