Website Planet landed an exclusive interview with Rodrigo Melo, Spaceship Head of Design Innovation at Namecheap Inc. We learned the ins and outs of their new product, Spaceship—a web services platform designed with over 1 million domains under management, which gives users true ownership of their digital assets. Melo discussed how Spaceship’s tools simplify website management, making it easier for anyone to launch, customize, and grow their online presence with ease.
What is Spaceship?
Spaceship is a new domain registration and web services platform that simplifies the process of launching and managing a website. It has a smart design and simple interface that allows users to connect all the products and services they need to launch their website and manage it as they grow.
What legacy domain registration and web services problems are you solving with your new platform Spaceship?
Spaceship allows users to skip many of the inherent complexities usually associated with domain registration and web services product integration. Even for more tech-savvy users, there are headaches around setting up DNS, managing subscriptions, or switching between hosting products and add-ons. And these examples are only a few of the issues most people face. That’s one of the reasons we created our next-generation web services platform, Spaceship. Our goal with Spaceship is to drastically improve how you use, configure, and manage your domains and digital products — to connect them together into your own fully configured solution. Whenever you need, you can add, upgrade, and connect new products and services to seamlessly grow online.
On top of that, Spaceship is also a smart system that recognizes issues with your domains and web services, such as propagation, payment, or configuration issues. It will automatically notify you if an issue is found and will give you an easy way to fix it.
How did you come up with the idea for Spaceship?
Seeing a world of closed ecosystems and platforms that limit flexibility, we wanted to change this. We aim to bring together numerous digital products and services and empower customers to use them to work seamlessly with each other. Spaceship focuses on user choice and simplicity of use, placing full ownership and power in the hands of our customers. Making sure you can get where you need to be online.
We also believe profoundly in a free and open Internet. Spaceship is another step toward a giant leap forward in Internet freedom in this respect, in terms of customers’ ownership of their portfolio of digital products and having the freedom and control to connect and manage them as they wish.
How does your mission differ from the other companies in your category?
The things that set Spaceship apart from other web service companies exist in its core features. Our brand, product, and development teams specifically designed Spaceship to give customers the control, simplicity, and flexibility to create amazing websites and online businesses without substantial technical skills. We see Spaceship as the web services platform uniquely designed for the future of the Internet.
You can see that in Spaceship’s key features like:
Unbox™ – this is what makes it possible to connect and configure your Spaceship products into one simple solution. You gain complete freedom to mix and match to build your ideal digital platform.
Alf – brand new AI assistant that connects your domain to a website or app, links a domain to email or web hosting services, finds professional domain names at a great price, and much more.
Spaceship Library – your searchable product database where you can select, pay for, and connect useful features and services to empower your domains.
Launchpad – your fully-featured dashboard for easily viewing and managing all of your product and service apps, with the freedom to choose and customize as you like.
Connection Manager – your way to see and manage the connections between your products and domains, with nodes worldwide constantly monitoring everything.
Subscription Management – your all-in-one place to manage and upgrade your products, making it easy to cancel or pause your subscriptions.
Notification Center – your simple and organized comms area ensures you are always informed, allowing full customization to receive only what you want.
Anytime, anywhere payments – your way to upgrade, add extra space, connect more users, or renew services right on the spot and without separate payment pages.
Security is also a massive consideration for us, from securing customer accounts to safeguarding domains with features like DNSSEC and DNS DDoS protection to further measures like offering free SSL certificates with our hosting.
Another huge area we’ve worked hard on is our Conflict Resolution feature. There’s nothing more frustrating online than something not working and not knowing why or how to fix it! So our feature aims to understand when there are issues using products together. It helps you fix them automatically. For instance, trying to use two email products on one domain… The system will notify you and provide options so you can easily and seamlessly switch between products and services for your domains without any configuration annoyances.
What industries or kinds of business sizes benefit the most from your solutions?
Spaceship is for just about everyone looking to create a website. Still, we see it being beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as entrepreneurs, web pros, digital creators, and, of course, domain investors.
Through our smart use of technology, Spaceship streamlines website creation by managing the technical complexities in the background. The smart solutions are matched by Spaceship’s intuitive design and world-class user experience, simplifying the entire customer journey and flow. These components make Spaceship an ideal platform for most people or businesses who seamlessly want to bring an amazing website to realization online.
What is Unbox and how does it solve your client’s pain points?
Unbox™ in many ways is the core feature at the heart of Spaceship. The ability to connect and set up your products easily is of vital importance, but often it’s lacking in the web service industry. With Unbox, you can connect and set up your products with just a few clicks, without ever touching complex settings like DNS records. It brings everything together for you to manage products effortlessly, and add new ones whenever you wish just as quickly and easily. Of course, you still also get access to the core tools if you want to do things the old-school way. With Spaceship, we want you to have total control of your digital set-up and online future.
How is Spaceship doing today and what do you see in the future?
Recently, Spaceship surpassed over 1.5 million domains under management. Which is a big milestone since we only officially announced Spaceship last year and we’ve done little marketing so far. Many of our users now are early adopters, web pros, and digital entrepreneurs. So as we grow and continue to build the platform and improve the user experience, we will have many more product and feature integrations coming on the horizon.
Our web hosting and email products, such as Spacemail will continue to evolve, and you’ll see more and more of our products and marketing tools built into them in the near future. We’ll continue to incorporate more products that make getting online easier, such as our EasyWP (managed WordPress hosting) product, as well as smart website builders.
How can Spaceship users help create the ultimate vision of the platform and why is Spaceship the future of domain and web service management?
Spaceship is still being engineered and shaped into the full vision of the platform we want. After registering more than 1.5 million domains and open beta testing for a bit more than a year, we will continue to test it in the most challenging place of all: the real world. That means we’re still working on making sure everything runs right. What we’ve built under the hood is completely new and complex, sometimes requiring adjustments along the way. Fear not, though. Progress and improvements continue at a quick and efficient pace, especially now that we are getting feedback from real customers.
In the future we expect a full suite of marketplace and aftermarket tools to buy and sell your valuable domain names seamlessly. Plus, more decentralized/Web3 integrations like Handshake are on the way.
In the meantime, we encourage all smart and creative early adopters to see what we’re working on right now through our Public Roadmap of upcoming features and products — which even lets you suggest and vote on what you want to see added to the platform. It means we’re not just building the platform for you, but building it with you. We need all of you digital creators and online entrepreneurs to give us your input and feedback to help us shape the smartest web services platform ever created.
With over 13 years of experience in SEO and managing content websites, he has coordinated over 5000 product reviews and interviews with the biggest names in eCommerce, web hosting, cybersecurity, SaaS, AI, and online marketing, to provide newbies and experts with untapped, actionable insights from the top experts in the industry on how to build and grow websites.
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