GoDaddy, a familiar name to NASCAR (or Danica Patrick) fans and small businesses that use its web hosting capabilities, now has Amazon-like cloud services to sell or rent to customers.
Public cloud is the model in which a single provider—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, now GoDaddy—pools a ton of servers, storage and networking and rents it out to customers who don’t want to build more of their own data center capacity.
GoDaddy’s public cloud services are based on open-source OpenStack software. They have been available in early test form to a limited set of users since October but are making their broad debut Monday.
Many small and medium-sized companies already know GoDaddy (GDDY) for its hosting services and as an easy way to register and maintain their Internet domain names. Those existing services will now be integrated with the GoDaddy cloud—which gives the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company a healthy on-ramp.
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GoDaddy, which went public last year and toned down its image as part of that process, said it will offer automatic back up for customer user data and configurations and guarantee 99.9% uptime. To make sure there’s an array of applications that are easy to launch, GoDaddy partnered with Bitnami, a company that packages up popular applications so they can be installed and deployed easily.
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As companies decide to put more of their applications and data in shared, flexible cloud infrastructure, the beneficiaries will also include public cloud pioneer Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, Google (GOOG) Compute Platform, and Digital Ocean.
Note: This story was updated at 1:06 p.m. EDT with a description of public cloud computing.