Go Daddy: Secondary DNS Should be Free

Mark Berry September 10, 2012

Today’s Go Daddy outage has made it clear that I need to configure secondary DNS servers for the domains I manage. Not only are Go Daddy’s servers vulnerable to hacking, they are not geographically distributed.

What is secondary DNS? It’s basically a backup DNS server (or several servers) that will continue to answer that all important “where is mcbsys.com?” question even when the primary servers are unavailable.

Today, Go Daddy themselves moved their DNS to their competitor, Verisign, so they could get their web site back online.

Many companies offer secondary DNS hosting. BuddyNS.com looks promising:  their entry-level plan allows up to 300,000 queries per month at no charge. I’d think that would cover most small business accounts, but if not, their next step up offers 3 million hits for $1/month. They offer this handy tool to check your domain’s DNS distribution, including the “sparsity” (geo-diversity).

So I set up my BuddyNS account, but when I went in to configure Secondary DNS at Go Daddy, I was told I need to pay $3/month extra for "Premium DNS.” What? Why do I have to pay so I can configure third-party servers to take over when Go Daddy is unavailable?

Hopefully Go Daddy will see how ridiculous this policy is and stop charging people to safeguard against Go Daddy’s own vulnerability.

Update October 4, 2012:  Go Daddy has not responded to my suggestion to make secondary DNS available to all. And the promised “gesture” for the downtime never materialized. I’ve moved primary DNS from Go Daddy to DNS Made Easy, with BuddyNS as secondary. Here’s how to set that up:  Use DNS Made Easy with BuddyNS as Secondary.

WordPress at HostGator Faster than Go Daddy

Mark Berry January 18, 2011

Back when I first converted this site from BlogEngine.NET, I posted this comparison:  WordPress at Go Daddy Slow Compared to BlogEngine.NET. It showed that Google’s crawler was often taking 1000ms and more to read each page from Go Daddy.

I finally got tired of the poor (and sometimes hung) performance of the Go Daddy server and moved the site to HostGator on October 20, 2010. The improvement was immediate:  HostGator serves the site twice as fast as Go Daddy, and much more consistently:

The faster performance has continued, averaging under 500ms per page:

In fairness, I have to add that a client’s non-WordPress site at Go Daddy loads much faster than mine did. I don’t know if Go Daddy’s slow performance is related to MySQL (required for WordPress, and hosted on a separate server by Go Daddy), or if my site I just landed on an overloaded server, but I’m much happier with HostGator as a shared Linux host.

WordPress at Go Daddy Slow Compared to BlogEngine.NET

Mark Berry June 19, 2010

Through the end of May, this blog was run on BlogEngine.NET and hosted on a Small Business Server through a DSL connection with a maximum 768 kbps upload speed. On June 1, the converted site went live on WordPress at a Go Daddy shared Linux host. I thought that performance would be at least as good on more powerful software at a well-connected host. So I was a little surprised to see the Google crawler’s statistics:

The per-page time is significantly longer, though still well under two seconds per page.

Using Gzip in a Cron Job at Go Daddy

Mark Berry June 2, 2010

I wanted to copy my web site and subwebs from Go Daddy to my local machine. My trusty old WS_FTP32 client kept disconnecting partway through the (large) download. I installed FileZilla, and while that got further, it ultimately disconnected as well.

I figured if I could compress the larger folders using gzip, I could just download a few compressed files. But this Go Daddy account doesn’t have shell access. How do I run gzip? With a Cron job!

Go Daddy Email Too Smart for the Cloud

Mark Berry December 18, 2009

A small customer has an in-house mail server. After some recent DSL connection woes, I’m getting nervous about this single point of failure for their email service.

The customer’s Go Daddy domain and hosting accounts include free email addresses and forwarders. Could we move the email to Go Daddy’s servers to get a more robust, redundant solution?