221–230 of 308 posts
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I'm curious, how did you narrow it down to GoDaddy as being the culprit? Let me guess, you used a popular CMS?
It was a hosted WordPress blog. That by default makes it their fault. If WP weren't up to date, it's their fault. If the host for the shared instance were hacked and files were added to all of the shared installations (which is what happened), it's their fault. The problem was, the malware was only visible when the referrer was "Google", so they claimed there was nothing wrong. For weeks.
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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)
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.
http://status.godaddy.com/
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 bas…
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 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 diffe…
ETA is 6 hours