GoDaddy’s IPO Filing Reveals Nine Data Centers, Sophisticated Technology Stack

GoDaddy, a popular web hosting service provider and domain name registrar, kicked off an initial public offering Monday, planning to raise up to $100 million.

As it often happens when companies go public, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents GoDaddy filed in conjunction with the IPO shed some light on its data center infrastructure, which is massive.

GoDaddy’s 37,000 servers live in a total of nine facilities around the world. The company owns one of its data centers and leases the rest from wholesale providers.

Its own data center is in Phoenix, Arizona, and it has two leased sites in the state: Scottsdale, which is also home to its headquarters, and Mesa. The others are in Los Angeles, Chicago, Ashburn, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore.

GoDaddy’s own data center in Phoenix is more than 270,000 square feet in size.

IaaS, PaaS, lots of open source tech

In addition to the large data center footprint, the service provider has a fairly sophisticated IT architecture to deliver its services. The stack relies on a lot of open source technology.

GoDaddy’s hosting services are supported by a single automated infrastructure built on OpenStack, the popular open source cloud architecture.

One level up from the IaaS setup is the company’s Platform-as-a-Service, which provides an integrated set of services to its customers and enables the provider itself to build and deploy new products quickly and easily.

GoDaddy also uses open source Apache Hadoop to store and process data it collects through web crawling, local listings, social and mobile platforms to provide business intelligence to its customers.

The company uses Cassandra, an open source distributed database management system, to improve replication of customer data. A single Cassandra cluster can span multiple data centers, which enables replication across sites.

Ambitious expansion plans

The man in charge of this infrastructure is Arne Josefsberg, GoDaddy’s executive vice president and CIO. Josefsberg joined the hosting company in January after stints at ServiceNow and Microsoft.

He was hired to help grow GoDaddy’s infrastructure as it executes on a plan to expand into 60 markets by 2015. In April, the company announced that it had added support in 14 new languages and expanded services into 17 new countries.