Redundancy Shmundancy - GoDaddy Takes Down Entire Mobilytics Platform

This is a first!

When I owned a web hosting company many years ago, I used GoDaddy’s private label reseller plan for domain registrations. Thousands of my customer registered their domains through us, which was processed by GoDaddy.

Although I have had minor issues before, I have never had anything like this happen. This morning GoDaddy automatically changed the name servers for Mobilytics.net, and took down the entire infrastructure in an instant! We immediately knew and took care of it, but there was still downtime.

Now getting back to the title of this post, I want to point out how all the redundancy in the world means nothing when there is a single point of failure that can’t be avoided.

We have built redundant systems on everything:

• Our DNS is served from 9 servers all over the world, and is dynamic.
• Every server is behind load balancers on the Amazon EC2 cloud in different data centers.
• We have physical servers in case Amazon goes down.
• Our Database Servers replicate and ship logs to backups
• Even our office is in 2 locations!

But all this is for NOTHING when your domain name is suddenly taken from you and pointed to a “Coming Soon” page!

Think about it. The entire Yahoo network can be taken down by someone at their registrar simply changing the name servers assigned to the domain.

Just Like That!

So how can you avoid it? I don’t think you can.

Yesterday was the renewal date for the domain Mobilytics.net. We have it set on AutoRenewal so it charges automatically. Well apparently GoDaddy attempted to charge it and there was a problem. What’s odd is that I went in this morning when I found out, clicked the button that charges it to the “on-file” payment method, and it went through just fine. I made sure to renew for 7 years so I have no problems like this again.

So what do they do when there is a problem yesterday? They send an email (which is sitting in the “GoDaddy” spam box), and change my name servers to their parking page.

Bye, Bye Mobilytics…. Down you go!

So I guess since I spent $7 with them to register the domain, they can take down our entire business just like that. There is something very wrong with this. How can they have so much power? How does paying them $7 per year give them the right to take down 27 servers like that? Well we’re going to find out!

http://bluespotmedia.ning.com/