GoDaddy, the Domains & Hosting provider, today announced its Domain Connect Initiative. The company says the program will make it easier for its customers to connect their domain names to their web service of choice, regardless of their domain name registrar. Microsoft, Squarespace, Shopify, eNom, WiseStamp and Name.com have all been announced to support the protocol.
GoDaddy says that it developed Domain Connect as an open set of APIs for domain name service providers and Web service providers to allow anyone to integrate with the platform. It has also published Domain Connect as an IETF informational standard, so any domain or cloud/web service provider can take advantage of it, without any direct affiliation with GoDaddy.
GoDaddy Senior Vice President Charles Beadnall commented at the launch:
We’re always looking for ways to make things easier for our customers. We noticed how happy our customers were when we developed an earlier system to make DNS changes easier, and the Domain Connect APIs are an extension of that. We wanted to bring the same simplicity we give GoDaddy customers to the entire domain and web services industry.
GoDaddy says that when it enabled redirection of personal domain names to popular websites, like Facebook, Tumblr, and LinkedIn, it saw more customers engage. This spurred it to develop an API that enabled 3rd parties to let their customers change their DNS settings without editing individual DNS records.