GoDaddy: Getting Into the IaaS and Cloud Hosting Game?

GoDaddy, the web hosting and domain registration company best known for those almost over-the-top TV commercials (you know the ones), is getting into the cloud market with Data Center on Demand, an infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud hosting offering that has the potential to offer Amazon Web Services and Rackspace some serious competition.

Word of the offering first broke last week, when GigaOM uncovered a marketing brochure that revealed first details of GoDaddy’s intriguing new pricing scheme. While most IaaS offerings — Amazon EC2 included — charge for actual server usage on an hourly basis, GoDaddy seems to be charging monthly for tiered service that includes a bundle of computing resources, with additional options available on-the-fly for additional fees.

Those tiered plans include the “Deluxe” tier at $119.99 per month for three dedicated cloud servers, a cheaper “Economy” one-server plan available for $49.99 per month and an “Ultimate” six-server offering for $279.99 per month. All tiers come with 40GB of RAM per server.

Right now, GoDaddy Data Center on Demand is in limited private release, with a full rollout expected in July. If you’re curious, though, you can see the login page here and the offering’s community FAQ page here. We’re also hearing from GigaOM that Data Center on Demand is based on Cloud.com’s CloudStack platform, representing even more momentum for the open source vendor.

There’s a lot that’s uncertain about this offering, but there are two key questions TalkinCloud wants to see answered: How does Data Center on Demand fit into GoDaddy’s channel strategy, if at all? And is the loss of flexibility thanks to the tiered plans worth the predictability of pricing?

Follow Talkin’ Cloud via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for Talkin’ Cloud’s Weekly Newsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Read our editorial disclosures here.