No, it has nothing to do with SOPA. GoDaddy’s support for the Stop Online Piracy Act may have the Internet enraged, but the tipping point for me was when they took PhoneNews.com offline.
It almost feels like SOPA got its first test, but really it was GoDaddy’s terrible DNS management.
In preparation for some more major server changes, aimed at curing what caused some downtime last week, we moved the DNS from Peer1 to GoDaddy. We wanted our domain name provider to manage DNS temporarily, as we may be moving away from Peer1. Many SOPA opposers are asking people to move away from GoDaddy, but obviously you don’t want to do that while changing hosting solutions too!
Anyways, we flipped the DNS back to GoDaddy and coded in our A, CNAME, MX records, etc. All simple stuff.
A half hour goes by and I query up the raw DNS data. To my shock, only half of what I entered propagated to GoDaddy’s DNS. Our A record didn’t update, but half the CNAMEs, and half the MX records did. I wait an hour… still, all screwed up. Worse, when I go back to the GoDaddy DNS admin panel, it doesn’t match either what I entered into it, or what was in the raw DNS records.
If you aren’t too techy, that means GoDaddy took our entire site down. These are the codes that translate 1.23.45.67 into PhoneNews.com. If those codes aren’t published to the rest of the Internet, no web browser can find your web site.
You may be asking why I didn’t pre-configure the DNS records at GoDaddy… well, that’s because you can’t. They don’t allow you to edit their DNS records unless you have designated their name servers as the authoritative record.
In short, I don’t trust GoDaddy’s DNS management at all. This is going to delay our server changes, and caused unnecessary downtime for the site as we flipped our nameservers back to Peer1.