GoDaddy Sucks and Here is Why – Part 2 – Premium DNS Crashes Networks

GoDaddy sucks. Period. If it isn’t obvious to you from the smutty campaigns with Danica Patrick, supposed President and former CEO “Bob Parsons” having ‘secrets’ like, “The SECRETS to finding and hiring GREAT employees. + 2 Smoking-Hot Go Daddy Girls!”, while being totally sexist and a general creeper, poor advertising in general or the absolutely crappy hosting plans they over-sell hosting nodes on, then we need to talk. This has been a long time coming from us as timing is everything. We wanted to make sure that we took proper precautions to protect ourselves, our intellectual property and free speech as what we’re pissed off about is far from acceptable and borders on near to criminal on Go Daddy, Inc.’s behalf. So to make it crystal clear, this is an account of our experience and not some random slanderous prose on who to hate.

Might as well preface this with: A) It’s technical, B) It’s personal, and C) We gave them ample opportunity to make this problem right before we had to take the issue into our own hands. And in light of recent SOPA problems with GoDaddy, we hope this testimonial is even more of a reason that you don’t use their service. Speaking of, their real CEO, Warren Adelman, put out a statement about SOPA stating that because the Senate couldn’t come to a consensus that GoDaddy was no longer supporting SOPA. Read that again if you need to figure out why we’re astonished or read the whole article about SOPA and GoDaddy sucking. Now, on to the show!

We affiliated ourselves with GoDaddy, a.k.a. GoDaddy.com or Go Daddy, Inc., as an ICANN domain provider back in 2006 before we went public and as a reseller in 2008 to offer competitive pricing and an alternative storefront when we did begin offering public services. As a reseller, they take one of their other companies, Starfield Technologies as well as Wild West Domains (remember this name, it’s key to what went wrong) and have your WHOIS/Registration information pass through them. Since then, we’ve obviously learned that there are just as viable alternatives to domain acquisition and purchases than dealing with GoDaddy, often for pennies more or less. And our network continues to grow.

Looking for a way to keep costs the same or lower and provide the same if not better service, we looked at integrating what was called GoDaddy’s AnyCast DNS now called ‘Premium DNS’. We suspect that they stopped calling it ‘AnyCast DNS’ because you can’t serve DNS from one datacenter and honestly call it AnyCast… sort of a technical oxymoron. This was to be used as an extension of our services and as an alternative to running solely our own network of DNS servers. We didn’t jump in with both feet, but we were deep enough to start losing air before it was too late.

We called and spoke to a sales representative about their services a long time ago, long before our trust was broken and our issue ever occurred. At the time, we declined moving forward with their DNS service because there was no way to CNAME or create a hostname for the servers that matched a domain name of our own as we said a moment ago. When GoDaddy added the ‘vanity name servers’ bit to the DNS service, we were more interested. We called back several months later and spoke to a sales representative that we had make sure with her supervisor her statement was accurate and ordered the Premium DNS service because we were able to not hand out a string like a CDN does. At the time, we had been hosting our own servers and wanted at least one extension off of that for even more redundancy. Since we already had our .com at GoDaddy at the time with the core hostnames coming from GoDaddy, it was easy to say yes to testing out something for like $2.99 a month since we were paying much more than that per DNS server.

Before I get too far into this, a very important part of hosting relies on DNS. DNS to the layman is a server or network system which broadcasts the IP address or location of a server by converting the name of a top-level domain like turkreno.com into an IP address. DNS serves out usually every request that goes through a network and it also plays a very large part in the latency, or speed, in which content is found. There are times when a network is undiscoverable or slow just because of routing issues with backbone service providers. Those providers in the United States, such as AT&T, Global Crossing, Layer3 and others actually run the flow of the Internet and usually own the fiber optic cable on which it runs. So, when a DNS server does a query, the response or reply may tell your traffic to go to Washington first, because that’s where the first router is between you and the domain that resolved and the server you’re asking for, then further “hops” to other locations until your request reaches its destination. Having multiple servers, or an AnyCast-type network, that are within multiple datacenters around the world where those backbones are routed through provides what’s known as a Point-of-Presence (POP) and will decrease latency since the answer is locally cached to that router. In a worst cast scenario, the traffic where a network client requests a site that isn’t cached by the ISP, which is the usual case, the router may have to search or query the router ahead of it to search for a resolving DNS server, thus creating latency. Speed is of the essence and maybe that explains why this improvement is important for any network.

Digressing back to what happened is most likely easier if we just put it into a handy mind map and bullet out the entire issue here for those who don’t want to view a huge PDF. For months this issue was up on the whiteboard in the office and it took precisely that long to fix all of the screwed up issues that happened. We ended up making a mind map chart of what went wrong and we’ll go from there.

GoDaddy Network Failure Mind Map

PDF of the Mind Map — MP3 of the Voicemail

• GoDaddy Network Failure
• Cause/Reasoning
  • > TurkReno.biz hijacked to place to DNS records outside of our control by GoDaddy D/B/A Wild West Domains. Explained in further depth within “Effects”.
    • >> Premium DNS with AnyCast Network selected to improve upon POP in RackSpace ORD1 and DFW
    • >> Inquired about “AnyCast DNS” when plan was released and declined to move forward for fear of the effects that happened.
    • >> Told by sales associate that we could use “vanity name servers” in lieu of hosting our own recursive name servers.
      • >>> This sounded great. It’s much easier to tell a client, even if they’re technically minded, a human friendly and readable address.
    • >> Save money for same DNS purpose without self hosting part of the network. Expansion.
    • >Effects
      • >>> Apathetic responses from GoDaddy
        • >>>> Call from the Office of the President
          • >>>>> Spoke to “Jordan”
            • >>>>>> ”Main concern was getting feedback on how to prevent this in the future” – Actual Results:
              • >>>>>>> Apathetic
              • >>>>>>> Totally on GoDaddy’s Team
              • >>>>>>> Lacking in Technical Expertise, or at least playing extremely dumb.
            • >>>>>> No actual conclusion met. Essentially a feedback loop.
            • >>>>>> Refunded for AnyCast DNS service, but refused to compensate for any outage or brand damage we experienced.
        • >>>> Calls from Manager stating 4 days after the fact that this was due to “Vanity NS’s” not usable with ANY Domains outside my account, even ones within GoDaddy/DPR/WWD
          • >>>>> Recorded message to be put on CDN
            • >>>>>> Voicemail from GoDaddy – Epic admission of what we originally should have been told 5 days before.
            • >>>>>> Phone call from “Jeremy” stating exactly WHY this went wrong. GoDaddy states that you are not allowed to use vanity name servers with domains outside of
          • >>>>> Lack of information on purchase, would have left alone had known this information.
            • >>>>>> To this day, GoDaddy still has not corrected their website to prevent other users from this pitfall.
        • >>>> E-mails from Call Supervisors stating that they would not rest until this was made right.
          • >>>>> Never followed up to me directly after Presidents office called.
      • >>> Call to Registries
        • >>>> Placed call to NeuStar (.biz)
          • >>>>> Told to discuss this matter with Verisign since all domains affected were .com / .net, opened ticket #00406445
        • >>>> Placed call to Verisign (.com/.net)
          • >>>>> Opened ticket #6271
            • >>>>>> Verisign verified that a Wild West Domains employee modified the TLD causing the outage. Exact time of modification given by Verisign was 10:56:36 GMT.
            • >>>>>> Also recalled while on the phone with GoDaddy. GoDaddy support was extremely apprehensive about being on the phone and pretended as if what they were hearing didn’t happen.
      • >>> Distrust of clients
        • >>>> Letters from Client of Clients seeing once sites began re-resolving the message on our end stating to contact the webmaster.
          • >>>>> Clients e-mailing complaint letters
          • >>>>> Clients of Clients e-mailing stating that their travel plans had been ruined.
          • >>>>> Clients stating no traffic, business hurt
      • >>> Inability to correct problem without GoDaddy intervention
        • >>>> Shutdown of 39 Domains for 6 days
          • >>>>> Isolated to our account – per phone call and obvious reasons.
        • >>>> Several tickets opened without our ability to see any of the entry before the ticket was submitted. Basically the equivalent of a person summarizing everything you said on a call into one sentence and submitting it for you on the general contact form of the main website.
        • >>>> Interestingly never shown any of the tickets until after a technician responded to them, no way to reply to them either once responded other than rehashing the entire issue.
        • >>>> Investigative measure taken to identify scope:
          • >>>>> Used kloth.net and robtex.com as an external source to verify local terminal commands.
          • >>>>> Brought GoDaddy on the phone and conferenced in Verisign to have a verbal confirmation recorded by Go Daddy Corporate that WWD/GDI took our traffic offline.
          • >>>>> Purchased full listing of affected domains from domaintools.com to use as a reliable and neutral 3rd-party verifier to event.
            • >>>>>> 39 total domains verified affected by the change.
          • >>>>> Local terminal commands verified events.
            • >>>>>> Primary *nix command: dig turkreno.biz +trace
            • >>>>>> Discovered pleasedropthishost26787.turkreno.biz and pleasedropthishost26788.turkreno.biz – Totally unauthorized.
      • >>> Requests for Reparation
        • >>>> Invoice to GoDaddy
          • >>>>> GoDaddy Cites legal agreements (ToS) on site and says they will not pay any invoice.
        • >>>> No Reparations can be made at this time based on the notes found. Upon further review, subject to change.
      • >>> Removal/Termination of GoDaddy Security Scan from the primary website – Found to be worthless anyway.
      • >>> Deleted TurkReno.biz to attempt to clear GoDaddy NS Records
        • >>>> TurkReno.biz never returned or offered to be returned by GoDaddy. Deleting the domain did not make an immediate difference nor any measurable difference at all that would have happened on other odds.
          • >>>>> TurkReno.biz repurchased on a different ICANN registrar after the domain totally expired out of the Neustar registry as an available domain.
  • >Aftershock
    • >> Anti-GoDaddy Marketing Campaign with Twitter: #ShermanMarchesAgain Launched – (Thanks Tom)
    • >> Boycotting of GoDaddyBowl.com and all things related to the form GMAC Bowl in Mobile, AL.
    • >> Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg following made aware of dissatisfaction.
    • >> Recourse against TurkReno Incorporated.

We spent hours on this with them. Hours we want back from our lives. Maybe we can save you some time. Switch hosting to us, we’re not on GoDaddy’s crappy 4GH Network or whatever they want to call it. Or maybe you want to contact the Office of the President for GoDaddy. No problem, here’s all of their contact info:

E-Mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Phone: 408-505-8828

CEO: Warren Adelman

Alt. Numbers to GoDaddy Corporate Offices: 408-505-8800

So, when you think of DNS hopefully GoDaddy won’t be the first that comes to mind. We’ve got an awesome platform setup to accommodate multiple types of needs, including those of web masters using Linux or WHM/cPanel. Contact us if you’re interested. It’s private for the time being, but will be live soon.

Don’t trust GoDaddy with your DNS, their SysAdmins know NOTHING of how to complete a ticket and they COULD be stealing your traffic, or worse, blocking it because their tech support knows NOTHING.