My GoDaddy domain is down

My domain registrar (GoDaddy) is currently down (9/10/2012 11:20AM AZ) in what seems to be an attack from the group Anonymous. Not only their services are down, even their main webpage is down right now! Wow, that was ugly!

I am not hosting any of my projects with them. Everything is hosted on Google infrastructure (AppEngine, Apps for Business, Blogger etc). Unfortunately they are all down too because I still rely on GoDaddy's DNS servers! Grrrrr! :(

The only positive thing I can take from this issue is that my web monitor app Pingr worked as designed and quickly notified me about the problem. In this case there isn't much I can do to fix it though, have to wait for GoDaddy figure it out on their side. At least Pingr will tell me once their system is back up. Until then Pingr's main URL (http://pingr.eventfy.com/) will be unavailable.

P.S. If anyone else wants to receive a notification from Pingr when your system is backup you can use it from its Google AppEngine's URL: http://pingr-eventfy-com.appspot.com/.

Update: at 3:18PM AZ (about 4 hours since I found out about this issue!) my domain eventfy.com finally got back up.

It seems some sites are still affected but GoDaddy is slowly getting there. You can find a discussion about this issue here (Reddit).

Update: yesterday night (9/13) GoDaddy sent me an email taking the blame, stating that it wasn't caused by an external hacker but by themselves. Not sure if (i) I buy it and (ii) it makes me feel any safer if this is true. Anyways they gave me a 30% off new product or renewal valid for 7 days. Man, I am just happy I don't depend on this for my livelihood! :)

This blog is back

After a (too) long hiatus I finally decided to get rid of the cobwebs and write here again. I didn't have lots of cool ideas to discuss so I decided to start a new pet project to give me some inspiration. After few weekends this is what I came up with:

1. Eventfy (http://www.eventfy.com), a simple web tool to setup events. You can use Eventfy instead of group emails to organize and track events. You can even setup conditional events like those poker (or RPG) games you can't confirm yet because you're not sure enough people will show up. In this case, once enough people confirm their presence Eventfy automatically notifies everybody that the game is on. If not enough people confirmed by the deadline you set Eventfy sends an event cancellation note to all invited. Thanks to responsive design techniques all functions work great from computers and from small devices like smartphones and tables.
2. Pingr (http://pingr.eventfy.com), a basic web-based availability monitoring tool. Just enter a URL from your site and Pingr will monitor it for you. If the site goes down or performance (ping or download speed) drops below normal thresholds it will quickly send you a notification.
3. Eventfy Blog (http://blog.eventfy.com), where I will post updates about anything hosted in the Eventfy.com domain.

These are quite simple projects but they are mobile-friendly (the screens won't look crappy on smaller screens and as such users won't have to zoom in / out in iPhone and iPad) and  it can transparently scale to meet the demand (hosted on Google App Engine's PaaS solution).

Check out after the break all the different topics I am planning to discuss here soon, all inspired from my experiences with Google cloud platform, public internet domains, responsive websites, HTML5, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and more.