Two days ago, GoDaddy had a major outage in their DNS system. This affected probably millions of web sites (they currently have more than 45 million domain names under management, according to wikipedia), FTP sites, email sites, and so forth, whether those sites were actually hosted at GoDaddy or not. I was among the list of affected users, as you may have noticed.
I do not use GoDaddy for hosting of any kind (I did, but really hated the performance, so I switched away pretty quick), but I have been using them as a domain name registrar for many years, and so I use their DNS that is included for free with my domain registrations. It’s always been very reliable … until yesterday.
As soon as GoDaddy started having problems, some dork posted on Twitter that he was a hacker and took them down as an experiment in cyber security. A little bit later, somebody posted a video to youtube ostensibly from the Anonymous collective, claiming that this was an attack because Anonymous dislikes GoDaddy’s support for government regulation of certain parts of the internet.
Yesterday, an article was released by the Times saying that the issue was actually an internal problem that GoDaddy had (a major networking failure caused by corrupted router tables), and that it had nothing to do with hackers. Today, I received an email from GoDaddy apologizing for the outage, and offering me a credit – 1 month of free service for each of my active/published sites. The email was signed by Scott Wagner, CEO. I thought that was a nice gesture, and a very good move on their part. In my case, I’m not using them for hosting, so the credit does me no good.
Bob Parsons hasn’t been in the CEO seat since December 2011. I keep hoping that the new CEO will make some changes to GoDaddy’s “image”, and aim for a less juvenile persona than Bob had been pushing. Bob came off as a Hugh Heffner wanna-be, and I know of several fair-sized companies that won’t deal with GoDaddy (for domain registration, DNS, and certificate authority) as a result. I think this is a shame, because all-in-all, I think GoDaddy does provide a good and reliable service. I continue to live in hope.
