Monday, September 10, 2012, is the day the Internet died for millions of small businesses around the world.
Internet services company Godaddy, a company who provides domain registration, website hosting, DNS services, e-mail hosting and e-commerce services to millions of individuals and small business, had an outage "due to a technical glitch" according to Wired. However, TechCrunch, in an earlier report, said that Godaddy was a hacking victim.
Apparently, Godaddy was not able to resolve their problems and had to off-load their DNS services to their rival VeriSign.
Twitter was buzzing with tweets from Godaddy customers. Some where clueless about what was happening, while others were threatening to take their business elsewhere. Unfortunately, what happened to Godaddy could happen to any service provider. Moving to another provider will not protect you or your business.
My own company website was off-line too. However, my email was still up. I use Rackspace, a great company to do business with. My website is hosted with SquareSpace, another fantastic company. However, I use Godaddy to host my DNS server. I failed to plan for a possible outage, as did millions of others.
Godaddy is my main DNS service provider, but I have since contacted DYN to provide backup or secondary DNS services.
Secondary DNS provides redundancy for your primary name servers. If something goes wrong with your primary (and only) name server set, you run the risk of requests hitting a dead end with nowhere else to go. You can back up your DNS zones with Secondary DNS (a secondary name server) so your domain name never goes offline.
This will happen again, either by hackers trying to make a statement or by some "technical glitch". Now is the time to plan for that event. Don't be a victim again. If your business is important to you, having a backup plan in place is well worth the expense.
K.R. Hoffman & Co., LLC, counsels Entrepreneurs, Professionals and Select Individuals in taking control of their taxes, and businesses. Discover how we can help you overcome your tax and business challenges. For more information or to become a client, call Kenneth Hoffman at (954) 591-8290 Monday - Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. for a no cost consultation, or drop me a note.