GoDaddy launches cloud servers and cloud applications

Web hosting company GoDaddy is expanding its cloud services with new cloud servers that offer a “pay as you go” pricing model, just like public cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Targeted at developers and IT professionals, the move should help bolster revenues for the company by letting customers test and build cloud applications on its own infrastructure, which sits on OpenStack.

Jeff King, senior VP at the Arizona-based firm, said: “With the launch of Cloud Servers, GoDaddy aims to extend our lead as the number one trusted provider of cloud hosting solutions for individual developers and technologists.”

Alongside the servers, GoDaddy is launching Cloud Applications through a partnership with open source server application deployments library Bitnami.

“As a GoDaddy technology partner on Cloud Applications, we’re excited for [our] international customer base to take advantage of our capabilities – joining the millions of developers and business users who save time and effort with our library’s consistent, secure and optimised end-user experience,” said Erica Brescia, COO at Bitnamo.

Unlike Amazon Web Services (AWS) for example, GoDaddy is aiming for smaller businesses and teams who want the same cloud manoeuvrability as that offered by the larger cloud providers, but don’t need to go “all in”.

GoDaddy is claiming to offer 54-second or less provisioning with its new services, with virtual instances able to be built, cloned and re-provisioned almost instantly. Snapshots are also offered to developers, allowing them to save their configurations and launch new servers with that image in seconds, instead of starting from scratch.

The cloud offering from GoDaddy is available in 26 languages and 53 markets.