GoDaddy Fail Brings Geekazine Down for Day
Last Updated on February 23, 2024 9:18 pm by Jeffrey Powers
At 10:30 A.M, it was brought to my attention that Geekazine.com wasn’t resolving correctly. It would bring up a 403: Forbidden error. After giving it a half hour, I knew it wasn’t correcting itself. I then called GoDaddy support in where I was told that their internal process seemed to have corrupted the permissions on my sites. I was assured that it would be resolved in a couple hours. I told the support agent of the urgency, especially since this is a podcast day.
A couple hours passed and no resolution to the hosting had been made. I went ahead with the show anyway, but come 4 PM, nothing had changed. I called GoDaddy up again, in which I was told the same thing and that this call was to be escalated. Being on a tight schedule as it was, I decided to head out and hope things would be back online shortly.
However, they did not. By 10 PM, the site was not back up. This is an unacceptable situation: Geekazine had been down for a half a day with no decent explanation. If they had server issues, then I could understand a 12 hour or more block. But there was apparently no rhyme nor reason for this to have happened.
After a third call to GoDaddy, I finally got some resolution. By 11:30 P.M. – 13 hours after the site went down – everything was resolving properly again. No real reason given.
What was a little more frustrating was that GoDaddy support said that I was in a queue where I should have been prepared with a “24 hour rule” – basically they have 24 hours to fix the problem. They would get to my issue when it hit the top of the queue.
Now I am not paying hundreds of dollars for this site, but I still think a 24 hour wait is not acceptable. Luckily, I put my audio content on a different server and the video content on Blip.tv. My RSS should have been replicated in certain spots where you could download the latest show through Techpodcasts or Blubrry.com. I was restricted from adding the Weekly podcast and today’s Day in Tech History segment. Since the podcast is expire-able content, every second it’s not up is another second I could lose listeners.
The kicker is it was probably a 5 minute fix to a 13 hour wait. If they have that many problems that can cause a half a day to resolve, then Godaddy should get more people to resolve issues. By them saying they have a 99.9% uptime; With my problem, that means my sites should be up and running without issue for the next year and a half to maintain the 99.9% accuracy.
Not a great day for Geekazine. But now it’s all back up and running.
