Who’s your Daddy now?

Yesterday, webhost and domain registrar GoDaddy experienced an outage. While GoDaddy insists that an internal router problem caused the outage, a hacker thought to be associated with the group Anonymous is claiming responsibility. No matter what caused the outage, though, one thing is clear: Small business websites have been impacted, and there is likely to be an economic impact from such a widespread outage. The outage lasted for more than four hours for some sites, and that was time in which business could not be adequately conducted.

What Websites were Affected by the GoDaddy Outage?

Millions of websites were affected by the GoDaddy website. If your domain name was merely registered by GoDaddy, chances are that your site wasn’t impacted. However, sites hosted on GoDady’s servers felt the effects.

It’s also important to understand that just because you don’t purchase hosting services directly from GoDaddy, it doesn’t mean that you are in the clear. If you get hosting from a third-party site, that site might be brokering hosting on GoDaddy servers. That means that your business site could go down, even if you don’t realize that it is hosted on a GoDaddy server.

And, even if your website doesn’t go down, there is the real possibility that a third party that handles some activities for you, such as transaction processing, could be hosted by GoDaddy. In some cases, small businesses saw a limited impact, due to vendor issues or other service problems.

How Does an Outage Like this Impact Small Businesses?

GoDaddy is popular amongst small businesses because the hosting prices are low. That means the outage affected millions of small business owners. One of the biggest issues, of course, is that a down website means lost sales. When customers can’t access your site, they take their dollars elsewhere.

Some email communications were interrupted as well, which hampered customer service efforts. Small businesses need to stay on top of customer service, and without email abilities, providing the kind of attention customers want is very difficult – if not impossible. Small businesses should have other avenues for customers, including Twitter and Facebook, so that customers can get information quickly, and so that you can show that you are doing what you can to address concerns.

The possible economic impact is likely to run in the hundreds of millions of dollars when all is said and done. While the exact impact is unclear right now, the losses from millions of small businesses could add up and make a difference.

One thing is clear, though: Whether the outage was the work of a hacker, or an internal glitch as GoDaddy says, the message is that there is something lacking in terms of security and reliability. If GoDaddy can’t prevent this sort of thing from happening, the company could see an exodus of customers, and that would be a huge impact on GoDaddy.

Was your website impacted by the GoDaddy outage? Will you stick with the company after this debacle?