Thalasar Ventures

I am getting intermittent reports that many of Godaddy’s hosting customers are still down after a denial of service attack brought down Godaddy and it’s hosting environment.

Godaddy’s continued insistence rolling it’s own infrastructure is probably to blame. They have a real Not Invented Here attitude which means of course they simply don’t learn the lesson that other major hosting providers have learned. I was unaware of the continued problem until I got a message from my Text link broker

The site http://www.rpg-store.com, which was listed in our inventory, is not currently active. Is this only temporary, or should I permanently remove it form the inventory?

So naturally I called Godaddy customer service. After a short wait I was transferred to Godaddy customer support. Since I have about 1000 or so domains with them, I get my very own rep – who was on vacation.
After telling them my contact information I asked them to check on the domain RPG-store.com. The site was down and as of this writing is still down. When I mentioned to the rep that this might be related to the recent Denial of Service attack and the downtime. The rep said, “What downtime? I am in sales and was unaware of the issue.”
That’s a pretty telling problem right – when your CSRs don’t know about your large multi day downtime you might want to think about better crisis management procedures.
If your site is still down like mine, chime up in the comments and let me know.
Update: I have cancelled my Godaddy.com hosting account. My Google analytics indicated the site has been mostly down for the past 4 days. This is the second Godaddy hosting account I have canceled. I originally tapped them for my Online Business Directory but canceled when it became impossible to set up a basic PHP directory there.
Recommendation: Avoid Godaddy.com’s hosting offering. It’s poorly thought out, and doesn’t use industry standard control panels like Cpanel or Fantastico. Instead they have opted to write their own. As I said at the beginning of the post, they have rolled their own infrastructure and largely ignored industry standard practices.