GoDaddy, the hosting company and domain registrar, has been struggling or down since 10 a.m. PT, taking hundreds of sites offline. For Justin Wilcox, who today was launching ThingsWeStart, a project that tracks the location, success and expertise of Kickstarter projects, GoDaddy’s problem has been more than an inconvenience –it ruined his launch.
“We had a lot of momentum early in the morning, but now anyone who hasn’t been to our site can’t access it,” Wilcox said. “Our launch got squashed.” Still, he’s philosophical about the experience and says he’s content to stay with GoDaddy depending on what caused the outage and how GoDaddy handles the situation.
And like any entrepreneur, he’s trying to take the lemon of having his site not being up and turning it into lemonade. He’s hoping to find a few other startups whose launches may have been affected by GoDaddy’s outage and see if he can package those up as a story for tomorrow when his site is hopefully back online.
Update: Still working on it, but we're making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.—
Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012
And people should check out his project, ThingsWeStart.com (wait until the GoDaddy outage is over), because Wilcox and a team of volunteers has scraped the Kickstarter site for data about all of the projects to determine where they are held and in what industries. (Wilcox says that because he’s not planning to make money off the site, he’s not breaking the Kickstarter terms of service.) Visitors to the site can sign up for notifications of Kickstarter projects in their areas or in certain fields.
And next week, the project hopes to launch a calculator based on more data crunching it’s doing that will tell you things like the best day to post a new project based on your industry, how much you want to raise and other factors. Given how much Kickstarter has become a source of funds for entrepreneurs, having a source of data and analysis on the site’s past projects seems like a good resource. So bookmark it, and check out some of the maps it has released so far. Or check out the file of all the data it has gathered so you can crunch your own numbers.
As for GoDaddy, spokesperson Elizabeth Driscoll said the company is currently working to restore all of the affected services. As to the cause of the outages — rumored to be the work of hacktivist collective Anonymous — Driscoll said, “We have not made a determination.”
With additional reporting by Derrick Harris.
