In case you didn’t hear the news GoDaddy.com and millions of its customers website have experienced major downtime for their websites and e-mail as a result of an attack by someone affiliated with Anonymous. Hundreds of frantic customers have swarmed to technology news outlets such as Techcrunch, The Next Web and others to leave comments about how angry they are with Anonymous over this outage.
In reality these customers of GoDaddy should be angry at themselves for settling with a “budget hosting” provider which is notorious for providing cheap web hosting and dns services. Common sense tells us you get what you pay for and when it comes to the customers effected today there is no exception to that philosophy.
How could this have been avoided?
I often am amazed by how many small business owners or people who are trying to be successful online seek out the cheapest web hosting they possibly can. There are a few web hosting companies that people should avoid and among those are Godaddy, HostGator, BlueHost and MediaTemple Grid Service (Reviews for all of these providers are bad). If you pick any of those services then expect occasional downtime, unreliable and slow hosting coupled with poor customer service and possible security issues.
I am constantly telling people seeking advice on hosting platforms for blogs and websites that if they use WordPress they should checkout WPEngine and for all other hosting needs DreamHost is an excellent option but lets not forget Linode or Rackspace if you are capable of managing your own server.
I think it is also important for people to start looking at solutions like Cloudflare that have an “Always Online” feature which will keep your website online even if your web host fails.
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Edit: Forbes Magazine just published an article citing “Five Reasons You Should Leave GoDaddy (And How)”