The GoDaddy Way— Enabling Online Business In A Do-it-for-me Market

With 71 million domains under management and 17 million customers globally, GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar. With an estimated 465 million Internet users by June 2017, India is one of the largest markets for online business. However, the number of online businesses does not match the potential: of the 51 million small businesses in the country, only 12 million are IT-ready and a mere one million have websites.

A significant reason for this abysmally low website penetration is because of the perceived complexity by small businesses in setting up an online business; buying a domain name, setting up a website or selling online and doing digital marketing.

Raghu Murthi, Senior Vice President – Hosting, GoDaddy

Most small businesses turn to web designers and developers to build and maintain their websites. Says Raghu Murthi, Senior Vice President – Hosting, GoDaddy, “Most companies need professional help to get started and to keep running. India is a do-it-for-me (DIFM) market.”

A nation-wide survey conducted by GoDaddy and RedShift Research confirms this and points out that at least 30 percent of small businesses in India look for an internet company to build and manage their website for them. Another 24 percent look for help from a professional web designer.

Hosting— Going Beyond Domain Name Registration

One of GoDaddy’s high growth areas is hosting where it has a good portfolio. In late 2016, GoDaddy acquired WP Curve, a startup offering services and support for WordPress websites.

With this acquisition, GoDaddy provides best-in-class, 24×7 WordPress support, ranging from quick content changes, installing plugins, and security/back up.

Says Raghu, “WP Curve aligns perfectly with our GoDaddy Pro strategy supporting the WordPress community and fills a critical gap between standard customer care and the fully custom WordPress developer that GoDaddy Pro or Professional Web Service offers.”

Our business hosting solution is designed to help small businesses keep their business going strong with dedicated resources, faster than shared hosting. The solution helps high traffic sites like online stores, and sites for developers and creative agencies to easy upgrading solution with a single click.

Focus on the Indian Market

India is a priority and strategic market for GoDaddy and is the bedrock of its international expansion. GoDaddy is committed to helping expand the Internet ecosystem in India and in getting an increasing number of India’s small businesses online by directly enabling web designers and developers with the right set of tools so that they can serve the DIFM customers better (and grow their own businesses at the same time).

GoDaddy Pro Program and India Partner program are launched and designed with the objective of easing their work flow, are helping them build and manage their client’s websites and projects better. GoDaddy currently holds the #1 market share for .IN in India according to National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI).

GoDaddy’s total India customer base now stands at more than 750,000 as of March 2017. GoDaddy’s recently announced its localization strategy focused to unlock opportunities India’s linguistic diversity presents and remarkably increase internet uptake among SMBs in India by eliminating the language barrier.

Validating GoDaddy’s localization approach, Raghu said that 40 percent of India customer care call volume shifted to local language within two days of announcing the availability of local language support through IVR (interactive voice response).