GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, attending a large scale meeting of current and future domain registries this week, said by phone that no one knows exactly when the first batch of new names will be available but that the “over/under” consensus among the sellers is three months from now.

Under the process, the new names — which include suffixes like “.party,” “.dog” and “.mormon” — are expected to be rolled out in batches of 20 at a time. The impending sales will deliver millions of dollars to the domain name industry which makes major money off registration fees and in the secondary market for internet names.

The industry has been touting the addition of the approximately 2000 new suffixes as a “land rush” and a “gold rush.” Critics, however, have warned the process will mean a surge in cyber-squatting and trademark infringement. Companies, which have likened it to a shakedown, are already exasperated at having to pay for new names like “.xxx” they don’t need or want but feel obliged to obtain lest someone abuse them. This could occur, for example, if someone who is not Disney bought the name “www.disney.dog”.

The domain name sales have also been characterized as a brazen act of self-dealing by ICANN, an unaccountable agency that overseas the naming process for the internet.

GoDaddy’s Irving defends the process, saying “free market economics allow people to buy the names they want.” He added that the potential for abuse is lower since so-called domain parking (sitting on a name but using it just for ads) is not as big of a business as it once was.

The first of the new names to go on sale are likely to be non-Roman scripts like Chinese or Russian. These were given high priority by ICANN and the order of others was determined by lottery; other names tapped to go early are “.wedding” and “.buy.” (You can see the priority list here).

GoDaddy, anticipating a sizable amount of new business, said it is making its website easier to navigate in response. The company this week also dropped its own application to manage “.casa” and “.home” in order not to be perceived as competing with the names it sells on behalf of others.

(Image by  d3images via Shutterstock)

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Web site performance is critical because visitors are more likely to leave sites the longer they have to wait for pages to load. For mom-and-pop businesses without any real internal knowledge on how to design fast web pages, this could mean losing business to larger competitors whose sites perform better. And while a CDN won’t cure bad web design, getting a page’s images to load faster can definitely make a difference.

Jason Rosenthal

GoDaddy’s new service, called Website Accelerator, launched on Tuesday for users of the company’s “ultimate” hosting plan and, President of Products and Technology Jason Rosenthal told me, is designed for relatively unsophisticated sites and users. It’s optimized for sites that are fairly straight HTML and maybe a bit image-heavy, rather than dynamic, personalized sites that rely heavily on database interaction. The GoDaddy CDN also starts intelligently caching parts of customers’ web pages with just one push of a button rather than requiring them to go through and tag which content they want housed on a CDN providers servers.

Because GoDaddy handles many domain and web-hosting for many customers, Director of Product Marketing Eric Moyer said, the company is able to optimally route traffic without involving third parties. Early users have seen improvement anywhere between 25 percent and 100 percent, in part because the routing process remains entirely within GoDaddy’s network. Rosenthal said the CDN spans several major population and traffic centers throughout the United States, but that the company will expand it internationally at some point.

GoDaddy is also providing its CDN users with metrics to see how their sites are performing and will offer suggestions on how they might improve performance even more. Moyer said the company partnered with webpagetest.org as the backend for gauging performance improvements.

Really, though, the CDN is just part of a bigger push by GoDaddy to transition from a simple domain and web host into a full-service cloud provider that’s focused on users without software-development or systems-administration knowledge. Yes, it already tried and failed at offering its users something akin to Amazon Web Services and other popular infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, but Rosenthal chalks that up to poor judgment about what GoDaddy’s users really wanted in terms of server-level control.

When it killed its Cloud Servers offering, GoDaddy said it would use those technologies and the lessons learned to build cloud offerings better suited to its users. Rosenthal said Website Accelerator, which has been in development about for about six months, is the product of this plan. “This is really fruit that came out of our Cloud Servers product,” he said. ” … What we heard loud and clear from our customers is ‘I don’t want to know what makes my web site go fast, I just want it to work.’”

Presumably, that means they’re also not interested in looking at other services, such as Yottaa, that claim to be less-expensive CDN options than what giant CDN providers such as Akamai provide. It’s possible they’d work even better, but they would require a greater effort and cost than just sticking with GoDaddy.

GoDaddy actually brought in Rosenthal from Ning.com to help with its transition, and in December it hired former Yahoo and Microsoft executive Blake Irving as CEO. In November, GoDaddy launched a new service to convert customers’ web sites into mobile sites and discussed plans to start offering higher-value cloud applications, as well.

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Jason Rosenthal

New head of products and technology Jason Rosenthal told me GoDaddy is trying to evolve from being just a marketing and support company. It wants to grow a third leg focused on products and technology, and it thinks mobile is the perfect delivery vehicle for those aspirations. Rosenthal has spearheaded major strategic efforts before, including at his previous gig as Ning.com CEO, where he got rid of the social-network-creation company’s freemium business just a month into his tenure.

It’s mobile-first for GoDaddy

Whatever the rationale behind that decision, though, it’s difficult to argue with his focus on mobile at GoDaddy. Mobile device shipments have surpassed PC shipments, and even small businesses can no longer afford to ignore that reality. Consumers increasingly want to surf the web and do business on tablets and smartphones, and if it takes too long for a big clunky site to load, or if it’s too difficult to navigate a poorly designed site best viewed on a 27-inch screen, they’ll go elsewhere.

So, on Thursday, GoDaddy announced its new program for letting customers easily create their own mobile websites or convert their existing sites into mobile one (in fact, the conversion is free for the company’s approximately 700,000 premium Website Builder customers). Customers can customize their new mobile sites if they wish, but thanks to a partnership with mobile-conversion specialist DudaMobile, the idea is that GoDaddy’s customer base of landscapers, shop owners and others can make the transition with a click of the mouse.

However, Rosenthal said, “It’s really the first step down the road of what you’re going to see from GoDaddy in the future … This is going to be a year of mobile for GoDaddy.”

Up next: applications

In fact, the real first step in GoDaddy’s planned evolution might have occurred in July when the company bought Outright, creator of a Software-as-a-Service application for financial management. That helped the company establish a presence in Silicon Valley and also gave it the first in what sounds like a series of SaaS applications designed to make life easier all around for GoDaddy small-business customers, not just when it comes to hosting websites.

The accounting app will be first, Rosenthal said, and we should expect to see a big product announcement every couple of months through 2013. And they’ll have a largely mobile-first bent. He thinks a comparison to Intuit’s suite of cloud-based applications is fair, only he noted that GoDaddy’s offerings will be built from the ground up for mobile devices (running to the desktop to change a website or do simple accounting will soon start to feel “clunky,” he said) and will be less focused on the back office and more focused on helping manage users’ web presences.

About that Cloud Servers issue …

Lest anyone get suspicious of GoDaddy’s ability to follow through on its SaaS transition after the company delivered a swift death to its cloud computing infrastructure business in October, Rosenthal said they can rest easy. The company realized after launching the cloud computing offering that most customers really didn’t get it, which is a problem for a company that is, as Rosenthal described it, trying to take the complexity out of technology. Applications and services, not infrastructure, are the way to achieve that goal.

But, he added, the whole of GoDaddy is built upon the same cloud architecture that had been externalized as the Cloud Servers offering. And the company has completely separated the web experience from the mobile one, open access to its various services via API and is constantly testing backend configurations to find out what will work best for its mobile customers. If GoDaddy is going to deliver on its mission of giving customers websites and tools that work so their businesses don’t suffer (save for the occasional outage, presumably, which can happen to anyone), Rosenthal said, it all starts with the platform.

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The email highlights GoDaddy’s focus on winning small business customers and the apparent ill fit of Cloud Servers for that goal. “After reviewing all of our hosting products, we decided to double-down on our shared hosting and site builder products and invest to win in these spaces,” it reads. “As part of this focus, we will discontinue Cloud Servers as a stand-alone product.”

GoDaddy has confirmed the decision in an email to me via a statement from CIO Auguste Goldman:

 ”We are focused on SMBs and SMBs don’t use this product the way we are offering it now. So, in the weeks ahead, it won’t be a stand-alone product in and of itself. However, we plan to continue developing cloud technology into our other hosted products.

“We will continue to support existing Cloud Server customers in a variety of ways.”

This type of decision is one of the classic risks of cloud computing, where a service might be here today and gone tomorrow. Services rarely shut down immediately, thus leaving users without a chance to reclaim their data or code and move it elsewhere (well, except in the case of MegaUpload), but an eventual transition to a new service is still necessary nonetheless. Recent examples of cloud services shutting down include Motorola’s ZumoDrive cloud-storage service, the Slicehost on-demand servers service (by Rackspace) and, nearly, TextDrive (by Joyent), which was saved at the last minute.

The GoDaddy email mirrors Goldman’s statement on this issues, saying the company is “identifying the best ways to support customers who need to transition from Cloud Servers. Once we identify these support paths, we’ll notify them of the product update.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Lucie Lang.

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Here is GoDaddy interim CEO Scott Wagner’s email message explaining yesterday’s outage:

Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com.  We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure.  This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it.

We take our business and our customers’ businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.

- Scott Wagner

  Go Daddy Interim CEO

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“We had a lot of momentum early in the morning, but now anyone who hasn’t been to our site can’t access it,” Wilcox said. “Our launch got squashed.” Still, he’s philosophical about the experience and says he’s content to stay with GoDaddy depending on what caused the outage and how GoDaddy handles the situation.

And like any entrepreneur, he’s trying to take the lemon of having his site not being up and turning it into lemonade. He’s hoping to find a few other startups whose launches may have been affected by GoDaddy’s outage and see if he can package those up as a story for tomorrow when his site is hopefully back online.

Update: Still working on it, but we're making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.—
Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

And people should check out his project, ThingsWeStart.com (wait until the GoDaddy outage is over), because Wilcox and a team of volunteers has scraped the Kickstarter site for data about all of the projects to determine where they are held and in what industries. (Wilcox says that because he’s not planning to make money off the site, he’s not breaking the Kickstarter terms of service.) Visitors to the site can sign up for notifications of Kickstarter projects in their areas or in certain fields.

And next week, the project hopes to launch a calculator based on more data crunching it’s doing that will tell you things like the best day to post a new project based on your industry, how much you want to raise and other factors. Given how much Kickstarter has become a source of funds for entrepreneurs, having a source of data and analysis on the site’s past projects seems like a good resource. So bookmark it, and check out some of the maps it has released so far. Or check out the file of all the data it has gathered so you can crunch your own numbers.

As for GoDaddy, spokesperson Elizabeth Driscoll said the company is currently working to restore all of the affected services. As to the cause of the outages — rumored to be the work of hacktivist collective Anonymous — Driscoll said, “We have not made a determination.”

With additional reporting by Derrick Harris.

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As more cloud services come online — as they seem to be doing by the day this week at the Consumer Electronics Show – the demand for webscale data centers to power them will grow as well.

“In public cloud, where you do more things for more people — things like iCloud or perhaps what Acer and Lenovo are doing [at CES], you’ve got to build out data centers to accommodate a bigger user base,” said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud for market researcher Infonetics.

New Infonetics research shows the global data center players with the biggest data centers are those with the most aggressive plans to build out even more capabilities.

The numbers show that of the 19 big data center providers surveyed, those that field the biggest of the big “super data centers” plan to add more. Aggregate numbers from the 19 companies indicate they plan to move from three to five of these data centers by the end of 2013. (Infonetics defines super data centers as those with more than 10,000 physical servers.)

“That is very significant growth in a short amount of time,” said Barnett. While the research firm doesn’t name the companies surveyed, it says they include large telcos, cable operators, and big data center and co-location providers. Barnett did note that big Internet content providers like Google, Facebook and Yahoo weren’t surveyed — so their expansion plans are not factored in.

There are also plans to expand medium and large data centers, but the growth rate there isn’t as dramatic, Barnett said. These findings fall in line with anecdotal evidence that the biggest data centers are building out additional capacity as companies increasingly move more of their work to outside data center providers that can offer great price advantages.

Growth expected after M&A boom

That projected data center growth comes after a year of moving and shaking in the data centers arena, which saw $12.3 billion in M&A activity worldwide last year, according to BroadGroup, a U.K.-based consulting firm. Most of those deals were worth less than $100 million, but there were a few blockbusters, including CenturyLink’s $2.5 billion buy of Savvis and a partnership of KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures snapping up GoDaddy for $2 billion. And don’t forget Verizon’s buyout of Terremark.

Very few of even the biggest companies on the planet can run a big data center as efficiently as Amazon or another super-data-center provider can. Unless and until those economics change, expect more growth as the biggest-of-the-big data center providers get bigger still.

Photos courtesy of Flickr user Tom Raftery

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Put down those torches and pick up the phone.

Updated: Okay, so the Internet won, and Go Daddy has decided to stop supporting SOPA, but that doesn’t mean you should stop yourself from actually taking any one of these steps to speak directly to Congress.

Many in the tech community are against the Stop Online Piracy Act, but it’s time for a bit of a reality check on working with Washington D.C. As Clay Johnson put it pretty bluntly in his post on why Internet companies need to stop bitching about the system and learn how it works, y’all need to stop freaking out about GoDaddy supporting the effort and start doing something that could directly kill it. This whole Go Daddy boycott can be a side project, but if you really want to kill SOPA here’s what you need to do:

1. Call your Congressperson. Engine Advocacy makes it easy, so just take all of five minutes today and do it. And when you call, don’t just say, “I am against SOPA.” Start by stating your name and town, so the staffer who takes the call knows you’re a constituent. Check here first and see where your representative stands (need to find your representative? check here). Then craft a message just for him or her. Make it polite; make it coherent; and if you actually vote, say that. If you don’t vote, say this is an issue that will drive you to the polls during their re-election campaigns.

    
   For example, when I called my representative, the Big Bad Wolf in all of this, bill sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith, I said: “My name is Stacey Higginbotham, and I am a constituent of Mr. Smith’s in Austin, Texas. I am also a technology journalist who believes that my livelihood and the future of U.S. competitiveness is hurt by his stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act. I have voted since I was 18, and my husband is a registered Republican. However, we both feel that this is an issue that will determine our vote in the next election.”
   
    
   Keep it short, polite and personal if you can articulate why this affects you. To cap it off, say you would like a response for your Congressperson and be prepared to leave your address. A former staffer says this is a good way to get your call more attention. That same staffer underscores the need to be polite, so check your anger at the door.

2. Write your Congressperson. I know it sounds nutty, but Congress loves those personalized messages that also help support the U.S. Postal System. So find your representative here, and then type or hand write a short letter that should follow along with the guidelines from above (you can go longer in this format though). You can also submit a form letter or online petition, but nothing says, “I care” like an original written communique.
3. Visit your Congressperson. I bet you guys see a theme developing here, right? But if you can present yourself calmly and coherently, then find out if your Representative is speaking at any point in time over the holidays. If they are, go to the event and ask a question or try to shake your Representative’s hand and give him or her your feelings. Go here for a link to Congressional Websites and click through to yours to find out if yours is doing any local events. You may have to call the local district office and ask.
4. Talk to your friends. It’s pretty clear that Silicon Valley and certain other tech populations are against this legislation, but what about your Facebook friends and such in the heartlands? Find your family, your friends and acquaintances and educate them about SOPA. Tell them a personal story. Don’t just say it breaks the Internet; say you are worried because it makes your job harder, or because it means their home videos might get taken offline without them having a say. Then tell them how to get in touch with their representatives.
5. Talk to your employer. At the individual level, it’s frustratingly difficult to make headway in Washington, although, if you care about SOPA today, then you should also remember how your representative voted and make sure you carry that with you as you decide (and vote) when the times comes for his or her re-election. But you can also present information to your employer and see if you can convince your company to take a stand.
   
    
   Already 40 Internet companies have come out against SOPA. Another thought is that technology firms probably could take a page from the successful voting guides put forth by the big telecommunications and old-line companies. Many old-school companies whose livelihoods depend on the government viewing them in a certain light, issue voting guides for their employees telling them how to vote. Clearly employees can do what they want, but for some, the pamphlets or emails can be very influential.
   
    
   The final thing is to get your employer to understand the importance of lobbying. It’s a dirty practice, but it’s how influence is peddled in Washington. The tech world has been pretty above the political world, but now that everyone is consuming technology, the industry can’t afford to be holier than K Street.
6. Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As you probably have gleaned, there’s only so much a single individual can do to sway Washington, so if you don’t want to talk to your friends or employer, but would still like to amplify your voice, then EFF has been working hard to stop SOPA. It has an established DC voice and education effort, so its lobbyists are already familiar in Washington. Plus, if the law does pass, then EFF is likely the organization that will sue to challenge the law.

So go on, boycott any one of the 120 companies supporting SOPA, but make sure you pick one or two of these things to do too, if you’re serious about stopping the law.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Dooley.

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