What lessons can be learnt from the GoDaddy hack?

What lessons can be learnt from the GoDaddy hack?

Thousands, possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com have been taken down last mondey(10th September) in some kind of hack attack or DDOS. The most worrying and in some ways impressive thing about the attack is that it was reportedly carried out by just a single individual. @AnonymousOwn3r, who has links to the hacking group ‘Anonymous’ posted earlier that they were individually behind the attack.

This will surely cause people to think, can we reply on hosting companies to provide a reliable service? After all, if one of the largest providers in the world can be taken offline by an individual, is anyone safe?

Luckily I now have nothing to do with GoDaddy except as my domain registrar but I can share your pain at such an event.

What can be learnt?

What can you do to avoid an attack in the future? The short answer is don’t use GoDaddy or other similar companies to host mission critical sites. It amazes me that some of the largest and famous websites in the world, that have millions of dollars of funding, still use GoDaddy as their DNS provider. Seriously! It would only cost a few dollars, or in some cases, cents a month, to get an infinitely better service from a specialist DNS provider. For example, Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service, which MyTechBlog uses, is pay as you go and includes a service level agreement. If there was any downtime you would be eligible for compensation. Shop around and don’t just go for convenience or it might come back and haunt you later. Likewise don’t host a business website with GoDaddy or similar just to save a few dollars a month. It really isn’t worth it.

By the time I have finished writing this post it seems that most of the websites affected have come back online. Have you been affected? If so comment below.

What lessons can be learnt from the GoDaddy hack?