The Impact of Plugin Performance
In a Study of Go Daddy WordPress sites, we found: There are no caching plugins in the top 10 list. What does this mean for developers? Page caching isn’t as common as you might like. You can’t count on a page cache to speed up your code. Make sure you’re writing fast code and learning …
Website Experimentation Made Fast and Easy
With the recent surge in popularity of the Lean Startup philosophy developed by Eric Ries, many people have become familiar with terms such as MVP (minimum viable product, the least-effort deliverable that can be used to validate assumptions with real customers). Split or A/B testing is another Lean Startup concept and one that we’ve been …
Mobile Web Design Checklist
Despite most websites having neglected mobile support, mobile is not only the platform of tomorrow, but it is also the platform of today. With well over 10% of the worlds web traffic going to mobile devices, it’s time to give your mobile audience some much needed attention. While the term “mobile friendly” may be subjective, …
Go Daddy Employees have a BLAST!
At Go Daddy, every individual does whatever it takes to make things happen on a day-to-day basis to keep our customers happy. We help our customers grow their small businesses and their online web presence, either by working directly with them or by continuously improving our products and services. To celebrate and reward our hard …
Hosting Security – Validated
On 9/4/2012, Go Daddy’s independent auditor completed a Service Organization Control (SOC) assessment for Go Daddy’s hosting services. This assessment evaluated Go Daddy’s security controls against the Trust Services Principles and Criteria and resulted in the issuing of a SOC 2 and a SOC 3 Report. What is a SOC report? Remember SAS 70 reports? …
The First Steps on the Road to Service Oriented Architecture
You likely know Go Daddy for Domains and perhaps for hosting and SSL Certificates. But, you may not know that we have numerous other products, all with the overarching goal to empower domains. The development, delivery, and support of these services share many common aspects. However, as different engineering teams are typically heads-down, overcoming the …
“Version N+1″: A Discussion on Maintaining Legacy Application Code and Thinking about Rewrites
At times, maintaining legacy application code can be difficult. It is a challenge to balance the desire to add new features with the need to maintain backward compatibility. In addition, you need to be aware of “code rot,” which is technical debt that is built over time when simply meeting deadlines or making suboptimal design …
The “Inside Story” about What Happened at GoDaddy.com Sept. 10, 2012
On Sept. 10, 2012, many Go Daddy customers experienced intermittent outages that lasted for several hours. There was immediate speculation about whether we were hacked. It was being reported as “fact” before our engineers had identified the root cause. The service disruption was not the work of an external source, but rather an internal network event triggered by …
Threat Accelerometer
At Go Daddy, we measure a lot of things, including up-time, latency, time to provision, and a whole slew of other data. Also, we keep track of various metrics in the Information Security (InfoSec) department, from blocked attacks per day to virus detections per workstation. We do a lot of “what happened” measurements. We even …
Scaling the Database: Data Types
It was 2 AM on February 4, 2008 and I was on the largest conference call in my life. There were dozens of people listening in, from developers to executives. The Super Bowl had concluded hours before and our Vice President of Marketing was asking me if the query was done yet so that everyone …