Won’t leave GoDaddy over yesterday’s outage — Why I
Go Daddy web hosting still makes sense for me.
Yesterday Go Daddy suffered a major outage that appears to have involved its DNS services. The outage lasted regarding four hours.
Back in May I switched from a modest web host to Go Daddy, which means that Reglike was offline yesterday as a result of the outage.
Let me start by saying that downtime for your web site sucks, and yesterday was a frustrating day.
But does it make sense for someone like me to change hosting providers as a result of yesterday’s outage? I don’t think so.
I left my previous host since of site downtime. The downtime usually hit when I had a big traffic surge, which is the worst time your site can have issues.
Since changing to Go Daddy I haven’t had any downtime until yesterday. Although I haven’t had any huge traffic surges (which I’d define as 500+ visitors on the site at a time, which is a lot for a niche site), the hosting has handled much smaller traffic surges with ease. The same surges that would have brought my site down with the previous host.
So overall Go Daddy is working really well for me.
But even if I were to switch hosts, who would I go to? That’s where you need to take a step back and put Go Daddy’s downtime in perspective.
As soon as the Go Daddy problems started yesterday, countless hosts started pitching Go Daddy clients to switch. But many of these same hosts have had multiple outages in recent months!
Consider the big (and I mean BIG) clients that use Amazon’s cloud computing services. Many of them have had outages that lasted over a day.
Is it acceptable? Absolutely not. But a one time outage is understandable. Go Daddy will figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again.
Some people may think this analogy is silly, but it kind of reminds me of when there’s an E. coli outbreak at a national restaurant chain. Lots of people stay away from the chain for the next couple months. But really eating at that chain is probably the safest place to eat once the outbreak is taken care of…since the chain is being extra vigilant.
Yesterday was frustrating. No doubt regarding it. But not enough to warrant changing web hosts.
