GoDaddy.com and access to millions of sites finally being restored.
With domain name registrar Go Daddy and millions of sites down today, clicking on a Google search result was a bit like playing roulette: you might get a blank result.
A Go Daddy spokesperson told me the problems began around 10 am PDT today. I was in a meeting at the time, and saw a tweet from Go Daddy about site problems. I clicked over to GoDaddy.com and it didn’t resolve.
I then checked Domain Name Wire, which is hosted with GoDaddy, and found it was down. My blogging colleagues Elliot Silver and Kevin Murphy had non-resolving sites as well.
Domain Name Wire came back for a bit, then it kept resolving but showing database errors.
I’m finally getting back…the first traffic appears to have hit Domain Name Wire again around 4:45 PM CDT. The GoDaddy.com site is back up with a landing page but is not operational yet (see picture above).
Obviously this is very frustrating as a site owner using GoDaddy hosting.
However, it’s not as painful as my previous experience with web hosting.
1. When my site would go down, I wasn’t sure if anyone was working on it or not. At least in this case you know hundreds of people are running around trying to restore service.
2. My last host had problems precisely when I couldn’t afford it: when I was getting a lot of traffic. So far Go Daddy has handled my hosting fine when I’ve received a spike in traffic.
3. It wasn’t just me who was down. For some reason that brings comfort.
Finally, I’ve got to say it’s ironic that the outage managed to bring Downforeveryoneorjustme.com down, too.
As of right now the site, which is not hosted on GoDaddy, shows that it’s over its serving quota.
Don says
Yeah probably lost a grand or so today because of this. It pays to go with better hosting and pay more for it.
JMO
Don
Russ says
It wasn’t just hosting customers – I saw several with issues that only had GoDaddy running their DNS servers.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Russ – that’s the word on the street. I think we’ll find out more tomorrow.
Mike Flynn says
I pay under £100 per year to mirror host my websites. If one goes down I simply switch nameservers. Other than the cost the main downside is that you need to keep both servers up-to-date and this is often easier said than done and more or less difficult depending on the particular setup. Unfortunately I was caught off-guard last night and my sites were down for 4 hours. I take some comfort in the fact that nameservers changes may have taken this time or longer to properly propogate anyway.
I was also reassured to find first a small note on Godaddy’s website indicating a problem then a full size, single page “We’re working it..!” headline.
I didn’t take any comfort finding domaainnamewire.com was also down other than the knowledge that with so many Godaddy hosted websites down Google and co shouldn’t penalise individual sites too harshly for the downtime.
Anthony says
What a mess yesterday was and are we all still waiting for some answers and a conclusion as to how this WONT happen again. How are they still so open to attacks is what I want to know.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Anthony – We don’t know if it was an attack for sure. Odds are yes, but it couldn’t have been some other sort of problem.
Ahmer Jamil Khan says
My website, having its DNS on GoDaddy was down too! I’m with 000webhost, and find their free hosting to be pretty decent!