By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
August 26, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) - While it may not always be the foremost concern of Web hosting customers, among the most important things Web hosts have to consider is the hardware they choose to deploy in their data centers.Web hosting provider and domain registrar Go Daddy (godaddy.com) has been using Dell (dell.com) hardware to drive its hosting business for over three years now, says Mark Wachtmann, vice president of IT for Go Daddy. In addition to handling domain registration and Web hosting, Dell servers are used for SSL certificates, hosting the Go Daddy Web site and the company’s provisioning systems.
The right balance of price and performance is what makes Dell such an appealing choice, says Wachtmann. This is particularly crucial in the shared hosting environment, where hosts are faced with trying to squeeze what is left of an increasingly narrow profit margin. And making things tougher is the fact that even while the business gets tougher, customer expectations continue to remain high.
“You certainly have to be price performance conscious, but at the same time, even at those low price points, people expect their Web site to be up and running and serving pages, and we found that the Dell servers meet those requirements,” Wachtmann says.
Other vendors provide comparable if not better solutions in terms of space and power, says Wachtmann, but in the end it is hard to beat the more attractive pricing. “When I look at the competitive landscape, Dell provides us the best bang for our buck … in terms of price performance and reliability,” Wachtmann says.
Frank Muehleman, vice president of small and medium business at Dell, says Web hosts like Go Daddy standardize on Dell in order to increase productivity and decrease costs.
And these benefits contribute to Go Daddy’s ability to keep its prices down. “It’s one of several ways we keep that price competitiveness,” says Wachtmann.
Importantly, Dell’s product line has been flexible enough to accommodate Go Daddy’s wide range of offerings, which include shared, dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting. Wachtmann explains that different hosting offerings require different hardware configurations. With Dell’s flexibility, Go Daddy has been able to go with a single hardware vendor for all its hardware needs.
The ability to support and scale to Go Daddy’s rapidly growing infrastructure is another reason for using Dell, Wachtmann says. Go Daddy had to handle major surges in traffic earlier this year after its controversial Super Bowl ads hit the air, and has seen a huge increase in business ever since. According to some research, Go Daddy is now the largest domain registrar in the world and is quickly becoming one of the biggest Web hosts. “[Dell is] a vendor that really supports the demanding environment that we are in, and that’s pretty much the main reason we are doing Dell right now,” Wachtmann says.
Both Dell and Go Daddy also agree that a good working relationship with a major vendor, serving as single point of accountability, can be very beneficial for the Web host.
“The IT staff (of the host), especially if limited in budget and body, needs someone who is reliable and quick to respond,” says Muehleman. “Dell has made this direct interaction the heart of its business. If an issue occurs in the data center, the IT staff doesn’t have the time or resources to call five different people to fix five different vendors? hardware, they want one person to fix all five parts of the issue so they can get back to business.”
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