GoDaddy launches new premium cloud hosting service
This week, GoDaddy, one of the biggest and well-known hosting providers in the US, has revealed its latest offering: A premium cloud hosting service, called Open Ocean Hosting. We spoke with GoDaddy founder and CEO Bob Parsons about his amazing new platform.
Jumping on the cloud hosting bandwagon
When asked what this is all about, Mr. Parsons smiled and told us, “Haha, yeah, that is quite a feat, huh!? Well I’ll tell you how we pulled this off, but first a bit of background on this. We noticed that all the big guys were setting up all kinds of cloud services – you know, Rackspace, Terremark, GoGrid, and who else not – so we thought, we gotta jump on the bandwagon here, but we gotta do it right. Not just oversell the shit out of some Virtuozzo servers on second-hand hardware running out of my basement, like we did before, but something really impressive, that would redefine the whole Cloud Hosting thing.”
Road trip
The ocean hosting platform as envisioned by GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons
Parsons continued, “So we had this brainstorm meeting and one of the guys said: Why don’t we go out and set up a datacenter in the middle of the ocean. Fucking brilliant of course, it’s much more mysterious and there are no US laws out on the ocean, that’s perfect for us. Next thing I know, we got on a big van with a bunch of servers and this super-huge fiberglass cable machine and drove to San Diego, where we boarded my private yacht.”
Due to a lack of brevity, we must summarize Mr. Parsons’ story about the journey to a few key points: The team was severely intoxicated several times on the way, causing 20% extra cable to be used due to detours; the US Navy Carrier Nimitz, whose commanding officer was reportedly not satisfied with GoDaddy Customer Service, chased them for 3 days; and halfway, the team had to return to extend the parking of the van.
Building the platform
The actual hosting platform as built by GoDaddy
Upon arrival at the selected location, somewhere between the Johnston Atoll and Kiribati, the crew realized there was no secret island there, as John Locke, one of the GoDaddy managers, had foreseen. They went back up to Captain Cook, on Hawaii. As the project’s funds had been almost depleted at this point, Mr. Parsons decided to reduce infrastructure investments so as to squeeze it into the $250 budget available.
After a few months of hard work, during which the team chopped down about 37% of the South Kona Forest Reserve, a strong but light-weight floating platform was constructed. The platform has space for no less than 5 42U racks, which are made of datacenter-grade palm trees. After receiving the blessing of the local tribes, the wind blew the platform to the right location, where the facility was connected to the fiber cables.
The Open Ocean Advantage
Glowing with pride, Mr. Parsons informed us about the high level of “green” innovation on the new platform, which he calls the “Open Ocean Advantage”:
- All equipment runs on either solar or water power.
- Constant cooling is provided by sturdy ocean winds.
- The Sea Location Agreement (SLA) guarantees the platform will be on the same spot 99.9% percent of the time, excluding displacement by tropical storms, hurricanes, typhones or heavy cargo ships.
- Security is unprecendented, as access to the facility is limited to sea birds and shipwreck survivors.
- An onboard intern will provide remote hands, unless sea sick.
Plans
Due to the special location, plans are a bit more expensive than usual, but still affordable, starting as low as $1000 per month for a basic VPS plan with 1 GB memory, 10 GB storage and 100 GB bandwidth.
