GoDaddy’s DNS Outage Exposes the Need for DNS Redundancy
The GoDaddy DNS outage had wide spread effect. Hacktivists claimed to have caused it but Interim CEO Scott Wagner said the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted route data tables.
No matter what the cause, whether it was internal errors or external attacks, the outage that Go Daddy experienced show the extreme effect a DNS failure can cause. One customer of Go Daddy, runningshoes.com, estimated that the outage cost them $10,000 to $20,000 in lost business.
To try and mitigate the issue GoDaddy is offering their customers that were impacted a 30% discount. I’m sure this will be a very expensive item for Go Daddy, but won’t come near to covering the loss that some customers have experienced. Go Daddy should be able to handle the hit and recover if it addresses the core issues such as implementing better redundancy and controls. Its 2011 revenue was $894.3 million with 10.4 million customers worldwide. It is crucial that Go Daddy rebuild customer confidence.
The Domain Name System (DNS) today supports real business and outages create real losses. The era of an experimental type of shared code, “best effort” environment is long past. Failure and outages bring real and extensive financial ramifications.
As covered in an article in Network Computing “GoDaddy Outage a Harsh Reminder That Enterprises Need DNS Redundancy” the importance of having a redundancy is necessary and crucial”. “As the foundation of the Internet, DNS affects a wide variety of services in an era where users access a great deal of information and applications online”, said Christopher Stark, CEO of cloud computing provider Cetrom. Stark said the Go Daddy outage should be a wake-up call for IT managers and CIOs who may not have sufficient redundancy for DNS. “It is standard practice to have multiple DNS servers and one or two providers,” he said.”
Having well planned redundancy is crucial to maintaining a highly available level of service. This includes using duplicate equipment, multiple carriers, and commercial grade software. Having a solid base for DNS Authoritative and recursive servers is very important in keeping DNS activity reliable.
At Secure64 we realized the importance offering an alternative to the base code that is used on the majority of the DNS servers on the internet today. This has proven to prevent our servers from exposure to many attack vulnerabilities. It is a characteristic for many of our customers.
