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Marcus Couch

It’s Go Time! GoDaddy Teases Future Managed WordPress Hosting

Godaddy WP Managed HostingLove them or hate them, it appears that GoDaddy.com is about to throw down and enter the managed WordPress hosting arena. While WordPress is already the most popular installation among GoDaddy hosting plan subscribers, a recent email blast to registered WordCamp Phoenix 2014 attendees shows that it’s ready to battle it out with established managed hosting providers like Flywheel, ManageWP, Pagely and WP Engine.

The news was shared yesterday by Sé Reed in the OC WordPress meetup group forum, who re-posted this email from GoDaddy. While no specific features or functions were mentioned, it is an interesting development from the world’s #1 domain registrar.

The email reads:

“GoDaddy is working on a Managed WordPress product and would love feedback from WordCamp Phoenix 2014 registrants. This new product offers optimal performance and security and automatically provides updated versions of WordPress. While you can already create and host an amazing WordPress site now, your feedback will help us build the features you want the most.”

What is your reaction to this news? Should GoDaddy be invading the space of established WordPress managed hosting solutions? Is this a genuine good-faith effort by GoDaddy or merely a play for pandering to the WordPress community? Let me hear you!

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33 responses to “It’s Go Time! GoDaddy Teases Future Managed WordPress Hosting”

  1. If I had to guess, this trend may end with lot of these managed WP services getting purchased.

    A lot of big hosting companies with very deep pockets are going to pick up some of these (still fairly small by hosting company standards) managed WP hosts.

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  3. Thanks Marcus
    Would be nice to see more competition in the Managed WordPress hosting arena – some of the prices at the moment are rediculous.

    And some of the big players don’t even offer email!

    I’m all for competition – looking forward to those prices coming down.

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  5. @Steve – If that happens, would be curious to see if some of those companies who have become to be known throughout the community as rock solid would see service go down hill.

    @Adam W. Warner – I didn’t think it would take GoDaddy this long to hop into the pool and while it doesn’t seem like big news to me, the fact that they are still the top domain registrar makes this news.

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  6. Steve, I have a hunch instead of being purchased, the smaller companies will end up going away..

    Go Daddy sees a growing and profitable niche market, that fully compliments their shared hosting business and they want a piece of it…

    It’s the difference between earning a Gross Profit of maybe 2 or 3 dollars a month on a shared hosting account, and adding a few services and boosting the GP dollars to 10 bucks or more.. with very little added human labor, once a site is set up initially..

    For a company like Go Daddy it’s a fairly easy sell to a first time, already nervous, hosting customer.. Those first time customers are a lot more likely to call Go Daddy or Gator than someone like WP Engine or Pagely

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  7. I would be shocked if GoDaddy didn’t underprice the competition in their initial public offering. The question is whether or not the new product line will be a flavor of their relatively oversold / underpowered hosting the community has talked clients out of using the past ~5 years. If GoDaddy can impress the informed (read: not their typical customer IMO) then they may find traction with the WordPress community.

    If it’s a substandard offering, I predict the community will continue to badmouth them and poke fun at every misstep, AKA business as usual.

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  8. Thanks for the writeup, Marcus. I’m the product manager heading up this new WordPress product and would love to answer any questions. I’m very excited to launch this and I think you’ll find this is unlike anything GoDaddy has offered before. If you are interested in trying it our, or have private questions, feel free to email me at sxcoleman [at] godaddy [dot] com.

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  10. @Ansel We are building a premium product with incredible performance, security and reliability. If you’re interested in testing it out, feel free to email me. I hope to impress everyone with the speed (and more)!

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  12. As much as I hate the concept of “big business”, I’m more so a big fan of our country’s roots, which are based on free enterprise. I hate Walmart, but i shop there. I’m a long-time user of GoDaddy, and my experience with them is nothing but positive (the fact that he keeps his tech/customer support and revenues on our soil is a big deal) – I’m sure the product will be a good one, as are the rest of their offerings.

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  15. I’m guessing this will be their regular hosting service, but with a WordPress updating system tacked on top.

    If this is to succeed, I think it will need to be spectacular. There is too much negativity regarding GoDaddy for them to get away with a substandard offering.

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  20. I started to try GoDaddy one time–and one time only. Did not find them user friendly or even, for that matter, comprehensible. If my current web host (which, just FYI, I love dearly) were suddenly acquired by GoDaddy, I’d be sorely tempted to just flat out quit dealing with the Internet altogether.

    Fortunately, I’m not using managed web hosting anyway, so the point is moot. But still….

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  21. If someone is using GoDaddy for hosting then most likely he never heard of WPEngine or Pagely, so this is no-sale sale for GD plus they have unlimited budget and army of marketing experts, i am guessing this will be a success in terms of revenue, as for quality will see :)

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  22. There is a free open source WordPress management platform you can self install called infinite WordPress.

    I am often confused as to why people pay for things like this when free ones are cheaply available usually for a gig on fiverr to get them installed.

    Go check source forge for stuff before you buy a hosted product.

    If you can install WordPress without using the cpanel installer tool, by ftpor ssh, you can figure out how to install 90% of the free Web based applications on source forge.

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  23. Wow, I never knew all the cool people comment on wptavern, I mean seriously, it’s the first article I am seeing so much valuable comments including a GoDaddy rep, Bravo WP Tavern!!

    Disclaimer 1: We’re a GoDaddy Reseller and although we don’t make too much money (at least compared to the monthly top grossers), we’ve had an over all fantastic experience from Godaddy. May be a glitch here or there over all these years, but that’s less than normal for any company providing any products/services across all sectors. If not, there’s a company I wish to have created myself :P

    Disclaimer 2: We’re in love with WP Engine’s services since early this year and there’re no signs of that changing any time soon!

    Looking forward to Managed Hosting on WP. If there’s a product that parallels already evolved competition, man will (we) the users benefit? And this is not about cheaper services, but better & more services like may be Migrate DB Pro being or a list of other such useful plugins being part of the hosted solution, like those for SEO, CDNs, JQuery, Forms, Types… all licensed and maintained by the Managed Host, what world will that suddenly turn out to be?

    Are Ben Metcalfe & Jason Cohen listening?

    #EnoughSaid

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  25. @Brook Infinite WordPress is a great product and includes many features that managed WordPress providers typically offer. At GoDaddy, our goal is to offer a lot more value past typical management features, including blazing-fast caching baked in to the product and redundant servers (both web and database) to make sure your site stays online even if one, or even two, servers die.

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  26. Frankly, the existing “specialist” WordPress hosting companies are useless when a client has anything more than a minor problem. Perhaps only the worst cases wash up at my door, but my impression is that, unless a support issue is on their existing list, they would rather jettison the client than spend time fixing it – no kidding, I have seen them abandon big multisite clients, spending thousands a month, over issues that anyone with an understanding of servers should know how to fix.

    At first I was surprised by this, but have come to understand that the business model is based upon systemizing the service, minimizing support spend per customer and simply relying upon marketing to replace the customers you lose. In a nutshell: focus on growth, grab the 95% of customers who are never going to have serious problems anyway, don’t waste time on edge cases. I can see how that would give angel investors and VCs a boner.

    So, the WordPress hosting industry is essentially a scam because, when you actually need the specialist expertise you thought you were paying for, you are left high and dry. Shamefully, the enthusiastic participation of the WordPress commentariat has been bought and paid for by large affiliate payments, I never see these cases receive any coverage.

    I have long thought that what customers are getting is, roughly, a $10 value for $30, with ridiculous jumps in billing for minor increases in resources. The entry of bigger players such as Godaddy will, at least, push prices closer to where they should be.

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  27. @donnacha –
    But the flip side of that argument, and the more likely scenario I think, is that the entry of bigger players such as Godaddy (especially GoDaddy) will set the standard of support bar so low that the others you consider subpar, will look much better and therefore be able to charge more or justify their charges.

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  28. @Bob Schecter – I am not saying that Godaddy will get it right but it would not be hard for them to replicate or even improve upon the basic configuration recipe that the “specialists” are using.

    Beyond that, they might actually be in a position to build up the sort of knowledge required to cope with edge case problems because they already have scale and are a mature, established company, presumably not under the same sort of pressure to make sky-high returns for investors at all costs.

    This stuff is not rocket science, even the edge cases can be dealt with efficiently if you know what you are doing. Sure, dealing with Godaddy over the years has led me to have a few WTF moments, but there is no reason why they could not run a tight unit that offers a better service than WPEngine at a lower cost, and still be massively profitable. In fact, I am surprised the big hosts didn’t recognize this opportunity a long time ago.

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  32. GoDaddy always brings up such complicated feelings. They’ve finally cleaned up their misogynistic advertising, but I still feel victimized and marginalized by it. I’ve registered a bunch of domain names with them and the’re pretty easy to work with. A lot easier than most of the other registrars I’ve tried. How have they never really had to answer or explain for betraying their own customers on SOPA / PIPA? I have friends who are very happy with their service. And buying Media Temple is just so weird. MT had the friendliest techs, and the slowest performance of any host I’ve ever used. IDK how MT had any kind of “premium” reputation. GoDaddy: so many contradictions.

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