Go Daddy crashes; leaving small businesses in the dark

In the past  a few things may have hurt the image of Go Daddy. The first was the controversial Superbowl ads featuring half- naked women. The second one was the backlash from people hearing about Godaddy’s support of SOPA, the Internet censorship bill that prompted Wikipedia to pull out. And now Monday’s crash.

If you tried to access some of your favorite sites Monday you may have noticed they did not load and even seemed like they never existed. That’s because Go Daddy’s DNS servers went down  and did not come back for several hours. 

Small businesses like the Baltimore Post-Examiner were victims of this crash as perhaps millions of others. Go Daddy is the largest Internet domain registrar in the world. The Web hosting company  also sells e-business related sofware. Since their Super Bowls ads in 2005, the company claims  to serve more than 45 million domain names.

Initial reports suggest the crash may have been the work of @AnonymousOwn3r who claims to be a official Anonymous member. The @AnonyOwn3r Twitter claimed responsibility.  Service was restored at about 5 p.m., according to GoDaddy officials.

The AnonymousOwn3r account tweeted that: “it’s not Anonymous coletive [sic] the attack is coming just from me.” The hacker also tweeted, “Duuude? This attack affects not only corporations but also ppl who support your ideology. whats the rationale?” one supposed fan of Anonymous tweeted.

And, the AnonymousOwn3r account said in response to a question of whether he took down the whole block of DNS (Domain Name System) servers: “yes! it’s not so complex.”

That was followed by: “when i do some DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack i like to let it down by many days , the attack for unlimited time, it can last one hour or one month.”

The AnonymousOwn3r account added, “I’m taking godaddy down bacause (sic) well i’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now.”

Go Daddy has not confirmed whether it was caused by the hacker

During thef down time for many sites, companies and individuals took to Twitter and other social networking sites, to express their anger toward godaddy. So the big question is how will a company bounce back from this?

If you are as feed up as most people are you can easily transfer your domains over to many great sites.

Here are a few recommendations:

Hover.com: Hover is a great company who’s number one priority is customer service. If you call them up there is no computers or waiting on hold, you get a live person right away. I have started to move some of my domains and hope to move the rest by the end of the year.

Dreamhost.com: If you are looking for a great hosting company, you should head over to Dreamhost and check out their competitive pricing plans.

Bluehost.com: It offers affordable hosting plans.

Here are a few other hosting services that are worth a try. I have not personally used the following hosting sites but if you are looking for a bargain on your new domain or hosting, give these a try.

• JustHost
• ipage.com
• webhostinghub
• inmotionhosting
• fatcow
• hostgator

Erik Hoffman

Erik Hoffman is a web designer and computer consultant. He has run a computer consulting company for the past four years where he enhanced businesses by designing and developing user-friendly websites that have helped companies reach targeted revenues.

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