Anyone trying to reach my blog yesterday will have had great difficulty, due to an issue with the server my website and another 5000+ people are hosted on with GoDaddy.

I first noticed something was up with the blog when I attempted to access it on my lunch break around 12:30pm, at first I thought that maybe one of my recent plugin updates had somehow maybe disabled the site, but then when I also couldn’t reach my other blog www.vincesapplemac.com I definitely knew something was up.

So first thing I did was check GoDaddy’s status page to see if there were any issues being reported by them, but according to the page, there were no issues affecting them or their customers, attempted to contact them via phone, but the waiting time listed was anything between 15-20minutes, now remember at this point I was still on my lunch break and hadn’t even had chance to grab something to eat due to spending most of my already dwindling break searching for reasons as to why the blog was down.

It was at this point I checked out the forums to see if anyone else was reporting issues with their websites, and low and behold everyone situated on the same Server as me was also reporting their websites down, so along with the other poor souls I posted a message in the forums asking Godaddy why my site was down.

The response I received was that the site wasn’t down as it could resolve to my domain name when you opened a browser and typed in the address, however you couldn’t see anything of the content of my site, well to me if you can’t see the content of my website because of an issue with your webhost I’d say that means your site is down.

Anyway after a few more people posting about this, GoDaddy responded with some actual information about the issue affected the Webserver, apparently there words not mine, the Security Filtering for incoming traffic to the server wasn’t working correctly, in lay-man’s terms and according to I.E.’s diagnostic Port 80 was closed/blocked/not accepting traffic, well seeing as this is used for Hypertext Transfer Protocol this would certainly explain why no content was being displayed.

With little further information being provided by GoDaddy except to suggest we all hit refresh repeatedly and this may or may not bring up the content on our website (yeah as if anyone visiting my blog is going to know to do that, all they are going to see is that my websites down), it was just then a waiting game until GoDaddy resolved the issues, which they did around 7:30-8:00pm last night.

But we the customers of GoDaddy are left with a number of questions

1. What caused the Security Filters to suddenly start blocking traffic to the webserver? Filters don’t just turn on without some sort of intervention from an outside source
2. Why did it take so long for you to tell us what the problems were?
3. What measures have you put in place to prevent this happening again?
4. Why was there nothing reported on your status page when it was obviously affecting a large number of your customers?

I’m going to post the above on the GoDaddy forums and see what answers I get, because at the end of the day I’ve just swapped from a webhost who in the 10yrs I was with them never had a down day on my website, to one that within less than 2 weeks has me worrying about my decision to move to them, through slow loading times of my websites, slow one-click installs (though calling over 6-8hrs to install WordPress, a Quick install, is taking the piss a little) and now WebServer Security software preventing people viewing my site.

I need GoDaddy to instill me with confidence . . and thus far they don’t, so come on prove me wrong