As everyone now knows, GoDaddy suffered a major outage yesterday, which caused this site to be down for four hours.
It wasn’t that big a deal for me. I maintain this site as a labor of love, not as a business, so I didn’t lose any money over the outage. For others, that wasn’t the case. Still, I was surprised by the vitriolic response by many people. Frustration forced people to jump to conclusions that didn’t necessarily have evidence to back them up. For instance, a lot of people blamed Anonymous for the hack. They did this because someone on the Internet with a Twitter handle that had the word “anonymous” in it claimed to be the attacker. With no evidence. It could have been just a person in a room being a dick. Who knows!
What bothered me most about the outage was the barrage of ambulance-chasing hosting companies that came out of the woodwork to kick GoDaddy when they were down. Kind of sad that they would do this, but I think it shows how desperate they are for business–which is probably not a good sign for their future outlook.
I don’t agree with all of GoDaddy’s decisions and positions, but my purpose in switching to them last year was to avoid the maintenance headaches and outages I had with my previous hosting service. And since I have switched to them from my previous hosting service, I have not had any problems and not had to stress that my site would be down. Yesterday was the first time. And I would point out that GoDaddy advertises 99.9% uptime. Over the course of a year, there are 8,776 hours. A 99.9% uptime means that a service is only unavailable for 8.7 hours for the entire year. GoDaddy was down for 4 hours yesterday so–at least for me–they are still well within their 99.9% uptime threshold.
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The only irritating part was that with their outage, my email servers were down the entire time and since I use my email for business that really screwed up my ability to communicate with editing clients, etc. But I have never had outage problems with them before either and still consider the switch a good move. They are generally quite reliable.