Over the last week, Brain Terminal was inaccessible to large portions of the Internet, and much of the e-mail sent to me has been bouncing back to the sender. (If you sent me an e-mail that bounced, please re-send it.) The problem was related to GoDaddy.com’s domain name servers working intermittently and an apparent bug in their “Offsite DNS Manager.” After countless hours on the phone with their technical support representatives, it became clear to me that they were not going to be able to resolve the problem; I was never able to speak with anyone who had enough understanding of DNS to recognize the problem that I was describing. Their “solution” was to ask me to move my domain name registrations from Network Solutions to them. I explained that I would not be giving them more business when they were unable to provide proper service for what I had already purchased.

Recently, I moved Brain Terminal to a “virtual dedicated server” from GoDaddy. I am quite happy with that server—it is noticeably faster than the previous server—but their technical support staff was not able to resolve the problem with DNS. I have since moved away from using GoDaddy for DNS, and the problems began clearing up almost immediately. It may still take another 24 hours or so for the updates to propagate around the Internet, but it seems like the worst of the outages are behind me. I apologize for the problems and the recent lack of updates to the site. The time I would have spent posting was instead spent on the phone with technical support.

Although I’ve ditched GoDaddy’s DNS services, I will continue to use their virtual dedicated server; it is fast and allows me quite a bit of technical control over the environment. It would also require a huge effort to move my site yet again, and I have neither the time nor the patience. So, GoDaddy will continue to host this site, but I do not expect to be giving them any additional business.

The moral of the story? GoDaddy is a good service as long as everything works, but don’t expect much in the way of knowledgeable technical support. If you have any problems beyond the ordinary, you may be on your own.