GoDaddy Pushes into Developer Hosting Market with VPS, Dedicated Server Updates

logo-WHIR

This article originally appeared at The WHIR

GoDaddy has launched updates to its VPS and dedicated server products to better meet the needs of its growing customer base of developers and web designers, which will be served under its new GoDaddy Pro brand.

While GoDaddy has traditionally focused on the needs of small businesses, it is launching more hosting products aimed at developers and designers after learning that more than half of its small business customers have enlisted a third-party to build their website, Jeff King, SVP and GM of hosting at GoDaddy says.

“There’s everything from what we call moonlighters, this is your technical brother or cousin or something who builds your website for you. Or people who are basically building websites for other people for free,” King says. “There are also freelancers, to small agencies, developers, designers; there’s a whole array of different types of folks who are building ecommerce or websites for other people.”

According to an official announcement by the company last week, GoDaddy’s VPS and dedicated servers are powered by CentOS, Fedora or Windows and use cPanel or Plesk control panels.

Each product comes in three different managed tiers – either self-managed, managed or fully-managed. The managed offering is what King calls its “standard” tier, while the self-managed offering is for developers who are looking for “super value” and can handle most of the technical requirements on their own.

The new Pro plans also include new features such as OS patching, staging, cloning, root access, backups, and disaster recovery.

Support was also another huge area of improvement. With help from Media Temple, the hosting company GoDaddy acquired last October, GoDaddy has improved its support available to customers. Now employees will be required to be product certified, which GoDaddy says will result in customers receiving more knowledgeable and timely support.

“Essentially what we’ve done here is we’re taking the Media Temple playbook and we’re implementing it at GoDaddy,” King says. “This is a big advantage that we got when we acquired Media Temple and brought them into the family.”

“What we’ve done first and foremost is created a very specific hosting support team so that when you have a hosting problem…you get someone who really understands hosting,” he says.

“You essentially graduate into hosting support. We’ve executed a whole academy training program that we basically took the playbook right out of Media Temple’s world and make sure these teams are trained on everything from control panels to WordPress and PHP and other technical capabilities.”

King says there are more products to come under its GoDaddy Pro umbrella.

“We believe that designers and developers have very specific needs not only in hosting but in how they manage their clients,” he says. “We’re very excited to focus on this market and provide services and capabilities for them from the very beginning.”

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/godaddy-pushes-developer-hosting-market-vps-dedicated-server-updates