Go Daddy is picking up the pieces after being hit by a suspected DDoS attack that disrupted service to more than five million websites for four hours yesterday. But while the sites are back online, it may be a while longer until its reputation is restored…

We first reported on the attack shortly after it broke at 10:25am PDT yesterday. Go Daddy technicians battled for more than four hours to restore services to normality, eventually doing so at 2:43pm PDT.

“All services are restored and at no time was sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords, names, addresses, ever compromised,”  a spokesperson for the company told CNet.

Responsibility for the attack was later claimed by a lone operative of the hacker’s collective Anonymous, AnonymousOwn3r, who states on his Twitter page that he is the group’s ‘security leader’, although he has yet to offer any proof to either of these claims.

It’s uncertain what Go Daddy has done to restore order, or if they have fully fixed the problem, as it was later reported that company had to approach its main rival, Verisign, to ask it to temporarily host some of its DNS servers.

Customers Not Happy

Go Daddy responded pretty quickly, but it seems as if their efforts were not fast enough for a number of irate customers. Asked why he chose to use Go Daddy, Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of collaboration app Asana, responded that he would be taking his custom elsewhere following the outage:

“This was a poorly thought out decision, made by me, at the very beginning of the company. It is unfortunately somewhat high friction to change, but we’ve already had it on our task list to migrate. This morning’s outage (following one of our own—nobody’s perfect!) will certainly hasten that departure.”

Elsewhere, a number of smaller website owners took to Twitter to vent their frustrations at Go Daddy. @ROBsessedBlog, who has more than 70,000 followers, exclaimed:

Meanwhile, @AnimePlanet has apparently already decided to leave, tweeting the following message:

Despite yesterday’s troubles, Go Daddy will probably weather the storm. The company is no stranger to controversies after all, having attracted fierce criticism in the past for its support of SOPA and its acquisition of the top-ranked Go Daddy complaints forum NoDaddy.com, which it promptly shut down.

Go Daddy will take some stick for this outage (surely they’ve heard of DDoS mitigation?), and it may even lose a few thousand or so customers in the process,  but it will take more than some ‘anonymous’ hacker to bring it down.