The response was overwhelming.  I like to share what I have learned with others about everyday happenings as well as issues that make a difference in the world of business.  ~Bob Parsons

This past Monday, in the middle of the day, I noticed all my websites were down.  Yep, that means good old AuntHeather.com was down.  At first I thought it was something I did while making updates the night prior.  In disbelief over this outage, I turned to Facebook to see if others were experiencing issues.  I first saw the breaking news on Mashable – GoDaddy’s DNS Servers Go Down, Along With Thousands of Sites.   Evidently, anyone who had web hosting and domain names pointed from GoDaddy, were all down due to a hacker issue.

Monday night I had Kyle for his piano lessons.  During dinner I flipped on Channel 4 news, a bad habit while eating, and among other stories, I caught the one about GoDaddy going down.  As I was listening to the news, Kyle was half paying attention, strumming his guitar and playing with Storm.  I did make a comment on the GoDaddy situation, but again it didn’t seem to mean anything to Kyle and I didn’t think much of it until later that evening.

As Kyle and I were heading to his music lesson, a friend of mine was texting me, letting me know GoDaddy was back up again.  Naturally, Kyle checked my text messages while I was driving and read me the contents.  All of a sudden, he got this look on his face of complete fear and disbelief.  He asked me, “Aunt Heather does that mean our sites are down?  Even SpyRing?”  I said, “Yep, but Kelly said her sites are back up, which means ours should be too.  I’m going to look when we get inside.”  Spoken like a true business man, he said, “So how does anybody know about our stuff, if they don’t see it on our websites?”  Answering him, I said, “They won’t, that’s why it’s such a big deal, everyone associated with GoDaddy is down.”  Still in business mode, Kyle requested that I check our sites immediately when we get in the building.  He makes me laugh out loud!  I was planning on it, but it’s funny to see that Kyle feels the need to manage and direct me.

Upon conclusion of his piano lesson, he immediately went back into businessman mode and asked me about our sites.  “Aunt Heather, how’s SpyRing? and Thrill of the Hunt?”  I said, “All looks good, Piper Corporation and Aunt Heather are all back up.”  Naturally he didn’t care about my blog but it was neat to see his understanding for the value and importance of the company websites and his sense of urgency.

The next morning I read a story from CNN Tech – Hacker claims responsibility for GoDaddy outage.  The article claimed

“A person affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous — named @AnonymousOwn3r on Twitter — claimed responsibility for the outage.”

Really?  Was that necessary?  If hackers need something to do, then I have a laundry list to put them to work.  There is no doubt, these hackers are a brilliant bunch and very intelligent, but they claimed to want to check the security of GoDaddy.  Really?  Was there act so selfless?  If that was the case, then don’t take down the company who in turn effects a large part of the population and their businesses, and not certainly for a better part of the day.  But then again, I’m no hacker, so what do I know.  Putting a positive spin on the situation, maybe GoDaddy has beefed up their security.

I can honestly say, I am a customer of GoDaddy’s and this situation has not changed my view of the company.  In fact, I thought they did a pretty good job returning things to their original state.  Personally I think GoDaddy is reasonably priced and they have GREAT customer service.  In the years that I’ve been a patron of GoDaddy, I’ve never had an issue.  I know I’m not the only one in this camp.  GoDaddy!

Also, thank you GoDaddy for the credit I received today because of the mishap.  That really helped to strengthen my view of your customer service.  I know you value and appreciate my patronage.