GoDaddy is launching a cloud platform Monday, designed to win 30 million developers worldwide serving very small businesses. But first, the company needs to get its tarnished brand to shine again.

The domain registrar and hosting service came under fire for sexy TV commercials featuring NASCAR driver Danica Patrick and other so-called "Super Bowl girls." Animal lovers hated GoDaddy after then-CEO Bob Parsons hunted and killed an elephant in Zimbabwe and posted a video of the event. And techies hated GoDaddy for being difficult to do business with -- bombarding users with advertisements for additional services, and making it hard to transfer domains elsewhere.

Indeed, I can't find anybody to defend GoDaddy. Attendees at the Open Networking Summit, a conference in Silicon Valley last week, laughed outright at the idea that GoDaddy might become respectable. A feminist woman in tech said she didn't want to talk about GoDaddy, preferring to give attention to other, more respectable domain registrars (which must hurt twice for GoDaddy -- once for the suggestion that they're beneath notice, and again for the description as just a domain registrar).

Figure 1: Past Tense NASCAR driver Danica Patrick in 2013. The association with Patrick is part of a past that GoDaddy is looking to put behind it. (Source:Marco Becerra, (CC BY 2.0).)

Not satisfied, I took an informal, unscientific poll on my Google+ profile. With 57 responses, only 16% had positive associations for GoDaddy: "Love them!" 4%; "They're OK," 12%. Other responses: "GoDaddy? Are they still around?," 35%; "Sexist elephant-killing sleazeballs," 26%; and "No Opinion," 23%.

I was intrigued when GoDaddy pitched me an article about augmenting their existing hosting business with a cloud service aimed at the VSB market -- very small businesses, sole proprietor or up to three employees. I felt compelled to visit their offices face-to-face. Maybe I'd get to meet Danica Patrick, or go on an elephant hunt.

GoDaddy is based in Scottsdale, Ariz. I visited its Silicon Valley offices, located in Sunnyvale. They're typical offices for the area. That surprised me. I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe stripper poles and animal-head trophies.

The offices are spacious and airy, with big windows letting in plenty of light, an open office plan, pedal-powered go-carts lined up on display in the lobby, and a centrally located, well-stocked coffee bar. The coffee bar also has a mini-fridge that serves hard liquor; but I did not see anyone tipple during our meeting hours. Coffee and soft drinks are free, but employees and visitors have to pay for the hard stuff.

I met with Jeff King, general manager of hosting and security for GoDaddy. We discussed concerns about the GoDaddy brand, and he acknowledged them as valid. He even raised one or two himself. For example, as of three years ago, the company had an international presence, but messaging was America-focused. Even its website for the subcontinent of India was in English, prominently featuring Danica Patrick holding a football.

However, King says, GoDaddy's negative image is a couple of years out of date.

GoDaddy and Patrick parted last year, the elephant-hunting CEO has been replaced (though he still serves on the board), and new CEO Blake Irving, formerly of Microsoft and Yahoo, is focused on building GoDaddy as a global hosting and cloud provider for VSBs.

GoDaddy is looking to rebuild its brand the only way it knows how -- build a reputation for delivering quality service by building a track record. That takes time, King says.

"You're only going to turn your reputation around by what you do every day," King says. "What we try to do is build world-class products."

Wall Street likes GoDaddy's odds. It went public a year ago, trading at $26.50 April 2; it peaked at $34.13 in December and its stock closed at $31.93 Friday. Revenue was $1.6 billion in fiscal 2015, up from $1.4 billion year-over-year. However, the company ran at a net loss of $120.4 million, down from $143.3 million in 2014.

In the fourth quarter, GoDaddy's hosting and presence revenue was $155.5 million, up 12.7% year-over-year, with 14 million customers and 62 million domains under management -- more than 20% of the world's total.

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Its customers are bakers, plumbers, restaurateurs, writers, photographers, and more. "Our mission in life is to enable the small business economy," King says.

GoDaddy sees the economy as moving in its direction. "We think enterprises are going to hire fewer and fewer people over the next ten years," King says. The economy will shift to contractors and self-employment, and those workers will require websites to attract business.

Next page: Winning small business

Winning small business
Half of all these VSBs build their own websites, which is a market GoDaddy already serves. The other half hires 30 million web professionals worldwide to build websites, and that's the market GoDaddy is looking to tap. "For us, winning the professional segment is critical to winning small business," King says.

King adds, "Where this offering is really targeted isn't for the DIY restaurant owner. It's for the professional who builds websites for a living." GoDaddy is looking to provide a "simple turnkey operation that's more easy to consume than Amazon.com, and provides all the capabilities they need for building a website." These include compute, storage, DNS, domain names, security and "other things you expect and need if you sling a website together."

King adds, "We're not trying to compete directly with Amazon, Microsoft and Google for the enterprise. We're going to let them beat each other up for that market."

This week, GoDaddy is launching two new services designed to woo developers. First, it's getting into the cloud business. In addition to shared hosting, hosting on virtual private servers, and dedicated hosting, GoDaddy is launching website hosting in the cloud, for added flexibility and elasticity.

Also, GoDaddy is launching Cloud Applications -- simplified installation and deployment of popular packaged applications such as Traq, Drupal, Odoo, OpenERP, OpenCart and Magento, in partnership with Bitnami, a library for open source application developers. Cloud Applications provides developers with their choice of Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Ubuntu and other popular Linux distributions.

GoDaddy brags that virtual instances can be provisioned in 54 seconds or less, with pay-as-you go hourly and monthly billing.

"Spinning up an environment on Amazon is overwhelming for small business. If you want to spin up a global commerce platform for Uber or something on that scale, Amazon is your man. Otherwise, it's overkill." King says.

The service is built on OpenStack with KVM virtualization.

The focus on small developers is relatively recent. The company is 18 years old, with a previous focus on small business. "Three years ago, when Blake Irving became CEO, we changed the market and vision of the company, studied the customer base in more depth, and realized that web professionals were incredibly important," King says.

The new cloud service is just one step in the journey to turn GoDaddy's reputation around.

"When you talk to people about GoDaddy, they think of the elephants and the Danica Patrick Super Bowl ads," King says. "We're trying to pivot the brand around the product. Our products are beginning to speak for themselves and we think they're going to pull the developers."

The company is expanding with an international presence -- 53 markets in 26 languages. Three years ago, GoDaddy was in five English-speaking markets.

"The attention-setting tactics of GoDaddy in the past, whether it's Danica or the Super Bowl, were a huge way to build the brand," King says. "That was, in many ways, successful. But it's not the way to build the next level."

GoDaddy sees having a web presence as being extremely valuable for small business, and wants to facilitate that presence. "We can argue all day about whether walled gardens like Facebook or Yelp are good for business. But having your own content online and controlling your own content -- having your own real estate on the web -- is important and will continue to be in the future."

— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading.