Arg!

There, I’ve gotten that off my chest. Usually I jump on my blog early in the day and check up on a few things. You know, like comments, spam, outdated plugins, incoming links, etc… Then come back later in the day and, hopefully, get a post written and posted a couple times a week. Of course, I’ve been quite lax in that area lately. 😉

So this evening, I go to log into my blog and I get this:

I dig a little deeper and find that the entire godaddy.com site, services, and everyone who hosts their sites with them is offline. Heck, even TechCrunch was unreachable for me – are they on GoDaddy too?

Apparently GoDaddy is the exclusive registrar for the new .me TLD domains, and many in the blogosphere are pointing to the massive registration and failure of correct billing of these new domains. I can’t find enough time at this point this evening to really give a good account of what’s really going on. All I’m reading is people’s experiences and their frustrations, so I’ll hold off on drawing any conclusions.

At this point, about 9:00PM (CT), I’m not really upset yet. Sure, my blog is down – all my sites are down actually – but I really don’t know the facts, and I can’t blame people for things without knowing the whole story. As an IT pro – I’m continuously amazed that all this stuff works in the first place, so I’m not too surprised when a complex operation or an overabundance of traffic takes a site or service down. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s figuring out the reasons that these things happen is the puzzles that I really love to solve most. 😉

So I’m writing this post offline and will upload later when GoDaddy is back – hope it’s tonight. My comment to the team at GoDaddy right now: don’t rush, you’ve got a big outage – take the time you need to be able to come back at or near 100%. Good luck!

UPDATE: Just as I finished this post, up came GoDaddy.

UPDATE 2: I got a friendly call on Friday (July 18th) from GoDaddy’s “office of the President” from a fellow named Alon. Nice guy, he explained the challenges that GoDaddy (and other registrars) faced when new TLDs were brought online with the large number of highly sought after domains.

We also talked about the outage that I (and many others) suffered through when we couldn’t access our hosted sites. It seems that the problem was actually with Comcast and their network. Appearantly (and I have yet to verify this, but have heard rumblings about it) Comcast had a trunk issue in their network that affected customers in the midwest that affected their ability to access many sites that appear to be hosted in the Pheonix area. Strange stuff, but it happens.

So I was right, I didn’t have the whole story – still don’t, but at least it’s starting to make a bit of sense.  Also, I see that this post is attracting a bit of attention for comment spammers. Just an FYI to those types of folks: I’m deleting any spam post, so move on.