What we can learn for GoDaddy’s Outage Today-

Even the big boys can have troubles. Today GoDaddy was hacked. The attacker caused GoDaddy’s master DNS servers to not resolve domain names- effectively taking out email and websites for millions of users.

Millions of people around the world use GoDaddy for domain registration (they are a great and cheap registrar) and use the free DNS service provided when you register an account.  If you use their free DNS service your name servers would be something like ns???.secureserver.net or ns???.domaincontrol.net and your website, redirects and inbound email would be down even if you do not host your email or website with GoDaddy.

DNS is basically the address book of the internet.  If the address book is taken offline traffic for domain does not know where to go.  Email stops flowing, websites don’t display and it can have a serious negative impact on your business.

If you’re using a 3rd party mail provider like Google Apps- your outbound email will still work but your inbound mail will not work.   Most email providers will queue inbound email for some hours (usually 2-72 hours) so when GoDaddy service returns you may get some of your missed emails

All domains are required to have at least 2 name servers listed for redundancy— BUT in this case both name servers were attacked so domain resolution is not possible.

So how can you protect yourself? To be truly protected you should diversify your DNS- having duplicate records on GoDaddy as well as a 3rd party like www.DNSMadeEasy.com or Amazon’s Route53 service.

If you registered your domain name with GoDaddy but changed your name servers to ones given to you by your hosting company your website and email will not be impacted by this hack- however this is a good time to review your DNS records and if your systems are mission critical ask your hosting provider to assist you with improving the redundancy in your DNS records.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2012 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.