4-page Case Study - Posted 4/10/2009

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GoDaddy.com

Web Hosting Firm Empowers Customers, Realizes Operational Benefits

GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest Web site domain name registrar and one of the world’s leading hosting companies, offers more than 40 Web site products and services for its customers. With its focus on empowering its customers to achieve success on the Web, Go Daddy deployed Windows Server® 2008 and Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7.0) to address its own expanding IT infrastructure requirements as it supported the growing needs of its customers. By offering new features, including individual application pools, and both Microsoft®-based and alternative development options, Go Daddy is providing an improved customer experience based on more individual choice and flexibility, while delivering reliability, improved manageability, and increased data security.
   
    

Situation

GoDaddy.com is the world’s largest registrar of Web site domain names—more than three times the size of its closest competitor. As the world’s largest provider of secure Web sites as well as the world’s largest provider of new SSL certificates, Go Daddy offers a variety of services and products that enable individuals and businesses to develop a successful online presence.

Founded by Bob Parsons in 1997, Go Daddy offers its customers an array of more than 40 products, including comprehensive hosting solutions, Web site creation tools, personalized e-mail with spam and antiphishing filtering, e-commerce tools, and more. Go Daddy, headquartered in Arizona and with facilities in Iowa, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., employs more than 2,000 people and maintains round-the-clock customer service operations in the United States without using offshore staff or outsourcing a single job.

“GoDaddy.com is the ‘on-ramp’ to the Internet. We provide our customers with domain names, which they use to establish an Internet presence and which we enable with an array of over 40 products. The Go Daddy Group, Inc., has a worldwide market share of new domain registrations of 45 percent. We currently have more than 34 million names under our management,” explains Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “We are leaders in just about everything we do. We’re the world’s largest domain registrar by far. We’re the leading issuer of secure certificates. And we are one of the largest Web-hosting providers in the world.”

Go Daddy’s customer-centric focus has enabled the company to expand its own operations and support the growing needs of its customers. This dedication to customer satisfaction, present throughout every level of the company, has helped Go Daddy to garner top votes for “best choice” and “most innovative” company in surveys of Web users, industry professionals, and business organizations. Go Daddy has earned top rankings in the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing, privately held companies in the United States and the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list.

In its effort to ensure world-class customer satisfaction, Go Daddy is recognized as an astute early adopter of key technologies that provide customers with solutions that are easy and quick to both implement and use and that offer customers a competitive advantage. For example, one common request from customers was to have the broadest possible choice of applications and the ability to run all popular applications regardless of the technology on which they were built. Go Daddy accommodated these customer requests while enhancing its own operational capabilities and efficiencies.

Solution

Early on, Go Daddy embraced solutions based on the Windows® operating system to meet the demands and evolving needs of its customers and to improve the reliability, manageability, and security of its technology platform. In its most recent significant infrastructure project, Go Daddy deployed the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0. IIS 7.0 offers customers the widest possible set of options for developing and running PHP and Microsoft .NET–based applications; provides an efficient, one-click method of installing those applications; and delivers enhanced reliability, manageability, and security.
Those enhancements are consistent with the key Go Daddy business principle of using leading-edge technology to empower Go Daddy customers to pursue new business opportunities. Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 provides a security-enhanced, easy-to-manage framework for developing reliable Web applications and services. By providing more choice, more stability, and more security, Go Daddy can assure organizations that their Web platforms are available when needed.

Our customers’ demands are simple…. They want to use the Internet … and they want products that enable that…. That’s what Go Daddy is all about: delivering great, intuitive products at an affordable price, and offering world-class support. Bob Parsons CEO and Founder, Go Daddy

“With GoDaddy.com, setting up a Web site takes a matter of minutes. Our engineers understand that it has to be simple and fast,” notes Sam Pietrofeso, Senior Director of Hosting at Go Daddy. “For example, our customers are able to take advantage of our Hosting Connection applications on the Windows Server platform. They are now able to select PHP-based applications and have those applications seamlessly installed for use on their server with virtually no interaction required by them. This was not possible previously.”

Go Daddy’s customer-centric focus on providing high-quality services and products at a low cost helped the company attain its leadership position in the industry, but retaining that distinction year after year is the result of the company’s hard work and strategic focus on meeting customer requests for new products and services.

“With the advent of IIS 7.0 and Windows Server 2008 coming out from Microsoft, it was a no-brainer for Go Daddy to realize we wanted to be involved. Our customers expect us to be on the leading edge in providing new technologies. So when the opportunity came up to be an early adopter, we knew right away we had to do it,” Pietrofeso says. “The deployment of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 has been impressive. Our administrators have the benefit of a more stable platform, so we can provide better support for our customers. Our customers now have the advantage of being able to run .NET and PHP on the same environment, which before was very difficult. Additionally, we can now offer more Hosting Connection applications on Windows Server; with our one-click stop, our customers can select an application and have it automatically installed on their server with no additional interaction required by them.”

As a part of this significant deployment, Go Daddy upgraded its hardware platform and migrated from Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition to the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard and from IIS 6.0 to IIS 7.0. These upgrades to the 64-bit environment have provided improved performance and reliability.

“We were able to increase the RAM on our servers by transitioning to Windows Server 2008 Standard from Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, which translated into significant cost savings. With more RAM, we were able to utilize more application pools and give our customers a more stable environment. We’re not worrying as much about our customers hitting the limits of memory like we did with our previous server configuration,” notes Kevin Scheer, Manager of Windows Systems Engineering at Go Daddy.

Through these enhancements, Go Daddy not only provides more customer-facing features, but also has improved its internal monitoring, support, and resource utilization.

“We’re particularly excited by the ability to run one site per application pool on the IIS 7.0 framework. This is a huge win both from an operational perspective and in terms of the end-user experience. It allows customers to do things such as recycle their application pools, add their own MIME types, and modify their own default documents. On the operational side, it allows us to troubleshoot customer issues by using the robust monitoring set provided with Windows Server 2008,” explains Go Daddy Director of Hosting Development, Scott Brown.

“One great advantage of Windows Server 2008 is the management and resource utilization tools included. This comprehensive set of tools enables our operations staff to quickly identify Web sites that are using a large amount of resources and move them to a less resource-intensive server,” Brown adds.

The smaller server footprint offered by Windows Server 2008 helps Go Daddy administrators and support teams monitor and proactively resolve problems quickly. The modular architecture of IIS 7.0 also helps improve security because it automatically isolates applications to keep potential failures from affecting other hosts on the server.

“Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 is the next step to becoming more efficient from an IT perspective. These technologies provide the performance and increased security we need to offer a product to our customers that we think really adds value to their own initiatives,” says Justin Jilg, Director of New Product Development and Strategy at Go Daddy.

Benefits

By continually adding to its product offerings and fine-tuning its world-class customer service and support, Go Daddy realizes several benefits through the upgrade to Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0. Not only have options for customer choice been enhanced, but the upgrade has also proved beneficial for the Go Daddy administrator and support teams because it has improved system maintenance, increased troubleshooting accuracy, and provided better overall manageability of the company’s infrastructure.

“Running Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 allows us to keep a competitive mentality going forward. It affords us the ability to be more efficient while maintaining lower costs and accommodating our customers’ needs. That’s what Go Daddy does. We offer high-value, low-price solutions,” Jilg explains.

Greater Customer Choice

For Go Daddy customers, the Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 deployment means they can select and deploy feature sets for their Web sites quickly and easily. The modular design of IIS 7.0 offers a “minimum install by default” option, which has given Go Daddy customers the freedom to choose the precise feature sets and optimal number of components to meet their requirements. Offering customer choice is a key tenet of the Go Daddy service satisfaction policy.

“Our customers appreciate being able to do one-click installation of popular PHP applications. Now that we offer these hosting applications on Windows Server 2008, our customers have more choices. We’ve received a good response to our Hosting Connection marketplace, which offers both Microsoft-centric and open-source applications. We see an installation about every minute and we think that will continue to progress in a positive way for us,” Jilg observes.

Although it might seem counterintuitive, enabling customers to select and manage Web site feature sets has provided operational advantages for Go Daddy as well.

“Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 give us more manageability options because we’re able to install only the components on a server that are needed. We don’t have to install all the components like we did with IIS 6.0. It is important we don’t have extra services running on the server, taking up unneeded resources. With IIS 7.0, we don’t bog down the server, and the customer has a better experience,” Scheer notes.

Brown agrees: “It gives customers the ability to work with the familiar Windows platform and the flexibility of running open-source PHP applications. It offers them the best of both worlds, having PHP, Microsoft ASP.NET, and C# running on the same platform.”

Improved Management and More Configuration Flexibility

The upgrade to Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 has enabled the utilization of individual application pools that offer more development choices for Go Daddy customers and greater server and site management resources for Go Daddy IT teams.

“Our biggest motivation in moving to Windows Server 2008, and the big improvement between IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0 for us, is being able to separate the application pool for individual clients. We now give all customers individual virtual memory, which provides them with more flexibility in the development of their site,” Scheer notes.

Individual application pools enable Go Daddy administration and support teams to better monitor and proactively resolve potential server issues.

“The administrator can look at just a single application pool to see why it’s spiking and work to resolve any issues. You can just go to the one app pool and don’t have to worry about negatively affecting other customers,” Scheer explains. He notes, “We have seen an improvement with our server uptime, and I think the modular design and enhanced security components of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 have contributed a great deal. Our administrators spend less time troubleshooting problems because they’re able to diagnose the problem quicker.”

“The deployment of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 was successful for Go Daddy, especially for our administrators,” says Pietrofeso. “The ease and accuracy of maintaining our servers have increased. We are now able to pinpoint problem areas and provide the highest-quality servers that our customers desire and require.”

Reinforced Culture of Innovation and Excitement

Go Daddy’s drive to improve its product offerings arises from its culture of innovation, collaboration, and customer-centric focus.

“Go Daddy is a unique place. We’re very aggressive; we move very fast. At the same time, we’re fun and edgy—as our Super Bowl commercials demonstrate. But make no mistake, we’re a hard-working company and we do everything we can to help our customers achieve success,” Jilg observes.

Scheer agrees: “We’re always trying new things, outside of the mainstream. We’re always trying to come up with new ideas. There’s always something to work on and something to explore. We are always looking to come up with new products or take existing products and improve them. Go Daddy has some of the best developers and system administrators.”

“The most interesting part of our Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 deployment was watching the synergy between GoDaddy.com and Microsoft. We worked together as a team to deploy the technology on time with very few issues. And we’re all very proud of that effort,” Pietrofeso says. “At Go Daddy, we want to be on the leading edge but we want to make safe bets. That’s why our work with Microsoft is very important and critical to our success,” he adds.

As Parsons notes, it all comes back to what customers want and need.

“Our customers’ demands are simple. They want to be on the Internet. They want to use the Internet for everything it has to offer and they want products that enable that. And they don’t want to spend a lot of time understanding those products—they want the products to be intuitive, like driving a car,” Parsons says. “That’s what Go Daddy is all about: delivering great, intuitive products at an affordable price, and offering world-class support.”

Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2008, with built-in Web and virtualization technologies, enables you to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server infrastructure. New virtualization tools, Web resources, and security enhancements help you save time, reduce costs, and provide a platform for a dynamic and optimized data center. Powerful new tools like IIS 7.0, Server Manager, and the Windows PowerShell™ command-line interface allow you to have more control over your servers and streamline Web, configuration, and management tasks. It is the only platform that lets you host both ASP.NET and PHP applications side-by-side in a single, consolidated environment, by using the new FastCGI module. Advanced security and reliability enhancements like Network Access Protection and the Read-Only Domain Controller option for Active Directory® Domain Services harden the operating system and help protect your server environment to ensure you have a solid foundation on which to build your infrastructure.

For more information, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008
www.iis.net

To download the Web Platform installer, go to:
www.microsoft.com/Web/downloads/platform.aspx

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about the Go Daddy Group, Inc., products and services, call (480) 505-8877 or visit the Web site at:
www.GoDaddy.com