Godaddy is down! Sorry for the downtime, connection issues
You may have noticed connection issues to websites such as ghacks.net and thousands of others in the past couple of hours. Responsibility for this has been claimed by a Twitter user associated with Anonymous. Fact is, the main Godaddy website and DNS servers are down, affecting sites that are hosted by Godaddy and domains that use Godaddy as their DNS provider (we are one of them).
The main godaddy.com website was offline for some time and the only source of information about the issue were available on Twitter and other social networking sites. Godaddy has managed to upload a static page to their main domain explaining to customers that the company is currently experiencing problems and working "to restore all sites affected".
Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are buzzing with activity; webmasters are venting, customers and site visitors are irritated, and other webmasters and networks post story after story to benefit from the situation as much as possible.
The issue here is that even if you wanted to change right now, you can't as Godaddy's domain management pages are not accessible as well. Webmasters affected by the issue can do nothing but wait and sit this one out and hope for the best.
When Godaddy is up again, there will certainly be some who will switch hosting providers because of it. But if an attack has caused this, there is no guarantee that the new hosting provider is not the next one on the target list.
Here is what I plan to research once servers get back online. I'd like to separate the domain hosting from the DNS service, which are both currently maintained by Godaddy. I will have to do some research first to find a third party DNS provider that is offering great response times and does not cost a fortune. If you have a tip in this regard let me know in the comments please.
I'm also considering moving some domains over to Namecheap which offer a discount right now, honor the renewal data and add a free year on top of that. Again, I'm open to suggestions so fire away.
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Why do you use Go-daddy, they are Elephant killers and have bad customer service, please move elsewhere.
It WASN’T Anonymous. The Twitter account in question had the word “Anonymous” in it, but the account owner himself said he just wanted to test Godaddy’s security. I regularly go on AnonOps IRC and we had nothing to do with it.
This is why Anonymous has such a bad reputation, script kiddies messing things up and then claiming they’re Anonymous.
Thanks. Godaddy now claims it was a technical outage.
Why would you put DNS services for something with Free or Cheap in the name? You’re just asking for more trouble…..
DNS should be managed with a quality DNS provider. There are a ton of them out there like Ultra DNS or DynECT.
I encountered a short issue last night with ghacks.net, the page appeared but totally broken. A few minutes later all was fine again.
Need I notice ghacks.net is a marvel also in page rendering : blasting fast :)
I´m using name and namecheap for most of my domains and never had a problem!
Martin, I too am surprised that you are using Godaddy. Hopefully this downtime will let you find a (much) better hosting and DNS service.
As for suggestions, both Stablehost (http://www.stablehost.com/shared-hosting.php) and Hawkhost (http://www.hawkhost.com/shared-web-hosting) have good reviews at the Web Hosting Talk forums, which I consider the most authoritative source of information about web hosting providers. It’s also a good idea to have a different DNS provider than your hosting one. At the WHT forums, one of the most recommended DNS providers is Zerigo (http://www.zerigo.com/managed-dns/pricing)
Hope it helps!
Thanks for the tip. The server is hosted by Wiredtree, Godaddy is only hosting the domain and DNS. Had a very unpleasant experience with Godaddy hosting back in 2005/2006 https://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/09/why-you-should-always-have-a-web-hosting-exit-strategy/
I agree that Web Hosting Talks is a great source, I found the Wiredtree recommendation there and a bargain offer. I read about Zerigo before and will take a closer look.
That an ISP the size of GoDaddy was vulnerable to this DDoS is disturbing, especially with their DNS servers being affected. They’re going to have to do quite a bit of “damage control” after this or they’re going to lose customers in droves.
Surprised to read you use a godaddy service. namecheap and name.com are probably the other best options.
Yep, a lot of sites went down when GoDaddy was attacked. I think you should migrate to eNom, it’s less evil than GD and therefore less of a target by DDOSers. I’ve already transferred some of my domains recently (before the attack).