Gone daddy gone: GoDaddy offloads its cloud businesses

GoDaddy is killing its clouds.

The company announced an OpenStack-powered public cloud in March 2016. Now it has emailed customers to let them know their servers won't be there after December 31st, 2017, while support of the Bitnami app provisioning service expires on November 15th.

Early last week, GoDaddy announced it had sold PlusServer, part of a managed hosting outfit it acquired along with Host Europe Group for €1.69 billion in December 2016. A group of funds will pay €397 million for PlusServer.

When GoDaddy announced its plan to get into the cloud server market it aimed for its small business heartland, rather than taking on AWS or Azure with a smorgasbord of services. The likes of Linode or Digital Ocean appeared to be the target - hence a short list of server configuration options and partnership with Bitnami for easy installation of apps.

The company launched the service in 26 languages, 53 countries and 44 currencies, an unusually broad effort.

We can now see this didn't work.

At least GoDaddy is in good company: HPE and Cisco have also shuttered OpenStack-powered clouds and both have tens of billions of dollars more annual revenue than GoDaddy's $1.85bn. ®