Data Backup Digest

Headquartered on the West Coast of the United States, GoDaddy has served as a domain registrar and dedicated web host since 1997. While they’ve take on several forms over the years and seen their share of controversy, their recent move has many crying foul. Not only have they cancelled their public cloud service for good, which was only launched a year earlier, but they failed to inform their customers or even issue an official press release. To make matters worse: this isn’t the first time they’ve pulled the plug on their failing cloud service.

In fact, GoDaddy had a head start over much of their competition when they initially launched their cloud service in 2012. Dubbed Cloud Servers, the service was designed specifically for small- to medium-sized businesses. Their initial foray into the world of cloud computing lasted a mere five months.

GoDaddy decided to try it again in 2016. They successful resurrected Cloud Servers, including the name and target audience, and began marketing the platform once more. One of the most notable differences this time around, however, was the introduction of some major competition from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Apparently the competition was just too stiff. While everything appeared to be going well, news of GoDaddy and Cloud Servers’ second demise began to leak out in mid-2017. It was later confirmed in a statement by GoDaddy.

Raghu Murthi, senior vice president with GoDaddy, was quoted as saying: “After serious consideration, we have decided to end-of-life our cloud servers’ product. Our goal from the beginning was to create simple and scalable services for small and medium business owners. We’re proud of what we built and now we are focusing on building a robust and scalable solutions based on OpenStack infrastructure.”

The announcement to cease their public cloud operations coincide with the sale of PlusServer, a company that was only acquired in months earlier. Although that particular sale wasn’t a surprise, nobody expected the cloud servers to shut down, too.

It’s important to note that GoDaddy is still actively pursuing other acquisitions. They’ve recently acquired FreedomVoice, WP Curve, ManageWP and Sucuri, all of which provide increased functionality to their webhosting and management services. This has led to some speculation that they’re moving away from cloud computing in order to increase their focus on traditional services like web hosting and domain management.

But they’ve also lost a couple of key members of their team. They lost their executive vice president of Cloud Platform shortly after the re-launch of Cloud Servers and a senior vice president in early 2017.

Despite the recent setbacks, the team behind GoDaddy remains optimistic about the future. A prepared statement reads, in part: “In the coming months, we will be informing you of some exciting opportunities to move your services to other GoDaddy products. In the meantime, we would encourage you to consider our GoDaddy VPS plans.”

For more information on GoDaddy, including details on any of the services they currently offer, please visit their official site at {{https://www.godaddy.com/|www.godaddy.com}}