
GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down - davewasmer
http://www.godaddy.com
======
mmaunder
Some data that may help:

If you're in the rare situation of using GoDaddy DNS but don't use them as a
registrar, then you're in luck. Simply sign up with a new DNS provider. They
will give you their DNS servers which you need to set as the DNS servers that
are authoritative for your domain. Then sign into your registrar and change
the authoritative DNS servers for your domain. There will be a propagation
delay but once it's done you're all set.

If you are in the extremely common situation of having registered your domain
through GoDaddy and also use their DNS service, then you have a problem
because to move to another DNS provider you need to sign into GoDaddy.com to
make the change I've described above i.e. change which DNS provider is
authoritative for your domain. You can't do this until GoDaddy.com is back
online. So what I suggest is that you sign up for a new DNS provider and then
keep checking GoDaddy.com. As soon as it comes back online, sign in and make
the change to your new provider as quick as you can.

Other data:

Whois requests for godaddy domains are currently failing because
whois.godaddy.com is offline due to name resolution failure.

Godaddy's twitter feed is a good source of updates, although they are claiming
to be making progress and all my godaddy DNS hosted domains are still offline,
so it seems to be more marketing speak than real data:
<https://twitter.com/godaddy>

As mentioned, Anonymous seems to be behind it as three tweets on their twitter
account seem to indicate: <https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion>

I don't think the scale of this attack is fully understood yet. According to
the CBC, GoDaddy hosts over 5 million websites (not sure if that's DNS,
registrar, etc) so expect this to be big news and potentially the next
political football.

Edit: And finally, <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/> is down for
everyone because it's over quota. Via Reddit which is also covering this:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/znvwk/godaddycom...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/znvwk/godaddycom_dns_servers_are_completely_down_and/)

~~~
baseh
>> And finally, <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/> is down for everyone
because it's over quota

We need a new site: [http://www.is-downforeveryoneorjustme-
downforeveryoneorjustm...](http://www.is-downforeveryoneorjustme-
downforeveryoneorjustme.com)

Sorry for the useless comment

~~~
eelke
It actually exists:
<http://isdownforeveryoneorjustmedownforeveryoneorjustme.com/>

------
mattdeboard
General question here about upstream outages that can take down your site,
e.g. DNS outage, AWS zone outage, etc.

What to tell your customers when an upstream service provider experiences an
outage? I mean, if you're running ifttt.com your users might be savvy enough
to understand that a DNS outage isn't your fault; but pinterest.com or
whatever (painting with broad strokes here, forgive me) might not have a user
base that would understand that events out of your control have made your site
inaccessible.

How do you reassure your customers? What's the proper tone to take?

~~~
thaumaturgy
At the risk of professing an attitude that I generally dislike: there's no
proper tone to take other than full responsibility. Like Steve Jobs said, when
you're the janitor, reasons matter.

Once you're a service provider -- whether your services in turn rely on other
services or not -- reasons stop mattering. As a practical matter, you and I
know that there's no way you can build a fully scalable, fully redundant
infrastructure from the ground-up in your first week. Hell, if you ever build
that kind of infrastructure at all, you'll be way ahead of most companies.

But, that's the kind of infrastructure you should be working towards building,
all the time. You should have a clear roadmap for ensuring data integrity,
then dealing with security, then dealing with redundancy, and finally high
availability.

If your service falls over for any reason, ultimately it's because you haven't
done something on your roadmap yet. There's no way to explain that to your
customers that doesn't sound like you're trying to pass the fault on to
someone else -- because that's exactly what you're doing.

So just 'fess up to your customers: "one of the services that our business
relies on had some serious technical problems that affected us today, but we
recognize that ultimately it's our responsibility to make sure that our
service is always available to you. We're constantly working on our
infrastructure to make it more reliable, but we clearly still have more work
to do. We will be changing some of our priorities so that this won't be a
problem in the future. Thank you for sticking with us." (And then _do_ it,
otherwise this will backfire on you the next time you have an outage of
similar cause.)

As an aside: I generally take a softer stance towards user responsibilities --
of course everyone should have backups, but Joe Schmoe just doesn't have time
for that -- but a much harder stance towards businesses. Once you accept money
from someone, you put yourself into a position of absolute responsibility for
whatever it is that people rely on you for. If you can't guarantee the
availability of your service or the safety of their data, then you shouldn't
be taking their money.

~~~
quicksilver03
Interesting, at the same time I both agree and disagree with what you wrote.
You're saying that you want to offer 100% uptime, but how much does that cost?
A client paying 5 USD/month has the same uptime expectancy as another one
paying 2000 USD/month?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Oh man. I think I could write a long essay about this. Before I respond, I
should mention that I've been running a business for several years that tries
to break the rules of the price-quality-speed tradeoff, we've offered an alpha
hosting service for a couple of years, and I've recently seen first-hand how
bad it is for both you _and_ your customers if you don't charge enough.

So, my reply in one sentence: a business should never charge less than it
needs to meet its customers' expectations.

I don't think I've ever seen any hosted service brazenly advertise, "It only
costs $4 a month and it's only down for a couple of days a year!" Instead,
hosted services advertise their pricing, and then hide their uptime
"guarantee" (in quotes because it's only a guarantee to the extent that there
might be refunds involved if they don't meet it) somewhere in their fine
print, or as a number that sounds impressive to people who don't know better,
like, "99%!"

The problem with that is that your customers still expect your service to
work. If your customers build a business of their own using your service --
and if you have enough customers, _somebody_ is gonna try to do that -- then
they can be seriously impacted if your service fails. At that point you have
an adversarial relationship with your customer. As a business, you want to
say, "but you're only paying $4 a month! What did you expect?", but as a
customer, that's just about the worst possible response.

I think the race to the bottom in pricing is a really bad idea. GoDaddy's a
really good example to use here. How many of their customers do you think
couldn't afford an extra $1 a month, and at their scale, how much could they
improve their service if they made an extra $1/month per customer? Conversely,
how much damage does GoDaddy do to the hosting industry as a whole every time
they piss off their millions of customers? I think you have to charge enough
money to make your customer happy, and that includes a little extra to make
sure your service continues to grow and improve and that you continue to be
happy so that you'll continue to want to work on your business.

Once the business is up and running at some price point, and your
infrastructure is, let's say, 75% complete, then start looking in to ways to
reduce your price without compromising your service. Maybe if you find a
thousand more customers, some network effects will kick in and you'll be able
to charge everybody a little bit less. Great, go find those customers.

And, let's not ignore that the technology available to service providers right
now is _amazing_. I first wanted to be an ISP in 1995. Back then, your startup
costs were atrocious, the technology was unreliable, documentation was opaque
(no such thing as howtoforge!), and you had to rely on industry fatcats that
would shake with their right hand and shank you with their left.

Now there's Linode, Rackspace, Hurricane Electric, Slicehost, Heroku, Amazon,
and a ton of others, all offering easy-to-use, low-cost, reliable services
that you can build your business on. It's really amazing stuff. While
individually they have sporadic issues, collectively they're rock-solid. So,
unless you're offering a service that cracks hashes, I have trouble imagining
that it would cost as much as $2,000 a month to provide a 100% uptime
guarantee. If you just want to host a particular technology stack for
customers, or provide SaaS, you should be able to engineer a really solid
service for $50/month, tops.

Finally, I left room in my previous comment on this for businesses that are
growing. I don't expect a business to have the perfect infrastructure in place
the day that they launch. I _do_ expect them to, at the very least, have solid
backups in place and an idea of what to do if everything goes upside-down one
day. Then, once they start getting customers, they should focus on improving
their infrastructure. If a business is a year old and they have a few hours'
downtime one day, I don't think to myself, "Pf, amateurs." But, if a business
is two or three years old, and their customers' usernames and passwords just
showed up on pastebin because they wrote their web app in PHP and didn't use
PDO? Yeah, amateurs for sure.

As a thought experiment, imagine if GoDaddy took all the money that they sunk
into Superbowl ads and pretty women and other stupid marketing, and instead
put that money towards being the best damn domain registrar and hosting
service on the internet. I bet you they could monopolize their market. There'd
no longer be any reason at all for any of their customers to use any other
service. There'd no longer be any reason for a potential new customer to _not_
use their service.

So, want to own your market? Build an unbeatable service. (Or product.)

And you have to charge your customers enough money to do that.

------
KrisJordan
It looks like the root of the problem is that their DNS servers are
unresponsive or offline. Web sites and mail whose DNS is hosted on GoDaddy
appear to look "down" because they cannot resolve.

Good push for anyone to switch to DNSMadeEasy or Amazon Route53 if you're
currently caught in this.

Update: It appears Anonymous is behind this
<https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/status/245218636187443200>

~~~
executive
or Nettica

~~~
maratd
or Rackspace, which is free and has an API

<http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/dns/>

There are many, many options.

~~~
ckrailo
Since we're giving options...

For DNS, I recommend dnsimple. They do DNS and domain registration for my
three domains and their UI is amazing. Here's a referral link that, if used,
gives both of us one month free DNS service (which is only $3 anyway).
<https://dnsimple.com/r/96a980397648e9>

~~~
scottbruin
We recently evaluated DNS options for our ~800 domains we host DNS for and
decided to go with DNSMadeEasy. We're not switched over yet but the deciding
factor for me was they're an anycast network and can offer a lot of cool
regional responding if we grow to that size. We want to use vanity domains,
e.g. ns1,2.ourcompany.com so w/ DNSimple that's only two locations that need
to be DDoSed or fail and our sites are down.

~~~
aeden
It's a fair point (DNSimple is unicast). We're working on building out an
Anycast infrastructure, but even that isn't a guarantee for surviving a DDoS.
Bottom line on a DDoS: it's a war of bandwidth and the enemy has all the
advantages. If you must buy bandwidth and you get DDoS'd you have to pay for
that bandwidth, which can be very expensive (not to mention the ongoing
operational costs and the ).

Still, we're going to do our best to switch over to Anycast and continue
building out our infrastructure as we have the capital to do so.

------
ApsoFacto
I'm one of those people you call "stupid", who "deserves what I get". This is
my first time posting here. I've used GD for years. Sure, they try to upsell
me, but being in sales, I don't have a problem with giving them a firm "no
thanks". If you do, that's your problem, not theirs. They're a business, for
goodness sake. Realize that.

And not only my sites are now down, but all the sites I maintain for clients.
If some individual (or group) has done this intentionally, then these people
are responsible for taking hundreds, maybe thousands of small businesses off
line today. They're cutting into their sales, hurting their bottom lines, and
if it continues for too long, will probably lead to people being laid off.

So you can sit on your techie high horses and think you're oh so smart, but
the fact is, these are real business people doing real business and criminals
are hurting them. So you come down on the honest people for signing contracts
and paying their bills on time?

Seriously?

~~~
brokndodge
Agreed. I've been out of work more than 6 months. Right as my family was
packing to move to the closest bridge, I got a call from a company to setup
their servers and finish their web app. With so much on my plate and no time
to do it, I picked the easy and fast route. Use GoDaddy for cheap fast DNS and
deal with it later. I brought our servers online this morning. Database and
all. I was getting congrats and thank yours from the whole office. Now I might
lose the job I just got. Thanks guys. Perhaps you can tell my kids.

~~~
mkr-hn
Don't let the callousness of some posters on HN get to you. I think HN is full
of decent, caring people, even if it's not always obvious. No one deserves
blame for what a criminal did to them.

------
amix
Does anybody have a guide on how to migrate away from GoDaddy without
downtime? And what would you recommend instead? We currently host a bunch of
domains and use their DNS servers.

~~~
rhizome
DNS services cost money, either in staffing or recurring charges, so it really
depends on your budget. Neustar is a nice DNS provider ($50+/mo).

Generally you'll want to set up your new DNS, turn down the refresh on your
existing DNS domains, wait $old_refresh or so, then change your
primary/secondaries listed at your registrar to point at your new DNS.

~~~
KenCochrane
I have to disagree with your 'Neustar is a nice DNS provider' statement. I
used them for 2 years, most of that time I was unhappy but because I was
locked into a contract I had to wait it out or else pay a hefty breakage fee.

Their website/UI wasn't any good, very dated, they even rolled out a new one
before I left, but that was horrible, they used AJAX everywhere, just for the
sake of using it, and it made usability horrible.

Their support sucked as well, you would need to submit a ticket, and they take
forever to get back to you, and they don't say anything besides "it looks fine
to me". If you try and call them, you end up talking with someone who has no
idea what they are talking about (same customer support line, for multiple
products), or they don't speak english well.

You end up paying per DNS query, which is a really expensive way to pay for
DNS, we were paying thousands of dollars a month to them for DNS alone.

Their advanced DNS services (DNS load balanceer and DNS failover) where very
basic, and getting them setup correctly was a PITA.

There DNS service was nice until it crashed, which didn't happen often, but
when it did, it took down half the internet with them.

[http://cyberinsecure.com/ddos-attack-against-neustar-hits-
ma...](http://cyberinsecure.com/ddos-attack-against-neustar-hits-major-
websites-including-amazon-wal-mart-expedia/)

I personally wouldn't have picked them to be our provider if it wasn't for one
of our investors telling us how great they are and we needed to use them. I
should have listened to my gut, but I also didn't want to piss off the guy
paying the bills.

YMMV, but I would say, stand clear, and go to one of the newer folks doing the
same thing for much less the cost, and more features.

~~~
rhizome
I know them from the secondary.com days, so I'm sorry to hear that they've
declined.

------
dshankar
Anonymous is claiming responsibility:
<http://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/status/245218636187443200>

~~~
debacle
They claim responsibility for everything now, though.

~~~
goostavos
There's a 'declaration of war' at least once a week with these guys. So who
knows what they actually do, if anything.

~~~
sharkweek
And by "these guys," it's most commonly anyone with an internet connection and
a bone to pick. Saw some ridiculous attempt the other day to brand an attack
on 9GAG with the anon logo.

~~~
milkmiruku
It's an 'interesting[1]' and.. 'silly[2]' narrative.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/9gag_repost_mac...](http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/9gag_repost_machine_explained)

[2] <http://i.imgur.com/hOWaD.jpg>

------
azarias
This thread demonstrates that HN needs a comment collapse button a la reddit.
The first comment thread, mostly useless, is taking most of the page, and no
way to collapse it.

~~~
gvb
Here: <http://niyaz.pk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/hn.html>

Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474078>

------
nord
Anonymous is claiming responsibility:
<http://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/status/245218636187443200>

~~~
whafro
As much as I dislike GoDaddy, and am glad I've switched away, I can't see how
this kind of attack can possibly result in progress towards Anonymous's goals.
It serves only to make them seem like radical thugs, far from being aggressive
protectors of internet freedom.

~~~
nord
My thoughts exactly. This isn't affecting just GoDaddy but a great number of
other sites (including mine, unfortunately).

~~~
tux1968
That's kinda the point though isn't it? Why is anyone still using GoDaddy
after SOPA / elephant killing / earlier outages / etc? For me at least,
there's no excuse in supporting this company with my business.

~~~
etagwerker
I'd switched half of my domains to Namecheap. I was waiting to migrate the
other half. I do not support them, but I had hired their service before SOPA
and I just didn't want to pay twice.

------
druiid
I'm assuming they're adding the Verisign DDoS protection service, but this
change should make EVERY single Godaddy client very, very, very nervous (from
the current whois):

    
    
       Domain Name: GODADDY.COM
       Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
       Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
       Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
       Name Server: A1.VERISIGNDNS.COM
       Name Server: A2.VERISIGNDNS.COM
       Name Server: A3.VERISIGNDNS.COM
       Status: clientDeleteProhibited
       Status: clientRenewProhibited
       Status: clientTransferProhibited
       Status: clientUpdateProhibited
       Updated Date: 10-sep-2012
       Creation Date: 02-mar-1999
       Expiration Date: 01-nov-2021
    
    

Yes, you read that right... they just implemented verisign name-servers. A
multi-multi million (billion?) dollar company.

~~~
aeden
That's a very interesting observation. When you say it should make current
clients nervous, what angle are you thinking of? The angle that they should be
nervous because GoDaddy had to go to someone else for this type of service or
that Verisign is now involved?

~~~
druiid
The angle that a company responsible for hosting DNS, site hosting, SSL and
similar services is incapable of bringing their own site back up without
resorting to using a competitors services.

~~~
mongol
Yes but still.. why so very very nervous? I value that they get things working
as soon as possible. After that I can switch.

~~~
druiid
I'd say (although until seeing the DDoS numbers, I suppose I can't assume
anything) that any large hosting provider like this should have an
infrastructure in place for taking care of a large attack like this. To have
any less at this late a stage in the game for them, speaks of a general enough
incompetence as to be enough reason to move services, let alone 'political'
type reasons.

I've seen (and experienced) 10Gigabit+ DDoS attacks and generally they end up
taking down the entire data-center, but that's smaller provider levels. I
can't imagine that level of attack should take down Godaddy, but then who
knows what they're actually running behind the scenes. Essentially, what I'm
saying... is this is a large enough issue with the internet today that a
provider this large should have had at least SOME protections in place for
this already (And perhaps Verisign might have been a decent enough choice, or
Prolexic...).

~~~
mongol
Yes.. it is very bad of them, I agree. I just don't see the point in being
very nervous. They will sort it out and I can switch. It is not like my domain
is stolen and can't be taken back.

------
semenko
Thread on Outages:
[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/...](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/4228)

The GoDaddy status page proudly announces "No issues to report":
<http://support.godaddy.com/system-alerts/>

During last week's GoDaddy mail outage, they had no status info posted, even
hours after reports on NANOG/Outages:
[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/...](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/4207)

~~~
fhars
The status page is actually unreachable, as the domain name does not resolve
:-).

~~~
semenko
I probably had the A record cached, after the mail outage ...

------
Bill_Dimm
I love their latest tweet (1:35pm Eastern):

 _Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with
our site. We're working on it._

That understates things by several orders of magnitude. It's not just their
site that is down, it's their domain name servers, so most websites that
bought their domain from GoDaddy are unreachable (unless you are working off
of cached domain data).

~~~
bwhalley
Only if they bought from GoDaddy & also host their DNS there. If you host your
DNS elsewhere (eg Dreamhost) your site is still up right now.

Most people who buy from GoDaddy probably host their DNS there as well though.

------
mckilljoy
I don't use GoDaddy, nor do I particularly like them, so this doesn't really
affect me or my business directly.

But I got a call earlier today from my less tech-savvy buddy who was freaking
out because his GoDaddy website was down. Yea it is probably "his fault" for
choosing them, and he probably "deserves it".

Still, not everyone is born a leet computer hacker, and sometimes this is the
only way people will learn, so I'm trying not to be too hard on people for
that.

------
ajennings
1\. Add the following lines to your hosts file (/etc/hosts on unix/osx,
\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows):

    
    
      216.69.149.215 mya.godaddy.com
      216.69.149.90 idp.godaddy.com
      216.69.149.9 dcc.godaddy.com
    

2\. Go to <https://mya.godaddy.com/> to manage your GoDaddy accounts.

3\. Change DNS providers.

------
dollar
Interesting whois for GoDaddy. :)

GODADDY.COM.VATAXIDERMIST.COM GODADDY.COM.THEYOUNGCONS.COM
GODADDY.COM.THEVILLAGEAT63RDSTREET.COM GODADDY.COM.THEFOREXTHIEF.COM
GODADDY.COM.THECOTTONWIFE.COM GODADDY.COM.TEST.CHUMCHUM.NET
GODADDY.COM.STAGEDOORPRODUCTIONS.COM GODADDY.COM.SKATEONGRANDROLLERRINK.COM
GODADDY.COM.SHOPCOULSDON.COM GODADDY.COM.SHIRLEEMCGARRY.COM
GODADDY.COM.SETHPAPA.COM GODADDY.COM.SANGRAALBODYWORK.COM
GODADDY.COM.RESPECTED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM GODADDY.COM.REMEDIASERVICES.COM
GODADDY.COM.QUINTAFLORIDA.COM GODADDY.COM.QHSSE.COM
GODADDY.COM.PISSEDOFFPEOPLEOFAMERICA.COM GODADDY.COM.MYANHOMEINSPECTION.COM
GODADDY.COM.MUTTLANDMEADOWS.COM GODADDY.COM.MICHALPOE.COM
GODADDY.COM.MERCHANTSSTORES.COM GODADDY.COM.LOVE8PLANET.COM
GODADDY.COM.LEVIATHANCOMPUTERS.NET GODADDY.COM.LANDLCONNECTION.COM
GODADDY.COM.KARLAADAMS.COM GODADDY.COM.JESSICABOAL.COM
GODADDY.COM.IXCANADESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.INDYMETROWOMAN.COM
GODADDY.COM.GGONYA.NET GODADDY.COM.GDDAS.COM GODADDY.COM.FLORIDASURETY.COM
GODADDY.COM.FLETCHERANDFLETCHERPHOTOGRAPHY.COM GODADDY.COM.EZGRAPHICSLOGOS.COM
GODADDY.COM.ERICAMDESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.EAGLEEYEHOMEMONITORING.COM
GODADDY.COM.CLIFFYCELLS.COM GODADDY.COM.CAKEMUFFIN.COM
GODADDY.COM.BERNADETTEHAROLD.COM GODADDY.COM.BANGALORESRESTAURANTS.COM
GODADDY.COM.AUTHORMARIONBROWN.COM
GODADDY.COM.AND.ALEX.FUCKED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM
GODADDY.COM.ANALOGANIMALRECORDS.COM GODADDY.COM.ALEXANDREAREINA.COM
GODADDY.COM.AIPOS.NET GODADDY.COM.1BEAUTYPRO.COM GODADDY.COM

~~~
ceejayoz
Do that for any large website and you'll see the same thing.

~~~
reustle
GODADDY.COM.AND.ALEX.FUCKED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM

------
CD1212
I just got an email from GoDaddy beginning: 'Todays Lesson -...'. I thought
this might go into their service being down, backups or failover protection.

But no, it carried on to: 'Today's Lesson - SAVINGS! 20% OFF*'

------
maerek
Literally just transferred all of my domain names and DNS hosting away from
GoDaddy last night. Should have done it after the SOPA fiasco - glad I didn't
wait until today!

------
crisnoble
Relevant guide to ditching GoDaddy: [http://lifehacker.com/5794507/how-to-
jump-ship-from-godaddy-...](http://lifehacker.com/5794507/how-to-jump-ship-
from-godaddy-to-a-better-web-host)

------
arihant
GoDaddy has been providing me with excellent customer support for a decade.
I'm not sure what the hate is all about.

Sure, they didn't take my side in the SOPA debate, but I'd rather live in a
world where everyone is entitled to their opinion.

I'm also not comfortable with a group calling themselves "Hackers" giving my
profession a foul name by activities like this. This is like bombing a nation
which doesn't have same views as yours. Hackers, they are not. Shameful.

~~~
CaveTech
My experience with GoDaddy has been nothing but negative. The latest being a
SSL certificate I purchased 9 months ago. They auto renewed the certificate at
full price 90 days in advance, without any warning whatsoever. Partially my
fault for not opting out (but I was unaware that I ever opted in). Most
services that auto-renew give you a warning prior to the imminent date.

When I asked for a refund, I was told I could only get in store credit. In
store credit for a virtual good that hasn't been activated/used and arguably
charged without my consent? Joke of a company.

------
chucknelson
Shouldn't we all know to use hover.com by now? Don't you all listen to 5by5
podcasts?! :)

<http://5by5.tv/partners/hover>

~~~
crisnoble
Do you use them? Why would $50 / year for one domain and one email be a good
idea?

------
orienwu
There's a discussion about this on WHT.

<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1190617>

------
sandeep45
so every site hosted on goddady just fell off the internet

~~~
whafro
and, of course, not just those traditionally "hosted," but every domain
registered there using their nameservers, which I'm sure is the vast majority.

~~~
autotravis
I'm half and half. Insert recommendation for name.com here.

------
lobster45
This has been a known vulnerability for dns, as they are susceptible to DOS.
We use network solutions for DNS but they can be taken down in a similar
manner as GoDaddy.

BTW one of the servers we needed to access did not resolve, but I was able to
connect via IP instead of DNS. Host file baby!

------
wethesheeple
In other news, IP addresses are still working. ;)

So what can we conclude from this incident?

GoDaddy's registrar service GoDaddy's authoritative DNS service GoDaddy's
hosting service GoDaddy SSL certificates etc.

They are all different services. When you link them all together and give
GoDaddy control over your entire setup, if there's a problem with any one
service, you can't recover as easily as if they were each handled
independently. meme: "Do one thing well."

"All-in-one" solutions, though they might provide convenience, might come at a
cost in terms of disaster recovery. meme: SPOF

I wonder if this thinking might also apply to software: using a single, large
"all-in-one" program versus using lots of smaller, independent (and
replaceable) programs.

------
wethesheeple
Why is GoDaddy excluded from the requirement to provide port 43 whois service?
Are they special? To my knowledge you can only get whois information on
GoDaddy domain names from their website. Why only HTTP whois? Are they front-
running?

------
zrail
I recently rented a VPS specifically so I could run my own DNS. I use
tinydns[1] on the VPS as a stealth primary to host my zones and then use
BuddyNS[2] as my secondary. It works seamlessly and wasn't that hard to set up
if you know how to work a command line.

Of course, if someone were to do this same thing to BuddyNS I would be up a
creek for a little while, but I could just login to Namecheap and point to a
different secondary.

[1]: <http://tinydns.org/>

[2]: <http://www.buddyns.com/>

~~~
driverdan
With API controllable services like CloudFlare (free) and Route 53 (cheap) why
would you want the headache of running your own server?

~~~
zrail
Mostly for the knowledge that only comes from doing it myself. I looked into
using Route53 but I would have had to build something for my dynamic DNS
anyway.

------
kaiserama
Sure someone will post this as a new story, but it appears DNS services are
back online. I checked a few of the sites I manage and they are now working.

Now I need to bust a nut and get things moved off ASAP.

~~~
mrbuttons454
It was back briefly for me, and now it's down again.

------
veyron
Someone (I'm looking at you, gandi.net) should give a "GoDaddy is Down"
discount for domain registration. I'm ready to migrate the domains I didn't
change during the SOPA fiasco ...

------
jaequery
It appears all that time/money spent putting into backups, replication, SANs,
and redundancy goes down the toilet when your domain registrar goes down

------
pointless
I found this hoping to gather some information about the DNS attack. And
instead all I found was that as a nonprofit without enough money to invest in
IT staff who might "know better", it's just too bad that we can't accept
donations on our website for our homeless children we support because by using
GoDaddy we got what we deserved. Was hoping to find information, but that
isn't quite what I got.

------
domainguy
I had domains with them marked "auto renew" that mysteriously had that status
changed. Since all my domains were "auto renew" I wasn't monitoring my renewal
notices. Suddenly I discovered that several domains had expired and had been
purchased by others. Now that sucks and is a good reason for me to find
another registrar, in addition to the moral misgivings I already had about
them!

------
vadimkatchkakov
and so, anonymous, after all this, why is <http://www.scientology.org> still
up???

------
robomartin
Godaddy.com is back up! (~4:45PM PST 10SEP12)

I'd be really interesting to get some behind-the-scenes data on what happened
and what it took to fix it.

------
wrath
I'm against SOPA and these laws as much as the next guy and I don't agree with
many of stances that godaddy takes, but assuming they were really hacked, it's
because of idiots like anonymous that our freedom on the internet is in
jeopardy. This kind of stuff will simply promote the governments around the
world to pass laws regulating the internet.

------
circa
man.. i'm so glad I jumped ship on my GoDaddy issues years ago. they were
awful in every way. looks like they still are.

------
ominds
I don't much care for blame as much as I care for alternatives. Who do some of
the largest sites register their domains with? And I mean reliable and fast.
For example, a whois showed me ycombinator.com is with EASYDNS TECHNOLOGIES.
Google is with MARKMONITOR INC, which is totally overkill I bet. Suggestions?
Recommendations?

~~~
jwarzech
I def. would recommend dnsimple.com (I think I pay only $3 a month). They have
a lot of templates to easily add records for heroku, blogs, and google apps.

------
mongol
I have a kind of unvoluntary ping to my mailbox hosted at Gmail / Google Apps,
"Buy Vigara" (sic) messages that arrive with a few minutes intervals since
months ago. Google sorts them as spam correctly, but it is interesting to see
how they are less and less frequent over the past hours. (Yes my domain is on
godaddy)

------
druiid
Is there any word on if this is a DDoS type attack (I've seen things like
request saturation attacks on DNS servers before)? Or, is it an actual exploit
issue? Seems perhaps that it might be the latter from what I've seen so far...
Anon is claiming it is only one of their guys responsible for this outage.

------
jbursky
Customer phone lines are down also.

------
jbarham
FWIW I run the DNS hosting service SlickDNS (<https://www.slickdns.com>). The
focus is ease-of-use, but there is also good redundancy with multiple name
servers located in the US, UK and Japan.

------
jakeburtn
I tried to set up my site on CloudFlare but it say's that it's not a valid
domain name. I think they might be checking the DNS records for the site
before you can set it up so it appears to be invalid. Does anyone know a way
around this?

~~~
jakeburtn
It seems there is no way around it,
[http://support.cloudflare.com/kb/troubleshooting/why-am-i-
ge...](http://support.cloudflare.com/kb/troubleshooting/why-am-i-getting-a-
not-a-registered-domain-error-message) \- so can anyone recommend other DNS
providers? (preferably free)

~~~
druiid
I've had good success in the past with <http://www.zoneedit.com/>

It's not free but close enough to it for your purposes here.

~~~
johnnyvangogh
I use division120.. never had any problems, easy to use, clean simple
interface.

<http://www.division120.com/>

------
Ensorceled
I moved the bulk of the sites I manage off of GD when the SOPA thing happened
but left a couple because the pain of transferring was to much (read, client
didn't want to).

Surprisingly, all the reasons to stay on GD vanished this afternoon :-P

------
knodi
Looks like the primary server cluster that handles all the incoming traffic at
godaddy for all their went down. This caused the traffic failover to secondary
servers which where unable to handle the load and crash.

ETA is 6 hours

~~~
aeden
Do you have a link to where you found this? Sounds interesting.

------
sebiw
German hosting provider Hetzner, also had a DNS outage about one hour ago.

------
letslink
GoDaddy never struck me as a particularly evil corporation, just practical.
But I would be interested to hear any recommendations for an alternative
hosting company, and the logic behind the choice.

~~~
ckrailo
For hosting alternatives, you'd have to describe what you want. Heroku for
rails is nice and is built on Amazon's EC2 stuff (which you could use for
other apps)... for VPSes, I like Linode a lot.

For DNS, I recommend dnsimple. They do DNS and domain registration for my
three domains and their UI is amazing. Here's a referral link that, if used,
gives both of us one month free DNS service (which is only $3 anyway).
<https://dnsimple.com/r/96a980397648e9>

~~~
letslink
Thanks for the tips, ckrailo. Will check those out.

~~~
ckrailo
Sure! Two more tips...

!) Look for hosting companies that are targeting developers (Linode and Heroku
are both good at this). The tools and UI will be more sane and you'll have a
more pleasant interaction.

2) Avoid bargain bin VPS services for anything that's not a playground. If it
can't disappear tomorrow forever, it's not bargain-bin material.

------
fledgeling
So.... just to get the ball rolling here... what did GoDaddy do to piss
everyone off so much that they raised the ire of Anonymous? Other than the
choice of Danika as a spokesmodel, I mean.

~~~
pmocek
GoDaddy's service is non-exceptional, their Web UI is clearly focused more on
up-sales than on helping customers get work done, their [advertisements are
sexist][1], their [attempts to police the Internet][2] are an affront to free
speech, they [lobbied for the horrible SOPA until it appeared likely that
continuing to do so would hurt their bottom line][3], and their
[founder/former-CEO][4] is a hyperaggressive douchebag who [kills elephants
for fun][5].

References:

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy.com#Marketing> (Wikipedia:
GoDaddy.com: Marketing) [2]:
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/01/godaddy_defends/> ("GoDaddy Defends
SecLists Takedown," Kevin Poulsen, January 25, 2007, Threat Level) [3]:
[http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57349913-281/godaddy-
bows-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57349913-281/godaddy-bows-to-
boycott-now-opposes-sopa-copyright-bill/) ("GoDaddy bows to boycott, now
'opposes' SOPA copyright bill," Declan McCullagh, December 29, 2011, CNET
News) [4]: <http://www.bobparsons.me> (Bob Parsons) [5]:
[http://abcnews.go.com/Business/daddy-ceo-bob-parsons-
africa-...](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/daddy-ceo-bob-parsons-africa-
elephant-hunt-video/story?id=13279206#.UE5SZiNH92M) ("Go Daddy CEO Bob
Parsons: Africa Elephant Hunt Video 'Nothing to Be Ashamed Of'," Susanna Kim
and Michael S. James, April 2, 2011, ABC News)

------
mstachowiak
For those looking for a quick route around, you can find GoDaddy's IP address
here: <http://who.is/dns/godaddy.com/>

------
vivyrelax
An other site like downforeveroneorjustme.com is: <http://www.cherchezvous.ca>
french site but work for any site.

------
frannk
<https://www.dnspod.com> is a good FREE dns provider, focusing on
domain/record management, you can have a try;

~~~
chuangbo
looks very good

------
savories
We've been on GD since our company (ecomm with revenue in mm) was founded with
zero issues.

Now we need to switch to DynDNS asap who say they are getting tons of calls
right now

------
shebson
They now have the DNS working for their own site, which means you can now log
in and change your nameservers to another service like Route53.

------
ApsoFacto
Godaddy has their email servers back on line already. I almost hope this was a
hack attack, just to show how fast they could deal with it.

------
sgt
I use gratisdns.dk, excellent free DNS service that I've used to years with
high reliability. Helps to be able to read danish.

------
brian_cloutier
Wow, just last week I finally started paying for DNS and migrated from
GoDaddy. I didn't expect it to pay off this quickly!

------
telecuda
Is any DNS/host outside of GoDaddy also effected right now? We're not on
GoDaddy but having plenty of intermittent issues.

------
philip1209
I have a client that uses Godaddy email - I assume this means that any emails
sent during the outage will be forever lost.

~~~
roadnottaken
I was just wondering about this. Does anyone know what happens to e-mails sent
to domains that aren't resolving? Do they really just get lost?

------
dhimes
OK-- long shot here: Would anybody happen to have (or know how I can get) the
ip address for yiiframework.com?

~~~
crisnoble
I don't know the ip but maybe this could help you:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiifram...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiiframework.com)

~~~
dhimes
Thank you!

------
frannk
ALL GoDaddy DNS monitor site: <http://www.dnsgua.com/>

~~~
charonn0
For those who don't read Chinese, the first column "Last 5 Minutes", the
second is "Last 10 minutes", the third is "Last 15 Minutes" and the fourth is
"Today,the failure rate".

------
X-Istence
I am able to resolve www.godaddy.com, but I am unable to reach their web
server on port 80 or 443.

------
Kurtz79
Even Coursera is down...

<http://twitter.com/coursera>

------
sjsotelo
<http://status.godaddy.com/>

~~~
druiid
Not to be snarky... but unfortunately their status page is down as well.

------
danielweber
DNS seems to be a universally bad service. It seems to be what everyone skimps
on.

------
throwaway54-762
Latest mirror from archive.org for those experiencing the slashdot effect:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110724055653/http://www.godaddy...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110724055653/http://www.godaddy.com/)

------
mythz
What are the best DNS servers that can be used instead?

~~~
ckrailo
For DNS, I recommend dnsimple. They do DNS and domain registration for my
three domains and their UI is amazing. Here's a referral link that, if used,
gives both of us one month free DNS service (which is only $3 anyway).
<https://dnsimple.com/r/96a980397648e9>

------
cardine
You should be using Moniker</conversation>

------
mariuz
whois godaddy.com

<https://gist.github.com/3693075>

~~~
semenko
Unfortunately, that's just WHOIS spam, a known (& annoying) problem.

To clear things up a bit: $ whois =godaddy.com

See: [http://superuser.com/questions/37954/how-to-use-command-
line...](http://superuser.com/questions/37954/how-to-use-command-line-whois-
for-spam-infected-domains-like-apple-com)

------
jakeburtn
Seems like it's working again

------
prawn
An elephant never forgets.

------
juddlyon
Burn baby burn!

I usually don't root against companies but they are exceptionally bad.

------
taf2
yep, this just took twilio down

------
gbin
The elephants are thanking Anonymous...

------
uptownhr
internet holocaust!

------
yoshhhhi
damn! my bussines is down!!!

------
drivebyacct2
If you are using GoDaddy for anything, you deserve what you get. If you are
using GoDaddy for not just registration but also for DNS, I would just fix it
as soon as possible and not tell anyone.

Also, do backups, use good password practices, and everything else that
everyone knows and the lazy will still fail to do.

Oh, 20 seconds in and a downvote. I can take them, I didn't ignore the last 8
problems GoDaddy has been responsible for lately and am not hurting from this
outage.

~~~
qeorge
This is an example of comments that are hurting HN's quality.

Absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion, just snark. Yet for some
reason its the highest voted comment.

~~~
saurik
So, I had both upvoted that guy's comment and flagged this entire thread (as
in, the top-level post). To me, and I think to many other people, what is
actually the core problem with HN is that it is being flooded with a ton of
what is pretty much "spam": posts that are either repetitive (either to
content from years ago, or even to content from last week) or content that are
informing people of things that should be prerequisite knowledge.

In this case, the problem is that DNS is a distributed database, and the idea
that people are hosting websites with all of their DNS from a single provider
that is at the same time acting as their registrar (whose only purpose in the
DNS infrastructure is to mediate your ability to change your DNS servers and
renew your account) is horrific: it means something horrendously wrong has
occurred in this community.

Meanwhile, the comments here are just strange: people talking about "switching
providers without downtime" when the whole point of how DNS works is that you
can have arbitrarily many servers and thereby have multiple providers hosting
your zones at once. To even have a webpage in the first place you had to setup
DNS, and if you somehow skipped that step then you probably skipped tons of
other important steps. :(

Reading this entire thread is thereby just depressing: this isn't some
advanced corner case of A/B testing leading to improved knowledge of how to do
pricing, this is web hosting 101. Yet, somehow, we have 308 upvotes and 238
comments that have been left about an outage of a single provider for the only
component in the entire stack of a website where you almost have to go out of
your way to _not_ have fault tolerance.

Then, as opposed to trying to get this discussion out of the way as soon as
possible, we are just being flooded with a combination of people claiming that
this is important, and that those who disagree are being "snarky", combined
with opportunistic bloggers submitting tutorials like the "GoDaddy Outage: How
to Migrate to AWS Route 53" that was just posted.

Therefore, I will claim that it isn't drivebyacct2 that is indicative of a
loss of HN quality: it is instead that somehow any of this was relevant in the
first place, and that once posted it keeps spreading. I can understand people
being interested when AWS or Heroku or even GitHub goes offline, but no one on
Hacker News should care if GoDaddy DNS goes offline.

~~~
DASD
Unfortunately lack of hosting-related knowledge is indicative through and
through here even to the actual startups out of YC. Is it too much to ask for
someone to know the latest buzz about Rails but can't spell DNS? Good luck if
you choose this as your crusade to educate.

<http://syskall.com/yc-w12-startups-hosting-decisions>

<http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html>

~~~
drivebyacct2
"Good luck if you choose" to start a startup without understanding one of the
most fundamental technologies that allows users to view your site.

------
kknate
Hey - everything is pretty much down right now, who thinks it's just godaddy?
You should get a dog, name is clue - then you would have one.

<http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm>

~~~
adrianpike
Looks like all of the routers that that's showing as down have been down for a
long long time.

