How GoDaddy Empowers 17M+ Web Entrepreneurs Worldwide to Build Online Presence, Reach Expanded Audiences, and Grow Successful Businesses

TL; DR: During its nearly two-decade history, GoDaddy has helped more than 17 million businesses build online presence and grow their brands. These entrepreneurs and organizations have turned to the company for its comprehensive set of web solutions, such as domain registration; shared, WordPress, virtual, and dedicated server hosting; intuitive site builders; and marketing and SEO tools, among other services. For these offerings and its focus on security and world-class support, GoDaddy has earned HostingAdvice’s Developers’ Choice™ award recognizing the company as a leader in the industry. GoDaddy zeroes in on delivering consistent, optimal experiences for organizations looking to succeed in the competitive online business space.

In today’s digital-centric landscape, an increasing number of people are tossing hard copy phone books into recycling bins and swapping them out for online search engines to find the products and services they seek. Many consumers today perceive a business without a website as outdated at best — and untrustworthy at worst. Simply put, a company without an online presence is at a serious disadvantage. That’s why it may be surprising to learn that almost a quarter of small businesses still aren’t on the web.

These businesses cite shortages in technical skills, time, and money as the obstacles keeping them from staking their online territory. And GoDaddy, which runs the world’s largest cloud platform committed to helping small businesses thrive, has long recognized these obstacles.

Kooper Frame, GoDaddy’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, told us many small business owners “don’t know what’s behind the curtain and don’t want to know what’s behind the curtain” when it comes to their sites.

But, with GoDaddy’s suite of web solutions, they don’t have to.

“GoDaddy serves customers with wide range of technical knowledge,” Kooper said. “We’re helping them understand the choices they need to make and the implications of those choices. We offer everything from do-it-yourself to we-can-do-it-for-you types of solutions.”

GoDaddy’s ability to understand customers’ needs and provide an array of services has earned the company many accolades in its 20 years in business, including HostingAdvice.com’s Developers’ Choice recognition. Today, GoDaddy’s platform helps more than 17 million customers in 50 countries build and expand their web presence. With 71 million domains under management, the company serves a wide range of clients with an eye toward emerging trends. And GoDaddy’s world-class omnichannel support and commitment to delivering consistent global experiences are helping its customers get their messages out to the masses and turn profits online.

According to Kooper, GoDaddy’s gamut of hosting and domain services speaks to the diversity of their customers’ needs. No matter an organization’s size or business mission, the host’s web solutions can provide an answer.

“There’s quite a spectrum of folks with different needs in terms of what they expect from their website and what they’re trying to do with their hosting account,” Kooper said. “It’s an interesting challenge that goes back to really trying to understand who the customers are and what are they trying to achieve.”

Kooper told us there’s undeniable value in website performance metrics. He said quantifiable benefits, such as page load times and reliability, are top of mind for modern businesses. Today’s consumers want to be able to quickly find what they’re looking for, and GoDaddy’s customers know this is the key to being successful online.

“The three nines (99.9%) and four nines (99.99%) of uptime will always be table stakes in terms of delivering value for the customer,” he said.

But GoDaddy doesn’t stop there. Instead, the company views those quantifiable metrics as the “brilliant basics” that enable a customer to reach further business objectives.

“Ultimately, they’re trying to attract customers; they’re trying to grow their businesses,” Kooper said. “As we continue to evolve our offerings, we’re thinking about how to help customers achieve that higher end goal. We help them use their site to drive traffic, attract new customers, and retain existing customers.”

To do that, GoDaddy offers domain-based email and storage options, productivity services, and even online marketing tools.

Microsoft Office 365 from GoDaddy, for example, provides customers with online versions of the Microsoft Office Suite, online storage options, and shared online calendars — all backed by 24/7 customer service, 99.9% uptime, data security, and spam filtering. Three tiers of service allow customers to tailor this offering based on individual needs.

The company’s online marketing offerings are similarly customizable, ranging from tools that allow customers to manage their own campaigns to the option of hiring GoDaddy’s SEO experts directly.

In the same way customer needs are varied and changing, the industry itself is evolving. Kooper said GoDaddy is staying competitive within the hosting market by focusing on security measures and providing increased integration with WordPress.

GoDaddy is constantly working to help small business owners protect their sites — and, thus, their customers’ information. On that front, GoDaddy recently acquired Sucuri, a leading security platform that helps technical and non-technical customers alike safeguard their sites from digital threats, respond to cyber attacks, and virtually patch vulnerabilities.

Together, GoDaddy and Sucuri are enhancing site security for business owners and plan to provide new offerings in the future. Furthermore, Sucuri’s WordPress plugin will help customers with security management specifically for WordPress sites — a clear benefit for GoDaddy customers, as GoDaddy is the world’s largest WordPress hosting provider.

“WordPress has continued to take share year-over-year in the content management system (CMS) space,” Kooper said.

To that end, GoDaddy is working to understand how its wide range of customers use WordPress to ensure that all customers — from businesses creating their first sites to web designers who create and manage hundreds of sites on behalf of clients — have the tools to be successful with the web-publishing platform.

With GoDaddy Managed WordPress, customers benefit from automatic setup and software updates, a hosting platform built specifically to optimize WordPress, and award-winning customer support, including educational materials.

GoDaddy’s signature customer support experience serves as a key differentiator for the company. According to Kooper, it’s all about forming bonds with clients and getting to know what their web mission is.

“It goes back to the level of the relationship that we have with the customers as a result of the support experience that we can provide,” Kooper said. “We talk to tens of thousands of customers every day, and we have more than 500 support agents who are specially trained just to support our hosting offerings.”

Kooper spends time with those agents on a regular basis, listening to client calls and soliciting input from staff and customers.

“No company is perfect, but we go to great lengths to make sure we are getting customer feedback and incorporating it into our roadmaps,” he said.

According to Kooper, when it comes to product development, industry challenges and trends push the company in new directions, but customers’ needs remain central to GoDaddy’s decision-making process.

“The technology and what’s feasible is always changing, and that will always play into it,” he said. “GoDaddy is among the best companies in terms of really trying to focus on customer need.”

As customer business goals change, GoDaddy has evolved its offerings from point solutions to complete bundled solutions — a trend that will continue to benefit customers in the future.

“Going forward, expect to continue to see — whether it’s WordPress offerings or our security offerings — greater integration of those into the customer experience to make it easier for customers to accomplish what they’re trying to do,” Kooper said.

GoDaddy is also growing geographically. When CEO Blake Irving (who plans to retire in late 2017 and will be succeeded by Scott Wagner) took the helm five years ago, the company was predominantly based in North America. Today, it competes in more than 50 countries.

The company’s recent launch of a business-hosting platform in India intended for small businesses in need of advanced technical solutions is just one example of that expansion. Similar to offerings in North America, GoDaddy India’s business hosting will enable site owners to enjoy a strong online presence without the need for technical knowledge, allowing them to focus on other aspects of their businesses.

As GoDaddy reaches across the globe, the company is keeping customer experience top of mind.

“We’re continuing to make sure that all of our offerings are really available and scalable on a global basis,” Kooper said. “As we’ve expanded our footprint with our datacenters, we’re making sure we’re delivering that consistent brand experience, that consistent product experience, in all of our offerings and across all of the geographies that we’re competing in.”