What’s up with the GoDaddy outage and how does it affect me?

What’s up with the GoDaddy outage?  It’s still early on in the game to say for sure but, at this point, it seems as though the group Anonymous has taken the GoDaddy site and services offline.  I have not seen any indication at this point that there was a breach or exposure of user data, but that’s not to say that we won’t hear of that later on.  Some other sites that have fallen to Anonymous include The Pirate Bay, Sony and others.  This email is kindof thrown together (and I apologize for that), but it seemed important to get the information out there sooner rather than later.

How does it affect me and what are my options?  That will depend heavily on what GoDaddy services you use.  I’ve made a list of some of the services that GoDaddy provides below with some summary data on each. 

• Domain Name Registration – If you have registered your domain name through GoDaddy and that is the only service that you are using, you will likely see very little impact.  It’s worth noting here that if there was a data breach, some of your information could have been exposed.  At the very least, change your password and make sure that it’s not a password that you use anywhere else.
• DNS – If you use GoDaddy for your DNS and you do not have a backup / secondary DNS provider, you will likely be significantly impacted.  It is likely that your website and email, even if they are not hosted by GoDaddy, will be unavailable during the outage.
• Email Hosting – If you are using GoDaddy for your email hosting, your email services will likely be unavailable during the outage.  It is unclear at this point if emails sent to customers hosting with GoDaddy are being rejected.  
• Website Hosting – If you are using GoDaddy for your website hosting, your website is likely down at this point.

What are my options, what can I do?

• DNS – Setup a secondary DNS server *somewhere* else.  You can have as many as you like, but two or three is usually sufficient, especially if they are on different networks.
• Email – I am not a big fan of hosting business emails on sites like GoDaddy, and this is a big reason why.  Big sites like GoDaddy are big targets.  There is some risk to hosting your own email or using smaller providers (like us, and yes, that was a shameless plug) as well, but knowing and understanding the risks will help you make a good decision about what works best for your situation.
• Website – If you’ve got your secondary DNS and still have access to the secondary DNS, you can point the website to a secondary site.  If it’s a brochureware type site, that should have you back up and going in a few hours.  If you’re doing something more complex, that may not be a realistic option.