Namecheap, Google, and About.me partner to help small businesses get online faster

Today longtime domain registrar and web host Namecheap raised the curtain on the Namecheap Marketplace, a service that aims reinvent the tedious process of getting started on the web with your own domain.

To launch the service, Namecheap — the anti-GoDaddy — partnered with Google (for Google Apps email), About.me, Briefmetrics (analytics), and Weebly (site design).

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The core idea here, a web hosting company offering a “getting started” solution, isn’t all that new. But it looks like Namecheap is taking a unique direction with its Marketplace. In a call with VentureBeat, Namecheap chief operating officer Hillan Klein described the Marketplace as an “open platform” and likened it to a full-fledged app store designed to help small businesses get online.

As part of the launch, Namecheap is calling on developers to build apps on the platform. Hopefully those apps will indeed “automate many of the complicated website setup problems — like finding and entering DNS info and correctly installing an email app,” as the company promised.

Whether Namecheap will be able to build a quality marketplace remains to be seen, but you have to give them a little credit for being ambitious enough to give it a try.