GoDaddy is one of the most popular web host and domain registrar services on the Internet, powering the websites of countless customers. A company of that magnitude can’t afford to have their site crash.

Unfortunately, last week GoDaddy suffered an outage causing thousands of websites to go down for most of the day. The error occurred from an internal server problem.

TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden says:

“This instability in GoDaddy’s network has had (perhaps just coincidentally) an unfortunate correlation to instability at the top of the organization. Wagner assumed the job of CEO at GoDaddy on an interim basis at the end of July after a tumultuous CEO upheaval that first saw ‘elephant-killing’ CEO Bob Parsons step down 10 months ago to be replaced by Warren Adelman for only eight months.

Wagner in this note writes that GoDaddy had up to now provided a 99.999% update on its DNS infrastructure. ‘We have let our customers down and we know it.’

The apology may not be enough to convince some. As we reported yesterday, Asana’s Dustin Moskovitz wrote on Quora that the downtime was a spur to his company to finally make the move from GoDaddy.”

However, the instability of the network can most likely be traced to a misstep in in-the-wild testing, or a lack of testing altogether. Thorough in-the-wild testing may have eliminated this real world problem early on. While GoDaddy has now taken the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future, major enterprises need to test to ensure these real world crashes don’t happen from the get-go. And as we know – the only way to simulate a real world crash is to utilize in-the-wild testing.

For more information on real world testing click here.

Has one of your favorite sites ever crashed? If so, did you stop using it after the incident? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.