It looks like the root of the problem is that their DNS servers are unresponsive or offline. Web sites and mail whose DNS is hosted on GoDaddy appear to look "down" because they cannot resolve.
Good push for anyone to switch to DNSMadeEasy or Amazon Route53 if you're currently caught in this.
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
Agreed. I use them as well, and they've been great from day one.
Short anecdote: I have an Icelandic (.is) domain. Iceland's NIC has very strict rules regarding DNS records associated with an Icelandic domain. dnsimple's support team got the problem resolved within a few days. I can definitely see myself with them for the long haul.
We recently evaluated DNS options for our ~800 domains we host DNS for and decided to go with DNSMadeEasy. We're not switched over yet but the deciding factor for me was they're an anycast network and can offer a lot of cool regional responding if we grow to that size. We want to use vanity domains, e.g. ns1,2.ourcompany.com so w/ DNSimple that's only two locations that need to be DDoSed or fail and our sites are down.
It's a fair point (DNSimple is unicast). We're working on building out an Anycast infrastructure, but even that isn't a guarantee for surviving a DDoS. Bottom line on a DDoS: it's a war of bandwidth and the enemy has all the advantages. If you must buy bandwidth and you get DDoS'd you have to pay for that bandwidth, which can be very expensive (not to mention the ongoing operational costs and the ).
Still, we're going to do our best to switch over to Anycast and continue building out our infrastructure as we have the capital to do so.
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.
Also, do backups, use good password practices, and everything else that everyone knows and the lazy will still fail to do.
Oh, 20 seconds in and a downvote. I can take them, I didn't ignore the last 8 problems GoDaddy has been responsible for lately and am not hurting from this outage.
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.
GoDaddy might not have been in the news for a few months, but their issues are well documented. If I had been the one to post I would have added links like you suggested, but when choosing someone to do business with it's prudent to find out if they're a shady company. A Google search will present their issues right up front.
Citing sources for your opinion is good practice, I agree, but so is independent due diligence.
Except that everyone doesn't use HN. The people that registered their domains with GoDaddy generally don't frequent HN. Informative decisions about domain registration is basically preaching to the choir here on HN. OP's comment is perfect given the context. Had this been CNN or someother popular news outlet, then the OP would have been "snarky"
From what I gather you should take your money elsewhere because: (1) they love SOPA (even though they redacted their support) (2) they have awful customer service and seedy sell tactics (3) have ads which are sexist and (4) have a CEO who likes hunting elephants.
If those don't bother you then you can now add have DNS servers go down for significant portions of time.
Even wikipedia ditched GoDaddy several months ago.
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.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but anyone would say the same thing if I complained about QoS on one of those hugely over-sold shared PHP hosting sites.
Are there really a lot of "not-too-savvy" folks who understand that they need GoDaddy to provide them DNS servers but know better than to use someone else for DNS services and/or registration? Maybe I underestimate the size of that population.
I should and do apologize... I'm getting a lot of flak for my tone. No one deserves for their sites to be down, but I have no sympathy for HN readers who experience downtime. This issue has been discussed to death too many times for it to be an honest surprise to anyone here.
No, you're right. It was off the cuff and non-specific and honestly, motivated by a frustration of GoDaddy more than of people here (though I do still hope that they consider this the last straw and move if they haven't already). I just think that someone who's as much a behemoth as GoDaddy could get their shit together and offer a decent quality of service and a tiny ounce of transparency.
I'm a bit upset because this subthread is so vitriolic as a result of my tone and I am sorry for that.
I would would guess there are is a huge population of not-too-savvy folks who use GoDaddy for registration... and they aren't even aware that registration and DNS can be separated.
At least, I assumed they aren't putting Danica Patrick in Super-Bowl commercials for the benefit of the HN crowd.
Agreed. All of my domains have used alternatives for the last few years (Google and Name.com). But my less tech-savvy self registered my legal name domain (and variants) around six years ago with GoDaddy and never switched the DNS management over. Big mistake. Now my blog is unreachable via DNS during a job search. Better update my resume links!
I totally understand what you meant-- definitely, anyone reading that comment had a chance to avoid this. But "you deserve it" is very harsh language for what is for the vast majority a well-intentioned mistake at worst.
So, no more shame, but just consider that it is possible to be sympathetic towards someone without endorsing their behavior.
Just pointing this out, it is entirely possible to be a HN reader and deal with clients who have set up their hosting and ignore your suggestions (pleas) to move to a better service. Sometimes clients with low budgets and non profits like to just "figure it out themselves" instead of let their developers handle the hosting arrangement (we do charge for that sort of thing). Enter: GoDaddy's incessant advertising.
What's shameful is that millions of not-too-savvy decided to make a serious decision without becoming savvy about domain registration. Profound? No, just pathetic.
There are timeouts in place to prevent rapid back and forth flamewars/arguments. You can bypass the timeout (at least most of the time) if you know how (for example, I just did to respond to you) though that should be considered bad form. This functionality is not something targeted against you.
I don't care for the tone of "deserve" in this context, but there are two ways to look at the term.
One is in a moral sense - something along the lines of "If you use GoDaddy, you share its guilt for its bad acts and deserve punishment". That's unfair, of course.
Another possible meaning is that anyone who fails to research something as important as a domain name registrar is suffering the natural consequences of their actions when a poor choice causes them problems. A person doesn't have to be very savvy to read the Wikipedia article and see that GoDaddy has been involved in several high-profile controversies regarding mistreatment of customers.
I don't think someone asserting the second should be shamed, though it doesn't seem to be very valid. I didn't come up with much negative information outside of the Wikipedia article when I avoided search terms specifically related to known issues.
Are you trying to say that it is ironic because my post is also snarky? If so, I think you need to a) go do some research on the concept of irony and then b) point out where I claimed to not be snarky...?
> (informal, sometimes proscribed^)[1][2] Contradiction between circumstances and expectations; condition contrary to what might be expected. [from the 1640s]
> ^ Some authorities proscribe the last sense, "contradiction of circumstances and expectations, condition contrary to what might be expected"[2], but it has been common since the 1600s.[3]
Close enough for government work.
Definitional pedantism aside, I think my point is clear.
To be really pedantic, your assumption that there was some expectation that my post would not be snarky is fallacious. Why do you hold that expectation? See, I wasn't the one calling out the snark, I was just pointing out what from the OP could be considered snarky, and I did it in a snarky way. That isn't irony just because you held the (incorrect) belief that for some reason (again, what reason?) my response post could/should not be snarky. That is all besides the fact that you had to dig up a proscribed definition of irony from god knows where to support your faulty premise.
And yet every other month we have posts about password breaches with tons of HN users complaining about having to change their passwords. Or we have posts from people who didn't back up their data and their cloud provider lost it, or experienced hardware failure. Or we have technically savvy people who dismiss GoDaddy problems or have literally in the past said "It's good enough, we'll just stay because it's easy".
Sure, it may be snark but I sure as hell hope it motivates at least one more person to switch. And apparently it has, unless I'm failing to detect sarcasm on one of the other replies.
This entire conversation should be useless because there shouldn't be people here still using GoDaddy.
The reasons not to use GoDaddy in the past have been entirely moral/political, not technical. I've been using them for 10 years without a DNS issue like this, so it's not quite the same thing.
That's simply not true. And even if you ignore strictly technical problems they've had in the past (and the technical issues I had helping a non-profit with a hacked GoDaddy instance on a shared box that they disclaimed responsibility for), their moral/political problems are technical problems as well. As far as I'm concerned, failing to follow a DMCA properly and instead simply re-routing DNS requests in the meantime is a technical issue just as much as political one.
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.
I'm not sure I follow your logic. GoDaddy may make it easy for you to install WordPress but it's still up to the owner to go in and update WordPress and Plugins. I'm not saying it wasn't GoDaddy but claiming it was definitively seems a little silly...
I don't know as I didn't set it up, but I've used shared cpanels in the past and they give you one-click WordPress installs and advertised as a "one-click full solution".
Either way, when it came down to it, one of their other shared clients were compromised and their sandboxing was rather insufficient leading to most of the clients on that box having some sort of malware installed. I'm sure the person in question was targeted because it looked like a standard install and frankly, if I was targeting shared hosting providers, I'd create my malware to be easy to integrate with WordPress.
I hope that makes it more clear why I find it to be GoDaddy's fault. In the end of the day, they understood what was wrong, apologized and fixed it.
Well here's how it works. GoDaddy and all other host's "one-click" is installation only. It doesn't auto-update your WordPress install so yours likely contained an old security exploit and was easily hacked. This is by design, it would be bad to install a WP theme and then have your website broken because it auto-updated WP.
Even so, you never answered my original question. How'd you determine it was a sandboxing problem rather than your own WordPress installation being compromised? Seems even less so considering you didn't realize you had to update WordPress yourself.
Moral/political reasons aside, have you ever seen their UI?
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.
While those things are certainly annoying, they take up about 10 minutes per year of my time. Yes, GoDaddy has lots of issues, but it's not like other registrars are any better. E.g. on the front page of NameCheap they advertise that .com domains are 3.99, but when you actually do a lookup they in fact cost $10.69.
It is slightly misleading (since the default search box is for .com), but all it says is "DOMAINS FROM 3.99"
which is absolutely true. Some .info domains go for as low as $3.99
That is nowhere near as bad as GoDaddy's upselling crap PLUS namecheap's configuration and control panels are really nice to use.
Comparing GoDaddy to NameCheap is like comparing MySpace (before the last major redesign) to Facebook. They both have to make money somehow (and so have certain lame tactics to be competitive), but NameCheap is obviously lightyears beyond godaddy in any informed persons mind (ESPECIALLY when actually using the service after having paid for it... NameCheap's control panels are the best i've ever seen anywhere)
Right below there it says web hosting starting at 2.95 per month, and if you click on the link the lowest price listed is 3.45 per month and that's only with a 24 month commitment. Why would I go with a company that is outright trying to steal money from me? I ask because they seem to be the most recommended GoDaddy alternative.
Namecheap is a fabulous hosting provider. Love 'em. That said, highly-redundant DDOS-resistant DNS infrastructure is not their focus--they offer it as a free service with hosting, but it's best to cough up a few extra bucks and move your DNS to something more robust with AnyCast (DNS Made Easy, Route53...) when you can if uptime's important to you.
Wow - you're seriously a hero. Thanks so much for building the test and thanks (even more) for the blog post (especially the legwork on pricing). I look forward to the day when "can we jump on a call?" sales processes are well and truly dead and self-service and transparent pricing is the norm.
It's actually not that bad and is only getting better since they've taken on investors. Even when it was bad, it was only bad on the first few visits, once you learned your way around the clutter, I never spent any more time on the GD site than I did on any other registrar or hosting provider site. For instance, just going to dcc.godaddy.com to go right into my domain manager when needing to update a domain.
Their UI is AWFUL. But you know what...it's intentional. All of the upselling. The current hiding exactly where the "My Account" stuff resides. It all feels very intentional as to mislead people into buying unwanted services.
Their UI is there to provide one purpose, confuse user's into buying stuff. It seems to have worked for the most part.
I think we just need to remember that most people reading HN is not the target audience GoDaddy is looking for (IMO).
Wow, someone tried to sell me something...oh, it was so hard to say 'no' to things I did not want to buy and did not need. Oh wait, that's right, I don't care at all. I have no problem not buying those things.
Completely agree. The small business I work for has used GoDaddy from the start and has had outstanding uptime. Sure the interface is horrible but that doesn't affect our customers.
Probably a little early to be advertising this, since we're a couple of days from an "official launch", but I'm launching NameCan.com to specifically address the problems in what I perceive to be an unethical domain management space, namely:
I run my own DNS, so this outage isn't affecting me.
But I've also been migrating my domains away from GoDaddy for purely technical reasons.
One is that the UI is constantly changing, with its sole goal to be deliberately counterintuitive. There are key places where it tells you click on a link, without just offering the link right there, so you have to hunt it down on the page. Crazy.
But the worst one is that I can no longer read their emails in mutt. At all. It was refreshing to get simple notifications from Namecheap that were short and easy to read.
Your initial comments snarkyness to usefulness level was pretty low. It was a lot of "look how oppressed I am by being downvoted," and "you are so stupid for using godaddy."
You can communicate constructively and effectively without being so asinine. Here is an example of your initial comment with a bit kinder language:
Unfortunately, GoDaddy's services are often quite lackluster. I would urge current users to switch all their Godaddy-hosted services to other, more reliable providers.
Also, always remember to follow security best-practices such as using secure passwords, conducting regular backups, and the like.
How come others get to downvote my comments but I don't like-wise? This is what's hurting HN. Black box phenomenon like this. No information about the commenting process. Maybe reddit is on to something after all. The designer of this site is one arrogant sob.
What does Paul Graham have to do with people downvoting you. It's a policy to help with people reflexively downvoting and it encourages people to become positive contributors before they can moderate others. It's a public policy. It's no conspiracy.
At the risk of further degenerating into meta discussion, I'll answer your question: Downvoting privileges are opened up at a certain karma threshold. The number has changed a number of times in the past and I believe it's currently at around a floor of 500-600 karma.
This just in: "Pointless Arguments Over What's Hurting Hacker News are Hurting Hacker News."
Just knock it off and get back to posting interesting discussion. If you're not doing that, you're contributing to the "hurting of HN." And I'm well within my understanding of hypocrisy and irony to be aware of the fact that I'm committing this exact fault, so thanks for pointing that out, you're so intelligent.
Negative karma. There's nothing wrong with your comments, but they're better suited for the more casual atmosphere of Reddit. (which is why I like Reddit more)
I agree. As much as I don't like GoDaddy and have already moved most of my domains away from them, I don't like seeing someone say "you got what you deserved for using them". What a mean thing to say.
So, I had both upvoted that guy's comment and flagged this entire thread (as in, the top-level post). To me, and I think to many other people, what is actually the core problem with HN is that it is being flooded with a ton of what is pretty much "spam": posts that are either repetitive (either to content from years ago, or even to content from last week) or content that are informing people of things that should be prerequisite knowledge.
In this case, the problem is that DNS is a distributed database, and the idea that people are hosting websites with all of their DNS from a single provider that is at the same time acting as their registrar (whose only purpose in the DNS infrastructure is to mediate your ability to change your DNS servers and renew your account) is horrific: it means something horrendously wrong has occurred in this community.
Meanwhile, the comments here are just strange: people talking about "switching providers without downtime" when the whole point of how DNS works is that you can have arbitrarily many servers and thereby have multiple providers hosting your zones at once. To even have a webpage in the first place you had to setup DNS, and if you somehow skipped that step then you probably skipped tons of other important steps. :(
Reading this entire thread is thereby just depressing: this isn't some advanced corner case of A/B testing leading to improved knowledge of how to do pricing, this is web hosting 101. Yet, somehow, we have 308 upvotes and 238 comments that have been left about an outage of a single provider for the only component in the entire stack of a website where you almost have to go out of your way to not have fault tolerance.
Then, as opposed to trying to get this discussion out of the way as soon as possible, we are just being flooded with a combination of people claiming that this is important, and that those who disagree are being "snarky", combined with opportunistic bloggers submitting tutorials like the "GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53" that was just posted.
Therefore, I will claim that it isn't drivebyacct2 that is indicative of a loss of HN quality: it is instead that somehow any of this was relevant in the first place, and that once posted it keeps spreading. I can understand people being interested when AWS or Heroku or even GitHub goes offline, but no one on Hacker News should care if GoDaddy DNS goes offline.
Unfortunately lack of hosting-related knowledge is indicative through and through here even to the actual startups out of YC. Is it too much to ask for someone to know the latest buzz about Rails but can't spell DNS? Good luck if you choose this as your crusade to educate.
There is so much that "should" be prerequisite knowledge, that people simply can't know it all.
I admit that I know very little about DNS, to the point where I don't understand large parts of your post. I have a website, and I vaguely remember doing stuff to get the domain name to resolve, years ago. I know roughly that DNS translates domain names to IP addresses, but not much more. I'm okay with not knowing much more than that. I'm confident I can learn if necessary, but so far I've been learning the prerequisite knowledge of other fields.
If I was using godaddy, this thread would be helpful to me.
You don't find it interesting that one of the largest DNS service providers has had a major outage rendering browsing many websites virtually impossible for several business hours? Not every site I am interested in using is maintained by readers of HN who should (perhaps) know better.
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.
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.
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.
That's kinda the point though isn't it? Why is anyone still using GoDaddy after SOPA / elephant killing / earlier outages / etc? For me at least, there's no excuse in supporting this company with my business.
I'd switched half of my domains to Namecheap. I was waiting to migrate the other half. I do not support them, but I had hired their service before SOPA and I just didn't want to pay twice.
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?
Godaddy has been a powerful supporter of limits on internet freedom. Given the size and influence of the company and the arrogance of its (politically reactionary) owner, I understand why they would be considered a target. Even though I have close to 100 domains registered with Godaddy, I fully support this action by anonymous.
Literally just transferred all of my domain names and DNS hosting away from GoDaddy last night. Should have done it after the SOPA fiasco - glad I didn't wait until today!
Does anybody have a guide on how to migrate away from GoDaddy without downtime? And what would you recommend instead? We currently host a bunch of domains and use their DNS servers.
These are instructions on how to move your domain, not migrate to different DNS servers. Moving away from GoDaddy in general might be a good idea, but if you're just looking to migrate to another DNS service like Route53, this isn't what your looking for.
1) Get a new DNS server. I use http://dnspark.net/ and even though their website is very ugly and there's no API, they're tremendous value at $10 - $14 per year
2) In your registrar's page (godaddy) change your DNS servers for your domain to whatever your new ones are.
$0.50 per hosted zone / month for the first 25 hosted zones
$0.10 per hosted zone / month for additional hosted zones
$0.500 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month
$0.250 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month
I host about 70 zones and pay less than 20 dollars a month. There's no minimum, so I would expect a single zone to cost less than $2. You would need to get 10 million queries to reach $6.
[Edit: Facepalm - I just realized you said per year]
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 have to disagree with your 'Neustar is a nice DNS provider' statement. I used them for 2 years, most of that time I was unhappy but because I was locked into a contract I had to wait it out or else pay a hefty breakage fee.
Their website/UI wasn't any good, very dated, they even rolled out a new one before I left, but that was horrible, they used AJAX everywhere, just for the sake of using it, and it made usability horrible.
Their support sucked as well, you would need to submit a ticket, and they take forever to get back to you, and they don't say anything besides "it looks fine to me". If you try and call them, you end up talking with someone who has no idea what they are talking about (same customer support line, for multiple products), or they don't speak english well.
You end up paying per DNS query, which is a really expensive way to pay for DNS, we were paying thousands of dollars a month to them for DNS alone.
Their advanced DNS services (DNS load balanceer and DNS failover) where very basic, and getting them setup correctly was a PITA.
There DNS service was nice until it crashed, which didn't happen often, but when it did, it took down half the internet with them.
I personally wouldn't have picked them to be our provider if it wasn't for one of our investors telling us how great they are and we needed to use them. I should have listened to my gut, but I also didn't want to piss off the guy paying the bills.
YMMV, but I would say, stand clear, and go to one of the newer folks doing the same thing for much less the cost, and more features.
This recommendation suprises me. Do you have particular reason to recommend them? $50 per month for DNS strikes me as ludicrous, but I suppose it's worth it for some sites if they truly can provide a more reliable service.
But I don't find the quotes on their website to be confidence inspiring: "UltraDNS manages and maintains its own industry leading resolver platform; as a non-open source platform it isn't prone to hijacking, spoofing or viruses".
And their industry positioning scares me:
The revised bill would place a ".kids" subdomain under the
control of NeuStar Inc., the Washington-based
telecommunications company that won the contract to manage
the ".us" country-code domain last fall.
NeuStar would be expected to police the subdomain to ensure
it remains free of inappropriate content, and it would
answer to the Commerce Department's National
Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Web sites in the domain would be prohibited from linking to
sites outside it, and they could not set up chat rooms,
instant messaging or other interactive services unless they
could certify that they did not expose children to
pedophiles or pose other risks.
If privately held NeuStar were to lose money on the
venture, it could give control back to the Commerce
Department, which would seek another operator.
ps. You're probably aware, but I was checking if the site listed in your profile was served by them, and noticed that many9s.com looks to have expired over the weekend.
" I would've thought you could simply set up your various DNS records in advance with the new service you use, and then switch the nameservers in the GoDaddy control panel."
Yes, see my comment.
"does anyone have any experience of using them?"
I don't but it wouldn't be a bad idea to setup other servers (as secondaries) at another provider. The only downside to this is that you are then susceptible to anything that happens at the extra provider (not if they don't answer or are down, but if your dns gets hacked there.) Keeping my previous statement in mind, if you are picking a reliable dns vendor I would say it probably pays to setup secondaries elsewhere for extra redundancy. It's not that expensive to do.
I don't but it wouldn't be a bad idea to setup other servers (as secondaries) at another provider.
Thanks, that hadn't occurred to me in the slightest. You're right that it's not expensive, and as a direct result of your advice, this is the road I'll be going down. Thanks!
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.
Imo, having done this since the mid 90's, you don't have to mess with TTL since you aren't changing any of the records. And having someone do that is an additional thing to mess with that adds unnecessary steps.
TTL would be necessary if you are going from one IP to another or a different MX server etc. though.
Altering TTL won't do anything for you unless you do it before you start to make changes and far enough in advance that the current TTL will expire and servers will pick up the new TTL. Then when you alter DNS records the alterations should propagate much faster.
If you're literally just changing DNS providers why would there be any down time - the record showing the IP where to find your website just gets grabbed from a different location, if a stale record is used it's still right.
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.
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.
In re-reading my comment I can see where someone would think I was implying that it was. Having worked with UNIX since V I am well aware of what you are saying. My mistake.
(What I was trying to say was "if you have a mac open a terminal session and use dig".)
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)
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.
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.
Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it.
That understates things by several orders of magnitude. It's not just their site that is down, it's their domain name servers, so most websites that bought their domain from GoDaddy are unreachable (unless you are working off of cached domain data).
And by "these guys," it's most commonly anyone with an internet connection and a bone to pick. Saw some ridiculous attempt the other day to brand an attack on 9GAG with the anon logo.
> 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
307 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadGood push for anyone to switch to DNSMadeEasy or Amazon Route53 if you're currently caught in this.
Update: It appears Anonymous is behind this https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/status/245218636187443200
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/dns/
There are many, many options.
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
Short anecdote: I have an Icelandic (.is) domain. Iceland's NIC has very strict rules regarding DNS records associated with an Icelandic domain. dnsimple's support team got the problem resolved within a few days. I can definitely see myself with them for the long haul.
Still, we're going to do our best to switch over to Anycast and continue building out our infrastructure as we have the capital to do so.
Also, do backups, use good password practices, and everything else that everyone knows and the lazy will still fail to do.
Oh, 20 seconds in and a downvote. I can take them, I didn't ignore the last 8 problems GoDaddy has been responsible for lately and am not hurting from this outage.
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.
Citing sources for your opinion is good practice, I agree, but so is independent due diligence.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-godaddy...
http://gizmodo.com/5870559/as-if-you-needed-another-reason-t...
http://www.salmanahsan.com/godaddy-sucks/
http://www.oooff.com/blacklist/why-godaddy-sucks.php
http://www.simpleproductivityblog.com/why-i-left-godaddy/
From what I gather you should take your money elsewhere because: (1) they love SOPA (even though they redacted their support) (2) they have awful customer service and seedy sell tactics (3) have ads which are sexist and (4) have a CEO who likes hunting elephants.
If those don't bother you then you can now add have DNS servers go down for significant portions of time.
Even wikipedia ditched GoDaddy several months ago.
For shame.
Are there really a lot of "not-too-savvy" folks who understand that they need GoDaddy to provide them DNS servers but know better than to use someone else for DNS services and/or registration? Maybe I underestimate the size of that population.
I should and do apologize... I'm getting a lot of flak for my tone. No one deserves for their sites to be down, but I have no sympathy for HN readers who experience downtime. This issue has been discussed to death too many times for it to be an honest surprise to anyone here.
Edit: also, there is a great deal of inertia to overcome for a registar change, so a bit of shove (instead of gentle encouragement) may be warranted.
I'm a bit upset because this subthread is so vitriolic as a result of my tone and I am sorry for that.
What a classy bit of self-reflection. Keep up the good work :)
At least, I assumed they aren't putting Danica Patrick in Super-Bowl commercials for the benefit of the HN crowd.
So, no more shame, but just consider that it is possible to be sympathetic towards someone without endorsing their behavior.
One is in a moral sense - something along the lines of "If you use GoDaddy, you share its guilt for its bad acts and deserve punishment". That's unfair, of course.
Another possible meaning is that anyone who fails to research something as important as a domain name registrar is suffering the natural consequences of their actions when a poor choice causes them problems. A person doesn't have to be very savvy to read the Wikipedia article and see that GoDaddy has been involved in several high-profile controversies regarding mistreatment of customers.
I don't think someone asserting the second should be shamed, though it doesn't seem to be very valid. I didn't come up with much negative information outside of the Wikipedia article when I avoided search terms specifically related to known issues.
Absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion, just snark. Yet for some reason its the highest voted comment.
You're attempting to marginalize GP's comment as "snark," but I'm not seeing it.
> ^ Some authorities proscribe the last sense, "contradiction of circumstances and expectations, condition contrary to what might be expected"[2], but it has been common since the 1600s.[3]
Close enough for government work.
Definitional pedantism aside, I think my point is clear.
Nice try though.
Also, read that definition again. It is not archaic, it is modern "it has been common since the 1600s". This definition was pulled from wiktionary.
So to review, I dared use the word "irony" in an informal fashion, and you are a snarky pedant.
Sure, it may be snark but I sure as hell hope it motivates at least one more person to switch. And apparently it has, unless I'm failing to detect sarcasm on one of the other replies.
This entire conversation should be useless because there shouldn't be people here still using GoDaddy.
The problem was, the malware was only visible when the referrer was "Google", so they claimed there was nothing wrong. For weeks.
Either way, when it came down to it, one of their other shared clients were compromised and their sandboxing was rather insufficient leading to most of the clients on that box having some sort of malware installed. I'm sure the person in question was targeted because it looked like a standard install and frankly, if I was targeting shared hosting providers, I'd create my malware to be easy to integrate with WordPress.
I hope that makes it more clear why I find it to be GoDaddy's fault. In the end of the day, they understood what was wrong, apologized and fixed it.
Even so, you never answered my original question. How'd you determine it was a sandboxing problem rather than your own WordPress installation being compromised? Seems even less so considering you didn't realize you had to update WordPress yourself.
They. Told. Me. It. Was. Their. Fault.
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.
It is slightly misleading (since the default search box is for .com), but all it says is "DOMAINS FROM 3.99"
which is absolutely true. Some .info domains go for as low as $3.99
That is nowhere near as bad as GoDaddy's upselling crap PLUS namecheap's configuration and control panels are really nice to use.
Comparing GoDaddy to NameCheap is like comparing MySpace (before the last major redesign) to Facebook. They both have to make money somehow (and so have certain lame tactics to be competitive), but NameCheap is obviously lightyears beyond godaddy in any informed persons mind (ESPECIALLY when actually using the service after having paid for it... NameCheap's control panels are the best i've ever seen anywhere)
You really think they'd resort to deception for an extra 50 cents per month? Ignorance before malice.
Check this out for real-time query speed testing: http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest
(And yeah, looks like GoDaddy is a solid "Test failed" still...)
Funny note after running the test a few times--the worst performing provider is the one whose salespeople contact me the most...
Their UI is there to provide one purpose, confuse user's into buying stuff. It seems to have worked for the most part.
I think we just need to remember that most people reading HN is not the target audience GoDaddy is looking for (IMO).
I would call that a technical issue, even though it probably only affects web crawlers.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2964084 2: http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts.htm
So, now what do we switch to?
- No Up-sells - Simple intuitive clean powerful UI - Pricing transparency - Security - Innovative management tools for handling larger domain portfolios
DNS functionality will be rolled out in the coming month.
But I've also been migrating my domains away from GoDaddy for purely technical reasons.
One is that the UI is constantly changing, with its sole goal to be deliberately counterintuitive. There are key places where it tells you click on a link, without just offering the link right there, so you have to hunt it down on the page. Crazy.
But the worst one is that I can no longer read their emails in mutt. At all. It was refreshing to get simple notifications from Namecheap that were short and easy to read.
You can communicate constructively and effectively without being so asinine. Here is an example of your initial comment with a bit kinder language:
Unfortunately, GoDaddy's services are often quite lackluster. I would urge current users to switch all their Godaddy-hosted services to other, more reliable providers.
Also, always remember to follow security best-practices such as using secure passwords, conducting regular backups, and the like.
There, was that really so hard?
There are guidelines surrounding commenting/submissions here: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Just knock it off and get back to posting interesting discussion. If you're not doing that, you're contributing to the "hurting of HN." And I'm well within my understanding of hypocrisy and irony to be aware of the fact that I'm committing this exact fault, so thanks for pointing that out, you're so intelligent.
A potential solution to get this fixed:
1. SNRKY_COMMENTS = {MODs manually tag comments such as OP}
2. SNRKY_UPVOTERS = {Users who upvote SNRKY_COMMENTS}
3. Vote = Vote * 0.5 , if user(Vote) ∈ SNRKY_UPVOTERS
In this case, the problem is that DNS is a distributed database, and the idea that people are hosting websites with all of their DNS from a single provider that is at the same time acting as their registrar (whose only purpose in the DNS infrastructure is to mediate your ability to change your DNS servers and renew your account) is horrific: it means something horrendously wrong has occurred in this community.
Meanwhile, the comments here are just strange: people talking about "switching providers without downtime" when the whole point of how DNS works is that you can have arbitrarily many servers and thereby have multiple providers hosting your zones at once. To even have a webpage in the first place you had to setup DNS, and if you somehow skipped that step then you probably skipped tons of other important steps. :(
Reading this entire thread is thereby just depressing: this isn't some advanced corner case of A/B testing leading to improved knowledge of how to do pricing, this is web hosting 101. Yet, somehow, we have 308 upvotes and 238 comments that have been left about an outage of a single provider for the only component in the entire stack of a website where you almost have to go out of your way to not have fault tolerance.
Then, as opposed to trying to get this discussion out of the way as soon as possible, we are just being flooded with a combination of people claiming that this is important, and that those who disagree are being "snarky", combined with opportunistic bloggers submitting tutorials like the "GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53" that was just posted.
Therefore, I will claim that it isn't drivebyacct2 that is indicative of a loss of HN quality: it is instead that somehow any of this was relevant in the first place, and that once posted it keeps spreading. I can understand people being interested when AWS or Heroku or even GitHub goes offline, but no one on Hacker News should care if GoDaddy DNS goes offline.
http://syskall.com/yc-w12-startups-hosting-decisions
http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html
I don't know why people are upset about talking about GoDaddy. Its interesting news.
I admit that I know very little about DNS, to the point where I don't understand large parts of your post. I have a website, and I vaguely remember doing stuff to get the domain name to resolve, years ago. I know roughly that DNS translates domain names to IP addresses, but not much more. I'm okay with not knowing much more than that. I'm confident I can learn if necessary, but so far I've been learning the prerequisite knowledge of other fields.
If I was using godaddy, this thread would be helpful to me.
The biggest pressure here is speed, though. A timeout on a failed DNS lookup is an eternity when you're aiming for sub-second page loads.
ETA: Source- http://storify.com/poe/anonymous-lulz-and-godaddy
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.
> 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.
The GoDaddy status page proudly announces "No issues to report": http://support.godaddy.com/system-alerts/
During last week's GoDaddy mail outage, they had no status info posted, even hours after reports on NANOG/Outages: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/...
[1] (Affiliate) http://www.namecheap.com?aff=37912
[2] (Non-Affiliate) http://www.namecheap.com
[3] http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...
1) Get a new DNS server. I use http://dnspark.net/ and even though their website is very ugly and there's no API, they're tremendous value at $10 - $14 per year
2) In your registrar's page (godaddy) change your DNS servers for your domain to whatever your new ones are.
DNSPark gives you 5m lookups a month and never built in overage charging!
$0.500 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month $0.250 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month
I host about 70 zones and pay less than 20 dollars a month. There's no minimum, so I would expect a single zone to cost less than $2. You would need to get 10 million queries to reach $6.
[Edit: Facepalm - I just realized you said per year]
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.
http://aws.amazon.com/route53/#pricing
http://www.dnshat.com/free-dns.html
http://www.cloudflare.com/plans
Their website/UI wasn't any good, very dated, they even rolled out a new one before I left, but that was horrible, they used AJAX everywhere, just for the sake of using it, and it made usability horrible.
Their support sucked as well, you would need to submit a ticket, and they take forever to get back to you, and they don't say anything besides "it looks fine to me". If you try and call them, you end up talking with someone who has no idea what they are talking about (same customer support line, for multiple products), or they don't speak english well.
You end up paying per DNS query, which is a really expensive way to pay for DNS, we were paying thousands of dollars a month to them for DNS alone.
Their advanced DNS services (DNS load balanceer and DNS failover) where very basic, and getting them setup correctly was a PITA.
There DNS service was nice until it crashed, which didn't happen often, but when it did, it took down half the internet with them.
http://cyberinsecure.com/ddos-attack-against-neustar-hits-ma...
I personally wouldn't have picked them to be our provider if it wasn't for one of our investors telling us how great they are and we needed to use them. I should have listened to my gut, but I also didn't want to piss off the guy paying the bills.
YMMV, but I would say, stand clear, and go to one of the newer folks doing the same thing for much less the cost, and more features.
But I don't find the quotes on their website to be confidence inspiring: "UltraDNS manages and maintains its own industry leading resolver platform; as a non-open source platform it isn't prone to hijacking, spoofing or viruses".
And their industry positioning scares me:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/687237/postsps. You're probably aware, but I was checking if the site listed in your profile was served by them, and noticed that many9s.com looks to have expired over the weekend.
Yes, see my comment.
"does anyone have any experience of using them?"
I don't but it wouldn't be a bad idea to setup other servers (as secondaries) at another provider. The only downside to this is that you are then susceptible to anything that happens at the extra provider (not if they don't answer or are down, but if your dns gets hacked there.) Keeping my previous statement in mind, if you are picking a reliable dns vendor I would say it probably pays to setup secondaries elsewhere for extra redundancy. It's not that expensive to do.
Thanks, that hadn't occurred to me in the slightest. You're right that it's not expensive, and as a direct result of your advice, this is the road I'll be going down. Thanks!
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.
Imo, having done this since the mid 90's, you don't have to mess with TTL since you aren't changing any of the records. And having someone do that is an additional thing to mess with that adds unnecessary steps.
TTL would be necessary if you are going from one IP to another or a different MX server etc. though.
If you're literally just changing DNS providers why would there be any down time - the record showing the IP where to find your website just gets grabbed from a different location, if a stale record is used it's still right.
Exactly.
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:
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.(What I was trying to say was "if you have a mac open a terminal session and use dig".)
For DNS hosting I'm currently happy with
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/
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.
GODADDY.COM.VATAXIDERMIST.COM GODADDY.COM.THEYOUNGCONS.COM GODADDY.COM.THEVILLAGEAT63RDSTREET.COM GODADDY.COM.THEFOREXTHIEF.COM GODADDY.COM.THECOTTONWIFE.COM GODADDY.COM.TEST.CHUMCHUM.NET GODADDY.COM.STAGEDOORPRODUCTIONS.COM GODADDY.COM.SKATEONGRANDROLLERRINK.COM GODADDY.COM.SHOPCOULSDON.COM GODADDY.COM.SHIRLEEMCGARRY.COM GODADDY.COM.SETHPAPA.COM GODADDY.COM.SANGRAALBODYWORK.COM GODADDY.COM.RESPECTED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM GODADDY.COM.REMEDIASERVICES.COM GODADDY.COM.QUINTAFLORIDA.COM GODADDY.COM.QHSSE.COM GODADDY.COM.PISSEDOFFPEOPLEOFAMERICA.COM GODADDY.COM.MYANHOMEINSPECTION.COM GODADDY.COM.MUTTLANDMEADOWS.COM GODADDY.COM.MICHALPOE.COM GODADDY.COM.MERCHANTSSTORES.COM GODADDY.COM.LOVE8PLANET.COM GODADDY.COM.LEVIATHANCOMPUTERS.NET GODADDY.COM.LANDLCONNECTION.COM GODADDY.COM.KARLAADAMS.COM GODADDY.COM.JESSICABOAL.COM GODADDY.COM.IXCANADESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.INDYMETROWOMAN.COM GODADDY.COM.GGONYA.NET GODADDY.COM.GDDAS.COM GODADDY.COM.FLORIDASURETY.COM GODADDY.COM.FLETCHERANDFLETCHERPHOTOGRAPHY.COM GODADDY.COM.EZGRAPHICSLOGOS.COM GODADDY.COM.ERICAMDESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.EAGLEEYEHOMEMONITORING.COM GODADDY.COM.CLIFFYCELLS.COM GODADDY.COM.CAKEMUFFIN.COM GODADDY.COM.BERNADETTEHAROLD.COM GODADDY.COM.BANGALORESRESTAURANTS.COM GODADDY.COM.AUTHORMARIONBROWN.COM GODADDY.COM.AND.ALEX.FUCKED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM GODADDY.COM.ANALOGANIMALRECORDS.COM GODADDY.COM.ALEXANDREAREINA.COM GODADDY.COM.AIPOS.NET GODADDY.COM.1BEAUTYPRO.COM GODADDY.COM
Is that a question? :)
See this, relative to my comment above:
FACEBOOK.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.LOVED.BY.WWW.SHQIPHOST.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.KNOWS.THAT.THE.BEST.WEB.HOSTING.IS.NASHHOST.NET
FACEBOOK.COM.GET.ONE.MILLION.DOLLARS.AT.WWW.UNIMUNDI.COM
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.
Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it.
That understates things by several orders of magnitude. It's not just their site that is down, it's their domain name servers, so most websites that bought their domain from GoDaddy are unreachable (unless you are working off of cached domain data).
Most people who buy from GoDaddy probably host their DNS there as well though.
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
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/9gag_repost_mac...
[2] http://i.imgur.com/hOWaD.jpg
Godaddy's dns:
Name Server: CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET
A typical customer of godaddy's dns servers:Name Server: NS07.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1190617
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm