GoDaddy Seeks Chinese Domain Name Buyers

GoDaddy.com, one of the largest top-level domain name sellers in the United States, is aiming for more Chinese business in a new marketing effort.

The company has emailed current domain name clients who have publicly-listed Whois Lookup data emanating from China about the new service. Now these clients can denominate all of GoDaddy's services in Chinese Yuan and access a toll-free number in China.

The toll-free number in China is answered by Mandarin speakers, but is only available for six hours each day, Monday through Friday. Godaddy has also updated and enlarged the amount of Simplified Chinese information on its website.

But GoDaddy still has a ways to go to fully serve Chinese website owners. it competes directly with the top Chinese domain name vendor, HiChina, which is owned by Alibaba.

And for GoDaddy's other main service — website hosting — many of GoDaddy's servers are blacklisted or filtered or filtered in China. This means that websites hosted on GoDaddy may not be visible or available to Web surfers in mainland China.