The web hosting company GoDaddy is “going all-in on AWS” as it migrates most of its infrastructure to Amazon’s cloud business, according to a recent announcement from AWS. The collaboration between the two former rivals in the small business space has brought the two closer and taken another cloud competitor off the market.
Just last summer, GoDaddy put an end to Cloud Servers, which at that time had only been running for one year as an AWS-style service for GoDaddy’s 17 million customers to explore building, testing and scaling cloud solutions on GoDaddy’s infrastructure. The notion behind it was to tap into the trend for cloud services, capturing new business from existing GoDaddy customers who were just starting to branch into the cloud before they left for AWS, Google, Microsoft or others in the space. However, it quickly petered out and was sold to private equity firm BC Partners in July 2017.
GoDaddy wanted to continue to offer cloud services and selected AWS’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Elastic Compute Cloud P3 instances, in addition to machine learning, analytics and other database-related and container technology.
“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.
The transition to AWS will take several years and will also involve gains for AWS who will become a partner in selling on some of GoDaddy’s web products – precisely its Managed WordPress and GoCentral for managing domains and building and running websites.
The deal is wide-ranging, however, it will not include AWS assuming domain management services for GoDaddy’s 75 million domains, according to TechCrunch. In a conversation with Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of Communications, he said , the company was “not migrating the domains it manages to AWS”. Race added, “GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business.”
Releasing its entire business to just one provider is clearly a surrender of control one step too far for the technology service. Going absolutely “all in” on just one provider is indeed rare. Dropbox for instance depends on AWS for part of its storage needs and service delivery, but it combines this with its own custom-built infrastructure for storage of the majority of its users’ data, according to its February S-1 filing.