When the internet seemed to be at a standstill on Monday, I was oblivious to the problems that what seemed to be thousands upon thousands of people were panicking that their websites were down. The only reason I knew that it was going on was because a friend of mine called me up and asked if there was anything that could be done while GoDaddy resolved the hack (or ‘infrastructure malfunction’ as they called it on Tuesday. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done because GoDaddy’s own site was down throughout the outage.
What I did preach to my friend (other than switching away from GoDaddy as soon as possible) was trying not to rely heavily on any one company to manage your online presence. Especially one as big, and as hated as GoDaddy seems to be.
It’s dangerous to have all your proverbial eggs in one basket. For example, say you started your business in 2009. You didn’t want to commit the capital into working with a web designer to put together, so you put together a nice looking Facebook page and used those handy dandy custom loading tabs to present your company in a unique way. Until 2011 when Facebook got rid of that format and transitioned everyone to the current Facebook timeline. All that work, down the drain.
Or what happens when Facebook is no longer the cool site to hang out on? Then what? You’ve invested a lot of time and money on a site/company that is no longer relevant.
As it pertains to purchasing domains, DNS servers & hosting (GoDaddy’s real problem) – I’ve always told my clients not to go with large companies that have a lot of enemies. While they usually have a better support staff when things go wrong, they usually attract a lot more problems. I use smaller, but more reliable companies like MediaTemple, NameCheap, WPEngine & VPS.netto manage my domains and hosting for my various sizes of clients. These companies don’t spend money on flashy commercials with scantily clad women, so they have more to invest on the things that really matter – infrastructure and support.
And more importantly – spend time building your online empire in a lot of different places. Facebook, Twitter, Web Sites, Pinterest – as many as you can manage. That way, when one company lets you down, you aren’t totally in the dark.
