We were recently contacted by Ben Gabler, the Senior Product Manager at GoDaddy, and the person responsible for the great decision to bring cPanel hosting to GoDaddy, to clarify a few points relating to a recent news post that we made about the new cPanel.
We took the opportunity to fire a few questions at Ben, and he graciously responded with some very full answers. We hadn’t intended when we asked the questions to do awhole post about it, but considering the full replies, we thought you would be interested in hearing what he had to say.
You can follow Ben Gabler on LinkedIn, or you can view his resume.
These are certainly exciting times for GoDaddy, and it will be interesting to keep a close eye on them over the next year.
The Interview with Ben Gabler:
1. I hope you don’t mind me taking this opportunity to ask you a couple of questions. You have a very interesting history in the web hosting industry, including as President of Hostnine, and Hostgator.
Absolutely! I take very much pride in our products let alone hosting in general, so I’m always happy to help. As I’m sure you know I started Hostnine back in 2006, and one of my greatest accomplishments with Hostnine was developing Reseller Central. With that said, I’m very happy to hear you hosted with us :).
Hostnine definitely attributed to my success and eventually got me to where I am today at Go Daddy and I couldn’t be happier. Go Daddy has changed so much as a business and the fact that they actually wanted to bring me on board to make it a true hosting company was like a dream come true. Everyone at Go Daddy has been nothing but supportive of my _onboarding and launching these new products and for the first time in history, _I feel like we have a true web hosting offering.
2. What made you join GoDaddy? Were you specifically brought in to implement the new cPanel Plesk control panels fresh approach?
I was brought on at GoDaddy in May of this year to run the entire hosting product line. I currently manage the Linux/Windows Shared Hosting, VPS, and Dedicated hosting products. The first step was improving the shared hosting products at GoDaddy, which led me to choose cPanel for Linux and Plesk for Windows.
3. You mention that you own the cPanel product. Can you clarify?
Yes, I am the Product Manager for our cPanel Hosting product. I worked side by side with the development team responsible for rolling cPanel out at Go Daddy to ensure we covered all of the bases. Also, due to my_ long-standing relationships with cPanel / CloudLinux I was able to develop a strategic offering making it possible to hit that 1/3 density number in the hosting industry.
4. As “fresh blood” at GoDaddy, do you have plans for more exciting features?
Absolutely! As you’ll see in many upcoming communications to the public we’re just getting started. This release of our new shared hosting products is just step 1. We definitely have a ton of work to do with Support but I can assure you we’re on it. I can’t give too much away when it comes to the specific products but I can tell you there are ton of improvements and launches in the near future :)
5. Did you have the opportunity to meet Jean-Claude-Van-Dam for the cool new promotional videos? If so, would you like to comment on the experience?
Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to meet him, but I am told I get to meet Danica Patrick soon!
Who is Danica?
For those who do not know who Danica Patrick is, Danica is a women NASCAR driver, model and advertising spokesperson for GoDaddy. She is the most successful woman in the history of American open-wheel racing. Along with her racing achievements, she is also known to most for her ads for GoDaddy. She’s been in multiple commercials of theirs, many being of a somewhat raunchy and controversial nature (but highly successful) and GoDaddy is her main sponsors when it comes to NASCAR racing. GoDaddy has since changed advertising tactics to focus more on businesses.