Godaddy Down?

Is your Godaddy Hosted Website Down? Here’s what you can do:

Do you have a website with Godaddy? Is it down? i can tell you there’s no more frustrating experience than having your website go down.
I host my websites with Godaddy, and like all hosting companies, sometimes the servers go down. Unfortunately I’ve found their tech support to be the least informative/helpful that I’ve ever come across, so I decided to go ahead make a guide for fellow webmasters whose websites are down.

Section 1: Check if it’s Really Down

Sometimes your home IP address or web browser can prevent you from loading a certain website that you’ve visited many times before. I won’t get into the reasons for this, but here’s what you can do to fix it.

• Choose another browser to load up your website. If you’re using Internet Explorer, try loading it up with Firefox, or Chrome (it’s always good to have multiple browsers on your computer anyway).
• Go to Down for everyone or just me?. This free web service will check to see if your website is running. If it’s not responding, then it’s officially down.
• If they say your website is up and running, then there may be an issue with your home network. Unplug your router for at least ten seconds to reset the network, and let it reestablish. This should fix it.

If your website is down, one thing you can do is see if it’s a server problem.
Normally you would get a tech support representative to help you, but like I said, they aren’t useful at all.
To find out what server your website is on, you need to what’s called a ‘Reverse IP lookup. It’s really simple, actually.
Go to Yougetsignal and put in your website’s address. it will give you all the websites that are held on your particular server (even if you’re on a Godaddy dedicated server this will work). Now try to visit some of those websites. Are they having the same problem?

The problem with server issues

Anyone who is in charge of servers will tell you that when they go down, it’s a total crapshoot as to when they’ll be back up running. It could be an hour, or it could be a week. All you can do at that point is wait. Trust me when I say that the IT guys are working their butts off trying to get the servers up and running again, and giving timetables is fruitless. Also, yelling at tech support won’t help either. They can’t do anything either.

There are some steps you can take that, when your websites go down in the future, you can lessen the headaches for yourself.

• Add your websites to Cloudfare - Cloudfare is, among many things, a way of backing up your website so that when your server goes down, visitors will still be able to browse an off-line version of your website. It may not be up to date, but it’s a free, no hassle way to make sure your website’s visitors don’t encounter an empty page. I can’t recommend Cloudfare enough.
• Automatically Backup Your Website - There’s several ways of doing this, and most of them go way over my head in a technical sense. I have websites, and so I use a plugin called “snapshot backup” that does this for me automatically. If you want a more technical approach, Lifehacker has a pretty good guide on how to do it.

Using Godaddy’s Tech Support

Once you’ve collected all the information you can (i.e. whether it’s a server issue, problem with your home network, etc.)it’s time to call them. Godaddy tech support isn’t bad, considering how bad it could be. They are based in the U.S., and all have adorable southern accents. Just tell them what you know: your website is down, whether it’s a server issue, and you’ve checked to make sure it isn’t your home network/browser).
Trust me, calling them is infinitely better than the online tech support, which is beyond useless. (they need to hire a consultant to reinvent the process). When I had an issue, I opened up five separate support tickets, asking the same question about my websites. I got five different responses, all telling me different things that sounded like ‘standard excuse #1’. When your website’s down, you don’t want to hear someone tell you that the internet is a busy place and it’s normal. I know that in the cosmic sense of my existence, this problem is small in comparison. I get that. I just want to know why website, once working, is no longer working. (sorry, had to vent at least a little here).

Why You Shouldn’t Switch from Godaddy Hosting

After all this, why would I recommend that you stay? Unless you want to upgrade to a managed server (which gives you someone you can call and yell at) or a dedicated server, there’s no point in moving to another shared hosting platform, like Bluehost or Hostgator. Why? Because after you’ve gone through the headache of switching to another shared server with another company, you’re no safer from before. As far as shared hosting uptime goes, Godaddy is on par with the major hosting companies.

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