GoDaddy Outage Leaves Small Businesses in the Lurch

Justin Wilcox and his team of developers were feeling pretty good about their startup ThingsWeStart, an online map of active Kickstarter projects, which launched on Monday after months of work. The startup had secured a fair amount of positive press and was starting to see some nice traffic, until suddenly the site stopped working ? an entrepreneur?s worst nightmare on launch day.

?We discovered it when half the team had gotten together at a coffee shop to celebrate and react to the press in real time, and we noticed we couldn?t actually get to the site,? Wilcox told Mashable. ?At this point, I had pulled an all-nighter and was pretty delirious. Our team was upset and frustrated.?

As it turned out, Wilcox?s business was one of thousands whose websites were impacted by a GoDaddy outage that lasted for the better part of four hours on Monday afternoon. The outage was initially attributed to a hack from a member of Anonymous, but on Tuesday GoDaddy released a statement saying it was actually the product of an internal server error. Whatever the reason, the outage impacted small businesses ranging from wedding photography blogs to learning centers for young children.

For some companies, like MixForSale.com, an e-commerce site that sells Anime and Manga merchandise, the GoDaddy outage cost the owner time, money and potentially customers. ?If you are buying from a place that is online and suddenly the website goes down, the customers won?t go back again,? said Allan Lobo, MixForSale?s owner. Lobo estimates that he lost out on as much as $200 in sales from being offline during that period and an unknown number of customers.

Even bricks-and-mortar businesses felt the impact of GoDaddy going down. LearningRx, a cognitive skills training center for young children in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was unable to get in touch with many of its students and business partners throughout the day because the company?s e-mail went down with the outage.

?We?ve only been in this location for a year and a half. We?re still trying to get our feet on the ground. The last thing you need is a disruption like this when you?re trying to get set up as a small business in an area,? said Chad Cooper, the PR director for LearningRx.

Some business owners found ways to minimize the fallout from the outage. Kelli Szluka, who runs a boutique design shop in Hoboken, N.J., quickly took to her company?s Facebook page to let her customers know what was going on. She also e-mailed some her clients directly from her personal e-mail account to keep them in the loop.

Other companies even tried to use the outage to generate a little publicity for themselves. Coupon Puppet, a website that features coupon codes, actually put up a music video on YouTube about the hacking set to the tune of Fun.?s hit song ?We Are Young.?

Most of the businesses we spoke with have left the door open to abandoning GoDaddy in the future, though for some it depends on whether the real reason for the outage turns out to be hackers or an internal failure.

?If it turns out that this is an internal server error, there is no doubt I will be moving to some other service because that is ridiculous,? Wilcox said. ?If it?s a hacker, then it will come down to how preventable it was.?

As Wilcox points out, if this outage were to happen again, it could have a negative impact on his business?s reputation. ?If GoDaddy?were to screw up again, someone can easily ask why I stay with them when I know they can?t keep their servers up,? he says. ?I wouldn?t have a good answer.?

Image courtesy of Flickr, www.alguada.com

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/09/11/godaddy-outage-leaves-small-businesses-on-the-lurch/

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