Alternative DNS hosting and Godaddy downtime

We, as many other businesses, are trying to keep our costs down to stay competitive on the market. We understand the importance of data storage reliability and data consistency. That's why we don't outsource server support, we maintain our datacenter and servers by our own staff and using our own resources.

Unfortunately, our attempt to cut costs on letting Godaddy take responsibility of our DNS (domain naming system) did not work as well.

As many of you probably read on CNN and other news web sites yesterday, Godaddy has been brought down by a massive denial of service attack. While we can certainly feel for Godaddy and their network engineers that had a hard day yesterday, we cannot afford being taken down during the busiest work hours.

We do consider our service unique and special. Understanding that we are not alone in the company of millions other web sites, does not make us feel comfortable at all. Our dedication goes to our customers at any cost, and we will not sit quietly waiting for another downfall of Godaddy or any other third party provider for that matter.

We are currently researching how Godaddy managed or rather didn't manage to hold the attack with their huge infrastructure and astronomical budgets. Of course it is almost impossible to tell exactly what happened, and it's pretty clear that Godaddy will never disclose any real details on that. Our preliminary conclusion is that they did not have enough redundancy at the network hardware level. Let their engineers do the work and rebuild what was not done properly in the first place.

Our next step is to research how we can prevent such a problem in the future. The answer seems to be simple. Stay independent, listen, learn, and be proactive. We are currently working on moving away the DNS and some of our domains to a different provider.


Update: Godaddy confirmed that there was no attack, there was an internal network problem. Most if not all owners of sites who were hosting with Godaddy at the time have received some compensation in the form of a month credit. Domain owners whose DNS was managed by Godaddy and which was broken for half a day did not receive anything.