It’s been one week since I boarded a plane from Orlando heading back to good ole’ Austin, Texas.

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few thoughts and interactions from my MERGE! 2018 experience.

It’s hard to believe a year has passed since MERGE! burst onto the scene in its inaugural debut.

Many attendees have converged to meet in Orlando, Florida this year at the Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista – Disney Springs Area to pick up where we left off last year discussing an array of digital principles — Domains, Hosting, Digital Search, CMS, Cryptocurrency, IP, Blockchain, eCommerce and Security.

Seems like every few weeks or months I receive an inquiry about how to share or whether or not it’s possible to delegate access to a given GoDaddy Account.

There are a number of reasons for delegating access to a GoDaddy Account. Often times delegating access to GoDaddy account helps those of us that manage many customers to centralize and become efficient.

In addition, customers often prefer to have their very own GoDaddy account (highly recommended) as opposed to a paying a 3rd party person that likely co-mingles products and services in one account with multiple customers.

Over a decade or so ago, I would attempt to manage a spreadsheet of customer logins for GoDaddy accounts.

Here we are closing out a Tuesday with Hump Day fast approaching, and GoDaddy has found a way to bring small business websites throughout the world using their WordPress and Classic web hosting packages to a complete halt.

I knew something went wrong when I received a flurry of emails close to 5PM EST about a number of customer websites being down.

I really didn’t pay much attention because I saw most were back up in a matter of 5 minutes or less.

Then came the knockout punch some 15 minutes later when every last customer website I support was displaying the dreadful WordPress error message:

As many of us throughout the world close the books on the first half of the year and start the second half of the year with a clean slate, I discovered Register.To is kicking off the second half of the year with a promotion to be happy about.

I received an email the other day from a customer that’s been us nearly 15 years.

About a year or so ago, we served this customer by upgrading their website design and hosting as well as implementing SEO retainer services.

Most recently, in an effort to speed up and optimize website performance, we implemented the use of Cloudflare for the customer’s website hosted via Bluehost.

If you haven’t heard of or not using Cloudflare, then you are missing out on realizing greater website performance and increased boost search rankings.

I originally discovered Cloudflare and all of it’s goodness from SEO Legend Bill Hartzer while attending DNHouston some time ago.

The reason I mention Cloudflare is because this is where my mind immediately was drawn to when receiving the customer’s email about not being able to successfully File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to the web server.

A few days ago, I was bouncing between Chrome tabs checking GoDaddy expiring domain auctions, email, and GoDaddy’s Hosting Manager.

All was working well until I encountered a pesky 400 Bad Request error as I attempted to access GoDaddy’s Hosting Manager using Chrome.