Bitcoin Forum

Tried to buy some goods at an online storefront that sells for bitcoins.

When it redirected me to Bitpay I got "can't find server" error messages, and am getting the same when I try to visit the site in another window.

Is anyone else having trouble here? What's up?

Yes, seems down.

Yes, we are looking into it now.  our blogs are down as well, which aren't even hosted on our server, they are hosted on google.

It looks like it's godaddy.com that's down …our DNS servers are hosted with godaddy.com, so any machine that doesn't have the DNS entries cached will not be able to resolve the domain names that we host on godaddy.com.

What should bitpay.com's IP be? I can add it to my hosts file until your DNS comes back up.

I have had this happen before at work, the solution we used was simply to have two completely separate DNS providers configured as primary, and we have to update them both anytime we make a change.  Sometimes the DNS providers get all their servers DDOS'd and there's just nothing you can do otherwise.

I guess you should invest in a more reliable DNS hosting solution that godaddy's one...

For what it's worth, they're apparently under DDoS attack - it's not like this is some random glitch.

I'll reword my sayings then.

I guess you should invest in a more reliable DNS hosting solution that godaddy's one, and in an effective DDoS protection solution.
It's not like any of those are things that don't exist in the market. I think that's obligatory for BitPay to become the recognized payment solution they aim to be.

Sigh. Somehow people seem to think that you can always stay up on the internet if you just throw enough
money at the problem.

http://dyn.com/post-mortem-attack-to-dyn-standard-dns-nameservers/

The link above is to a company that specializes in DNS. Even they can get knocked offline if an attacker
wants to make it happen and has the brute resources to do it.

So do you expect bitpay to spend a ton of money to get 5 9s of uptime or spend a reasonable amount to get
3 9s?

I know, I know.
I'm only surprised in case they don't actually have DDoS protection (sure, it is no perfect solution against attacks, but helps) on a service of that kind. I also heard some bad things about godaddy's DNS long ago, and that's why I thought they should find another DNS solution...

They need to determine if being knocked offline for a few hours results in enough lost revenue to
pay for the very expensive high end DNS services companies like DYNDNS offer.

DYNDNS customer list have places like airlines, large ecommerce sites, etc.. who obviously would lose a few hundred
thousand if they were off line for a few hours.

So bitpay may not be there yet to afford the extra payments per month for such a service.

Even I have customers of mine calling me and asking what is going on. I told them godaddy will
fix it in a few hours at most. It just takes time to get the right people in place to start mitigating it.

Actually it does not need to cost a lot of money to have proper redundant DNS for a small business. In fact it can be done in many cases for under 100 USD  a year. I have been hosting my own websites for over 12 years and following some basic rules saved my business 9 years ago when Featureprice went down back in 2002/2003.

Rule #1 Never host your DNS or website with the same company that is your domain registrar or with one of their affiliates or resellers.

Rule #2 Always know who your domain registrar is. This is critical when purchasing through a reseller or affiliate

Rule #3 Always ensure the domain is registered in your own or your own companies name. Yes that means avoiding private registration services.

Rule #4 Always ensure all the whois information is up to date and you have complete control over all the associated email addresses in the domain registration. It is best if these email addresses are under domains you own and control. It goes without saying keep your registration up to date.

Rule #5 Choose your domain registrar wisely and avoid companies that are constantly embroiled in controversy. GoDaddy is easily among the worst given their support of SOPA and their former CEO involvement with hunting elephants in Africa. Also be aware of political sensitivities if they apply to your site. A US based registrar is not a good idea for your Cuba travel site for example, similarly a registrar based in China is a poor choice for a site about the Falung Gong.

Now hosting DNS in a redundant manner is very affordable. There are companies like EasyDNS https://web.easydns.com/ (https://web.easydns.com/) ZoneEdit http://www.zoneedit.com/ (http://www.zoneedit.com/) that have been around for years and can do this at very affordable rates. One can also easily host one's own DNS on a server or combine one's own DNS hosting with a DNS hosting service for more redundancy.

http://blog2.easydns.org/2012/01/09/post-mortem-of-the-jan-07-ddos-attack/

i will leave it up to other readers to find zoneedit getting nailed with a dos taking them offline for a bit.

trust me.. to make sure you are not down, ever, costs a lot of money. and ever just means not ruining your 5 9s.
5 9s represents about 6 minutes of downtime a year.....
3 9s is about 8-9 hours.

you pay accordingly for each extra 9.

True but one can have redundancy across multiple DNS providers to deal with this. By the way it appears that Bitpay has just added http://www.buddyns.com (http://www.buddyns.com) to get DNS redundancy. That is why their site is now up.

It does not require a fortune to get up time 9's. One can make very significant improvements in uptime at very little cost just by saying no to the marketing BS that companies like GoDaddy spew out.

Edit: Also GoDaddy is still down. Fortunately for BitPay they had registered BitPay.com through another registrar MONIKER and it appears this allowed them to add the additional DNS servers through another DNS provider. So kudos to BitPay for not putting all their eggs in one basket.  

Yes, we setup a backup DNS on buddyns.com as soon as we identified the problem.  Our site came back online without godaddy, so you can now resume spending your bitcoins :)

Your site is still down, whats going on guys? Missed out on several customers wanting to pay.

I updated the OpenCart module code to restore functionality, so those with opencarts should check out this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110690.0