GoDaddy goes boldly into cloudy servers

GoDaddy has decided to get into the cloudy server caper.

The used-to-be-a-hosting-company is wisely dodging the likes of Amazon Web Services and Azure, instead choosing to offer web developers servers-in-seconds, packed with all the software goodies they're likely to deploy for a small business web site. Bitnami's aboard, with its service allowing quick deployment of packaged apps into new instances. The usual suspects – Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and Magento – are all available.

OpenStack and the KVM hypervisor powers the company's new rigs, which can run Ubuntu 14.04, CentOS 6 or 7, Fedora 23, Debian 8, FreeBSD, CoreOS and Arch Linux.

For now, the servers will run in only two United States data centres, but bit barns in The Netherlands and Singapore will come online soon. Windows servers are another imminent addition.

Dell's provided the hardware in the form of PowerEdge C6000 and C6220 II servers, all packing a E5-2630Lv at 2 2.4GHz with 16GB of RAM.

Can GoDaddy become a player? The company is deliberately not taking on the likes of Amazon Web Services or Azure. Nor is it offering full elasticity, instead offering plans for certain combinations of server grunt, storage capacity, I/O and data transfer. The servers-as-a-service service launched in 26 languages, 53 countries and 44 currencies, a deliberate attempt at being just-about-global on day one.

The company thinks that combination makes it an alternative to the likes of Linode or Digital Ocean, companies that offer pretty much the same service without massive differentiation on features or price among the three. Which probably doesn't matter because GoDaddy says it has "integrated" the servers with its DNS and domain name services, meaning this is foremost a product extension play and not a broad attack on the cloud market. ®