Go Daddy, now the largest domain registrar in the world, offers four different programs through which ISPs can resell the company's portfolio of services.

by Jeff Goldman [December 12, 2007]

Bob Parsons founded GoDaddy.com in 1997 as Jomax Technologies. According to company executive vice president Barb Rechterman, Jomax was the name of a road Parsons passed every day on his way to the office. But he wasn't happy with the name—he didn't think Jomax sounded particularly memorable—so he changed it to Go Daddy in 1999, and in 2000, the company became an ICANN-accredited domain registrar.

Since 2000, Go Daddy has done pretty well. Rechterman says it's now the largest domain registrar in the world; registering, renewing, or transferring a domain name every 1.3 seconds. It now has over 1,860 employees and offices in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa and Washington, D.C. "We've got the largest portfolio of domain names under management, at 25 million," she says. "And we register upwards of 40 percent of the domain names that are registered every single day."

Rechterman attributes Go Daddy's growth to a strong online marketing engine, as well as a continually expanding product line. "We've got secure certificates, shopping carts, website builders, search engine optimization tools, private domain registration, podcasting tools—we have a 40-plus catalog of products that we can enable a domain name with—and that appeals to customers," she says.

In addition to the retail domain registration site GoDaddy.com, the Go Daddy group of companies also includes the private domain site Domains By Proxy, the R&D site Starfield Technologies, the discount registrar Blue Razor Domains—and the wholesale registrar Wild West Domains.

Reseller options
Through Wild West Domains, Go Daddy offers four different reseller programs: Basic, Pro, Super, and API. Keeping the wholesale site separate from GoDaddy.com, Rechterman says, helps the company's resellers maintain ownership of their customers. "We established Wild West Domains so that customers of the reseller would not immediately see Go Daddy in the whois data," she says.

For a $99 annual fee, the Basic Plan gives the reseller access to a pre-built, private-labeled website through which they can sell any or all of Go Daddy's services, from domain registration to search engine optimization.

For a $199 annual fee, the Pro Reseller Plan provides access to the same range of services as the Basic Plan, but at a more discounted rate, giving the reseller better margins on each sale. The Pro Plan also pays a commission on clickthroughs from customers' parked domains.

The Super Reseller Plan increases the annual fee to $229. In return, the reseller gets all the functionality of the Pro Plan—as well as the ability to resell the reseller plan itself. A Super Reseller can market Basic and Pro Reseller Plans to clients, then collect an additional commission on all of the sales those resellers make.

Finally, the API Reseller Plan, for an annual fee of $249, allows an ISP with an established web presence to integrate Go Daddy's offerings directly into their own site.

While the API Plan gives an ISP maximum control over the look and feel of the offering, Rechterman says the ease of use of the other three plans makes them far more popular—and she notes that Basic, Pro, and Super clients do have the ability to customize the colors, logos, and layout of their sites.

All private labeled
One of Go Daddy's greatest strengths, Rechterman says, is the support it provides both to its resellers and to their customers as part of the reseller offering. "If you are an ISP that doesn't have an 1,800-person call center, you can set it up so that we handle all the support for all of our products under your name," she says. "And it's all private labeled."

Rechterman also notes that product development remains an ongoing priority for the company. "Our applications are under the software-as-a-service model, so they're continuously updated, and all of the customers get the benefit of all those updates just as they occur," she says.

And with all four plans, Rechterman says, the reseller has total control over which products and services they want to sell. "If you're already a hosting company, you don't have to sell our hosting—but you can sell our domains, and you might want to sell our search engine optimization tool," she says. "You can sell the things that you want to sell, even if you directly compete with us on something else."

Everything, Rechterman says, is private labeled—down to the SSL certificates. "We've got private labeled versions of our certificates for our resellers, so the secure certificate doesn't come up Go Daddy," she says. "We've really thought through how to enable you to have an entire suite of products that totally complement each other."

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