GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down (opens in new tab)

>> 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...

Sorry for the useless comment

"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."

Assumes of course that people have their zone file to refer to. Which they should. Even if you don't know what a zone file is it's probably a good idea to at the very least make a screen grab of the information where the info is shown at your registrar. Or just use dig from the command line (see my comment further down for syntax).

> You can't do this until GoDaddy.com is back online.

You actually can. You will have to modify your /etc/hosts file, go to your GoDaddy account and change to a new DNS service (name servers)

I followed the instructions in this post and I solved the GoDaddy hell for my sites:

http://davewasmer.tumblr.com/post/31283249223/migrating-from...

I have seen my GoDaddy sites coming on one at a time over the last hour. They are making progress.

godaddy.com is back up as of 4:45PM PST

Good question. I believe in explaining as clearly as possible, but ultimately in taking responsibility. You chose the provider, decided on the level of risk you're comfortable with, and that ultimately failed. It was that choice that got in the way of your users.

If you can point to ways you'll improve the service in the future as a result of the outage, all the better.

When we had a large DoS attack at Posterous, I wrote two posts, one as soon as possible (http://blog.posterous.com/todays-outage-and-changes-for-cust...), and the next as a bit of a post-mortem (http://blog.posterous.com/moving-forward). Both explained that there were many factors beyond our control, but that the responsibility was ultimately ours, and we were working to learn from the event and improve our services as a result.

They weren't perfect posts, but I think they went a long way toward being open and honest with our users in the midst of a major negative event.

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.

I don't think there's a tone you can take that will make non-technical users understand that it's "not your fault". To the non-technical user your site is just down and, potentially, a service they're paying for is unavailable.

I'd argue that such an outage _is_ your fault. If you're worried about Customer perceptions as a result of outages of third-party services your site relies on then, I'd argue, you need to have redundancy in your choice of third-party services. If it's important enough to worry about it should be important enough to spend some money on and do something about. If that drives up your costs then your product's cost, to your Customers, needs to reflect that.

NearlyFreeSpeech has reliable, simple to use DNS service. I've used it for years without issue.

or Nettica

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.

I'd imagine from their POV, when you continue doing business with a company they find morally reprehensible, you're no longer "honest people". If their end goal is killing GoDaddy, these collateral losses might be worth it. Also, it might have a positive side-effect of people associating more risk with dealing with shady companies.

If you are only using them for DNS (and assuming their DNS works again) you can simply setup the new dns somewhere but not switch the DNS at your registrar. Until the dns is working at the new dns provider (and you would query it to find that out).

Example:

1) setup amixdomain.com at, say, zoneedit.com (not recommending them just using as an example).

2) Wait a bit, say several hours then use a dns utility like the one at kloth.net to query the two zoneedit.com dns servers directly. If both of them answer for your domain you are in good shape. I don't know what the lag is until zoneedit reloads their dns. It could be in a minute or it could take longer (which is why you can just wait).

Or you can use the OSX (or equivalent on other platforms) dig tool from the command line as follows, using ycombinator.com as an example:

Edit: What I meant to say was "if you have a mac open a terminal session and use dig" sorry for seeming to implying that dig is an OSX tool.

dig @NS1.EASYDNS.COM ycombinator.com 'A'

yc's servers are, so I picked one. You want to query all the dns servers:

   Name Server: NS1.EASYDNS.COM

   Name Server: NS2.EASYDNS.COM

   Name Server: NS3.EASYDNS.ORG

   Name Server: NS6.EASYDNS.NET

   Name Server: REMOTE1.EASYDNS.COM

   Name Server: REMOTE2.EASYDNS.COM

   

3) After the dns is active at zoneedit.com change the dns to the nameservers zoneedit.com gives you (change at your current registrar). You should have no downtime (since the old and new nameservers are answering with the same results.

Well, you're already in the midst of downtime, so you have a head start.

Aside from that, focus on two concepts: TTL and overlap.

1) On your old host, lower the TTL of all your records to something quite low, like 30 seconds. This will increase the burden on your nameservers, since records will only be cached that long, but it will make you more nimble as you make substantial changes.

2) Migrate your records over to the new provider. This can be a bit tedious for more complex zones, but rather straight-forward for many. Change your nameserver on your local machine to point to your new DNS host, just to test in a "real-world" scenario.

Then go to your registrar and flip the switch.

Switching DNS providers is much less prone to downtime than changing web hosts, since the records themselves aren't changing much -- just where to find them.

If you're switching registrars, the principal is similar, setting the TTL quite low during the transition to help you make changes more quickly should something go wrong.

I use namecheap[1] for everything domain related and never had a problem. There's a no downtime migration guide here [3].

[1] (Affiliate) http://www.namecheap.com?aff=37912

[2] (Non-Affiliate) http://www.namecheap.com

[3] http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...

Moving DNS servers can usually be done with no downtime. All you need to do is copy your current dns records to a new provider and then change the name servers. Keep your old DNS configuration up at least for a few days.

Gradually clients will switch over to the new DNS servers, but as long as both servers resolve to the same IP you should be fine.

Well, since their DNS servers are currently down, didn’t you already get downtime?

CloudFlare offers free DNS services with a great UI. It also makes it trivial to enable/disable their accelerator/security proxy services.

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.

I do use a domain registrar for domain registering, and a DNS hoster for DNS hosting. From my - limited - experience it's not a good idea to have this with one service provider (registrars have not 100% uptime, DNS hosters are limited with domains or expensive)

For DNS hosting I'm currently happy with

http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/

We've been migrating people to internet.bs Once you pay for the transfer, you can set up all the DNS records, so when everything transfers over it is already configured.

FWIW, godaddy's dns is different than what is used for godaddy's customers.

Godaddy's dns:

Name Server: CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET

   Name Server: CNS2.SECURESERVER.NET

   Name Server: CNS3.SECURESERVER.NET

A typical customer of godaddy's dns servers:

Name Server: NS07.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

   Name Server: NS08.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

They claim responsibility for everything now, though.

Interesting. It looks like either Anon has changed their objectives, or someone is trying really hard to make them look bad.

I'm reminded of the Romney records[1] and more recently the Apple device IDs[2] stories.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4480301 [2]: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4500479

> implying this isn't just a random fake account > implying there is a spokesperson for Anonymous > implying there is a trace of credibility to this claim

Here: http://niyaz.pk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/hn.html

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

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.

I'm all for anonymous activism, but come on. Do they even have a reason for this attack, or was it purely to be able to gloat in having taken down half the internet?

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?

And in case anyone doesn't believe this:

Default server: a1.verisigndns.com Address: 2001:500:7967::2:33#53 > www.godaddy.com Server: a1.verisigndns.com Address: 209.112.113.33#53

Name: www.godaddy.com Address: 184.168.227.107

Status tweet: https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/245213898683318272

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

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.

That's an artifact of the way whois information is pulled up. Basically for any domain registered you can create a third level domain and have it come up when someone searches for that domain using a command line whois utility.

What you are seeing above (and some of the examples) are the result of clueless customers who got some instruction and entered into the wrong field at their registrar. Other cases are people trying to get hits or bring attention to their site. This has been around since the mid 90's at least.

Notice how "godaddy.com" appears at the beginning of each of those and not the end? Does that tell you anything?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

It seems there is no way around it, http://support.cloudflare.com/kb/troubleshooting/why-am-i-ge... - so can anyone recommend other DNS providers? (preferably free)

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

How did you come by this information?

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

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-... ("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-... ("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)

looks very good

Most (properly configured) MTAs will queue and retry, so any unsent mail shouldn't be blindly discarded. Postfix, for example, defaults to a queue lifetime of 5 days.

Potentially not, many MTA relays will retry a couple of times before completely giving up.

The sender might also get a delivery failure message from the relay.

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?

I don't know the ip but maybe this could help you: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiifram...

107.20.134.47

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".

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

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

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...

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.

Millions of normal not-too-savvy folks use GoDaddy because to them it's synonymous with domain registration. They profoundly do not deserve their sites to be down for that.

For shame.

Ok, snark aside, I think you would have contributed better if you rephrased this:

> 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.

...to something like this:

"GoDaddy has a history of not only being bad with customer support, but also being the target for many politically motivated attacks for business practices which are not forthright or above-board. If you use them for registration and DNS, you are likely to get burned, so I suggest moving to another provider in short order once this clears up."

You could do a lot to benefit people without the vitriol, snark and associated venom.

Thousands of mid-sized to small business, run by people too busy to read hacker news or other sources of geekery, have no idea why they should consider not using GoDaddy. A response like this is part of the problem, and not even close to being a solution or advice.

"Oh, 20 seconds in and a downvote."

I didn't downvote you.

But you might have gotten downvoted because you said "If you are using GoDaddy for anything, you deserve what you get." w/o giving links or further information. The things you are thinking might not be obvious to everyone.

For all the people recommending “use this thing instead, dummy!”: can you share evidence which supports the claim that your thing is less susceptible to a denial of service attack than GoDaddy’s?

Because it seems like there are a lot of suggestions to move to alternate services that are in almost every case more expensive, but may or may not be any more reliable. It is well known that there are entities in control of botnets large enough to DDoS just about anything for some period of time.

You are right. I deserved it, and I feel ashamed... I will move the domains I have there away tomorrow.

GoDaddy struck me as smarmy. Good on Anon.

Since GoDaddy is down I had to go to the comments page to see what's going on. Just to find this asshole. Hacker News used to be cool.

You are a horrible person.

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