The Go Daddy Group Inc., which provides a domain name registration at its www.GoDaddy.com Web site, said it is seeking an initial public offering of as much as $200 million in Class A common stock.

– via Reuters.com.

A lot of people look at GoDaddy and try to compare what they do to what Tucows does – both companies are registrars after all. In fact, GoDaddy and Tucows couldn’t be more different. GoDaddy is a retail webhosting company, and Tucows is a service and support management company. GoDaddy is a lot more like Gateway or Dell than Tucows – and Tucows is looks a lot more like EDS, IBM or Accenture than it looks like GoDaddy.

Just because a company is a domain registrar, doesn’t mean they share the same business model as the other registrars. Lots of companies with lots of different business models are registrars – Google (media) is a registrar, AOL (ISP) is a registrar, Iron Mountain (record management) is a registrar. Like these companies, most registrars aren’t in the business of selling domain registrations, they are in the business of selling things that work great with registrations.

That’s why I love our business so much. Some of our customers do what GoDaddy does. Others do what AOL does. Our resellers do a lot of different things and it is really satisfying that we can help them do what they do.

I love this story for a couple of reasons. Mostly, I’m pleased because it demonstrates that there’s still some life in the hosting market. This is something that our customers have known for a long time – but its nice to see that Wall Street and the press are finally figuring this out. Its finally cool to be in the hosting business again.

I predict that hosting is going to continue to be a hot story for a long time.