GoDaddy plans to close its cloud computing business, telling its SMB customers it will try to integrate the business into other services.

GoDaddy CIO Auguste Goldman issued an email outlining the company's plans:

"We are focused on SMBs and SMBs don't use our Cloud Server product the way we are offering it now," Goldman wrote in the email that GoDaddy provided to CRN Tuesday. "So, in the weeks ahead, it won't be a stand-alone product in and of itself. However, we plan to continue developing cloud technology into our other hosted products.

"We will continue to support existing Cloud Server customers in a variety of ways," Goldman added.

[Related: 7 Ways The Cloud Is Changing The Data Center ]

The company did not comment further with details about the pay-as-you-go Cloud Server service.

However, the closure of Cloud Server raises contractual issues for businesses that may be affected. GoDaddy, which also provides website hosting and email services, has about 10.5 million customers.

On Sept. 10, the company experienced service interruptions for about six hours, affecting an undetermined number of its customers.

CEO Scott Wagner said the outage was caused by a network failure, and not by a denial of service attack by the hacker group Anonymous, which initially had claimed credit.

GoDaddy subseqently said it would give customers a free month of service.

PUBLISHED OCT. 3, 2012