GoDaddy Server Attacked

DoDaddy Server Network Crashed by DDos Attack

GoDaddy Hosting’s entire server network was taken down Monday Sept 10, 2012 by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack by a hacker. Most, if not all, websites hosted by GoDaddy were down for several hours. E-mail and telephone services were also affected

Exactly how many sites were affected. GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest hosting providers and domain registrar with more than 5 million websites affected by the outage, and peak downtime estimates suggest as many as 48 million websites were affected by the attack

Mail Online (dailymail.co.uk) reports:

• Web hosting giant hacked and all of the websites run through GoDaddy were shut down temporarily as a result of Monday’s attack
• Service was eventually restored for the bulk of customers by 5:43pm (GMT)

GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said:

You Must Have FTP

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is Not Optional

Before signing a hosting contract, make sure the service you are planning to use allows FULL FTP access to your website! By FULL FTP I mean you must have the choice to use any FTP client (or at the very least those FTP clients considered reliable, and in common use by the industry).

FTP Clients

A FTP client is simply the term for a ftp program. (In the same way MS Office Outlook is considered an e-mail client). FTP clients are used to copy files from one location to another over the internet. Filezilla is a commonly used open source FTP client for Windows.

Some web design applications have built-in FTP clients e.g. Dreamweaver. Content Management Systems e.g. WordPress permit file uploads, but are not FTP clients – An FTP client must be standalone, and not dependent on the website. If a CMS website crashes, FTP may be the only way to recover the site; if the CMS is the client, and the site is down, you cannot replace the files easily.