Going Dark With GoDaddy: How Downtime Could Have Been Prevented

By PacketTrap MSP Guest Blog 1

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GoDaddy.com’s outage serves as a key example for avoidable IT issues and makes the case for the necessity of managed services. Through the use of remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools, MSPs can set alerts on a client’s infrastructure based on each unique system. Each system has different pain points that can affect service, and these alerts can be set to monitor performance (including traffic and bandwidth use), pending failure and other issues for routers, hubs, switches, servers and other network applications.

The in-depth and robust functionality that RMM solutions offer spans a wide variety of capabilities including, but not limited to:

In the case of GoDaddy.com, real-time performance monitoring would have been a key asset to the company. The ability to monitor for spikes in traffic, failing backup servers and network glitches is a feature that makes MSPs a key asset to SMBs. The proactive monitoring would have allowed an MSP to fix the issue before it caused downtime, and in hindsight, the internal issues could have been caught by an MSP before GoDaddy.com clients began to go dark.

Although no sensitive customer information was lost during the outage, it called GoDaddy.com’s reputation into question. When dealing with SMB clients, especially when hosting around 5 million sites, steady revenue and consistent service are keys to their survival, and MSPs serve as a trusted advisor for keeping business running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Having one network alert could have saved a vast number of SMBs from losing revenue due to downtime.

By understanding the issues that each unique SMB may face, and preemptively setting alerts to watch for the red flags, MSPs are positioned as trusted advisors to their clients and a necessity to their work flows. It is a value-add that allows for a steady flow of income for MSPs, who can offer managed services instead of break-fix services. As for SMBs, they no longer see a loss of business or revenue due to IT downtime.

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