Skanky competition

So GoDaddy went down this morning, and at the time some people speculated that it was a takedown by Anonymous, allegedly because of GoDaddy's initial support of SOPA (which it later reversed - I guess Anonymous didn't get that far in its research).

Some people think that this would be a really good time for competitors to tout their services.

But there's no good way to do it without the competitor looking bad itself.

Take this tweet from GoDaddy competitor HostGator:

This was followed up by several other tweets with a special offer (with promo code reliablehost).

Now consider the ramifications if it turns out that GoDaddy was truly shut down by malevolent forces intent on taking it down. Does this mean that HostGator supports such tactics?

And even if the outage truly was the fault of GoDaddy and not some script kiddies, any competitor seeking to take advantage of the situation had better make sure that its own house is in order. As Ben Cook noted regarding the #reliablehost promo code:

@hostgator @lordofseo given hostgators performance lately I'm assuming that's an ironic hash tag?

And there was a follow-up tweet:

@lordofseo yeah, we have had issues as have some of our clients. Moving everything off.

Of course, I may be making too much of HostGator's sleazy advertising techniques. After all, HostGator wouldn't be the first domain provider to use sleazy techniques in advertising.