Whew. What a day yesterday, huh? If your site or email service was affected, well you can at least take comfort in knowing you weren’t alone. Millions of customers were affected by yesterday’s GoDaddy hack, you can bet their customer service teams will be working some major overtime this week.
So now that you’ve had yourself a good cry and pitched the appropriate temper tantrum let’s pick up the pieces and look at how to go forward from here.
Never put all your eggs in one basket. Ever.
Sites using GoDaddy as a DNS manager but hosted elsewhere seemed to experience more uptime that sites hosted on the GoDaddy servers.
It is never, ever a good idea to have hosting and email service through one provider. In a worst case scenario (like yesterday) splitting your services across providers can help ensure customers can still get to you one way or another.
Don’t rely 100% on your website or email to run your business.
Easier said than done, I know. But if your business ceases when your website or email go down, that’s cause for concern.
Even if you are an online business with no physical store-front you should have enough customer data to be able to reach out to your biggest customers proactively when your website or email are down for a period of time. You may not be able to get to them all, but don’t risk losing your top customers by leaving them in the dark.
Have a Back Up Plan
If your site is down and you absolutely need that traffic, always have a site backup handy and ready to go live.
For our heavy hitters on the web, we maintain a separate hosting service located in a different part of the world with a fresh backup of the site ready to go live at the drop of a hat. Now if we can’t access the main host to redirect to our backup, we’ll quickly dispatch a series of paid ads on the major search networks to help direct traffic to our live backup site. It’s not 100% fool proof, but it does save some traffic in a pinch. And since we’ve monitored our customers’ web analytics so closely we have a great foundation for what keywords to buy.
Know your host
Without getting into our personal feeling about GoDaddy’s service and ethics let me just say this: Know your host. Know what they stand for, what the press says about them, and how they take themselves to market.
It may not be right, but outspoken and against the grain super corporations will come under attack by hacktivist groups like Anonymous. GoDaddy is well know for sexist ads, supporting SOPA and similar acts, and hunting elephants. Maybe putting your business in the hands of a widely hated company isn’t the absolute best move in the world?
So what do I do now?
Not sure where to go next? We’re offering free infrastructure evaluations for the month of September. We’ll analyze your hosting and email providers and work with you to put in place a plan of action (including a back up plan when the unimaginable happens). Just send an email to info@bluesteelesolutions.com or leave us a note in the comments below.
