GoDaddy Website Hosting

GODADDY WEBSITE HOSTING

Adding GoDaddy as a topic was prompted by the February 2023 stories below detailing the many break-ins to their system.

In addition to hosting websites, GoDaddy is also a registrar, that is, they register domain names. There are hundreds of domain registrars and considering the track record of GoDaddy, as detailed in the articles below, using a different registrar is the Defensive Computing thing to do.

April 2026: A story about a screwup of theirs: GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks by Connor Jones of The Register, April 29, 2026. Perhaps worse than making an outrageous mistake, is not trying to fix it afterwards. Quoting the article: "Support staff proved unhelpful and allegedly lacked what he believed to be the necessary urgency. Over the subsequent days, across 32 phone calls which in total lasted more than nine hours, GoDaddy support threw out various email addresses where it said Landis [the victim] could try to seek a resolution. He claims instructions differed depending on which staffer at the hosting provider answered the phone. Email conversations, of which there were 17, were never with a named individual, just generic address names, says Landis, who adds that he was asked multiple times why he thought the case was so urgent. Not once did he receive a callback from any of these email exchanges."

January 15, 2025: A action by the FTC: FTC Takes Action Against GoDaddy for Alleged Lax Data Security for Its Website Hosting Services.

GoDaddy: Hackers stole source code, installed malware in multi-year breach by Sergiu Gatlan for Bleeping Computer. February 17, 2023. GoDaddy provides website hosting services to more than 20 million customers. They were previously breached in November 2021 and March 2020. The November 2021 incident led to a data breach affecting 1.2 million Managed WordPress customers. In that case, attackers breached GoDaddy's WordPress hosting environment using a compromised password. In the March 2020 breach 28,000 customers had bad guys use their web hosting account credentials to connect to their hosting account.

From Andy Greenberg in Wired (Feb 18, 2023): "Discovering that hackers have had stealthy access to your corporate network for three years is bad enough. Web hosting company GoDaddy this week confessed to something even worse: A group of hackers it had repeatedly spotted inside its network had returned - or never left - and have been wreaking havoc in its network since at least March 2020, despite all the company's attempts to expel them."

From GoDaddy: Statement on recent website redirect issues February 16, 2023.

The GoDaddy 10-K filing with the UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022

Back in December 2021, Zach Edwards warned GoDaddy about problems. Compromised Godaddy Infrastructure Attacking Numerous U.S. Government Websites to Promote 'Canadian Pharmacy' Scam Websites. Quoting: "... something is very, very wrong with GoDaddy infrastructure. Today. Right now. I’ve attempted to report these problems to several entities/orgs for a good chunk of 2021, nothing has been fixed, and the problems seem to be growing."