Laissez Faire Club Blog

That GoDaddy Attack

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Well, that wasn’t pleasant. GoDaddy’s entire universe of hosted sites, as well as domain registrations, blew up in an instant, taking down millions of websites, including Agora Financial’s own which includes Laissez Faire Books. We don’t use it for hosting but our domains are there. It was the first time for this company after ten years of uninterrupted service. Some people say it was deliberate hacking in retaliation for GoDaddy’s support of SOPA and PIPA. Maybe. “Anonymous” itself is sending mixed signals.

I can only imagine what it must have been like today at GoDaddy’s office. These people will be reaching for a stiff drink at day’s end. For my part, I followed the thing on Twitter and appreciated the sheer excitement of it all. In the tech world, when calamity arrives, there is always a dawn that is better as a result. Hackings and outages expose vulnerabilities that are then fixed and and result is a better system overall.

Of course many customers tend to bail after these events, thinking that the service is unreliable. That’s usually the wrong approach. The best companies are those who have faced a high price for bugs and then fixed them. If you spend all your time chasing companies with perfect records, you can end up chasing failure from place to place. It sounds like a paradox, but the best companies are those who live through disaster and survived to face another day, stronger for the wear. (All you geeks who are facing the wrath of your bosses, repeat to them what I just said.)

In government, it is different. The bugs are not only built into the system; the multiply as time goes on and swamp the working parts. The absence of the profit motive and the ability to calculate rationally means that they never improve in accordance with consumer preference. The market is forever fixing itself; the government is forever repeating and entrenching its failures.

And speaking of profit, you have to admire the company that saw the opportunity and placed an ad for stress relieving services on the GoDaddy Twitter feed.

  • http://ar.to/ Arto Bendiken

    Frankly, I’m surprised and dismayed that any liberty-loving folks would park their domains with GoDaddy. Of all the domain registrars you could take your business to, they are about the single worst choice.

    For anyone unfamiliar with their nasty business practices and their enthusiastic support for state censorship, the “Controversies” section of their Wikipedia page provides an adequate summary.

  • http://activist.la Ivan Burbakov

    Good reason to move domains to any another good registar. I’ve moved mine right after that statements about SOPA and feels anticorporatively good.

    Good reason for emplyees and partners to think about working in such a statist corporation. NoDaddy :)

    But I’m not supporting ddos attacks, though.