NEW YORK — Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com, including several in the Myrtle Beach area, went down for several hours on Monday, causing trouble for the mainly small businesses that rely on the service.

More than 50 Myrtle Beach hotels that use GoDaddy services through Fuel Interactive could be impacted

by as much as $30,000 an hour, collectively, for each hour the sites are down, according to a press release from Fuel Interactive.

A Twitter feed that claimed to be affiliated with the “Anonymous” hacker group said it was behind the outage, but this couldn’t be confirmed. Another Twitter account, known to be associated with Anonymous, suggested the first one was just taking advantage of an outage it had nothing to do with.

GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said the outage began shortly after 1 p.m. EDT. By around 5:50 p.m. EDT, the GoDaddy.com website and sites hosted by the company were back up and running. Driscoll had said the company was investigating the cause.

GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites, mostly for small businesses. Websites that were complaining on Twitter about outages included MixForSale.com, which sells accessories with Japanese animation themes, and YouWatch.org, a video-sharing site.

“While we disagreed with GoDaddy’s stance on SOPA/PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect IP Act), which is being attributed as a reason for this

attack, they’re a big part of our business and the area’s economy. They’re a backbone of the internet and

attacks like this hurt the small businesses infinitely more than they hurt the large businesses they are

designed to target,” said Stuart Butler, Chief Operating Officer of Fuel Interactive.

Catherine Grison, an interior designer in San Francisco who operates the site YourFrenchAccent.com, said she had to stop sending emails with her website link in them while the outage was ongoing. The site is where she displays her portfolio of work.

“If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent,” said Grison, a native of Paris. She said she was already shopping around for another site host because she was unhappy with GoDaddy’s customer service.

Earlier, Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, Calif., screen printing business, said fresnodogprints.com and two other sites were down. Their email addresses weren’t working either.

“We run our entire business through websites and emails,” Borg said.

The business even takes orders from its two physical stores through the Web, so clerks had to use their personal email addresses to send in orders to the printing shop, causing an administrative headache, Borg said.

Borg said he could empathize to some extent with the hacker, if one was involved. GoDaddy was a target for “hacktivists” early this year, when it supported a copyright bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Movie and music studios had backed the changes, but critics say they would result in censorship and discourage Internet innovation.

“I’m definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if he’s going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that,” Borg said. “But I don’t think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company.”

The online assault on GoDaddy’s web hosting services that is being referred to on Twitter as

#TangoDown is making an impact all over the world, as well as in the Myrtle Beach area.

Over 50 local Myrtle Beach hotels that use GoDaddy services through Fuel Interactive could be impacted

by as much as $30,000 an hour, collectively, for each hour the sites are down.

“While we disagreed with GoDaddy’s stance on SOPA/PIPA, which is being attributed as a reason for this

attack, they’re a big part of our business and the area’s economy. They’re a backbone of the internet and

attacks like this hurt the small businesses infinitely more than they hurt the large businesses they are

designed to target,” said Stuart Butler, Chief Operating Officer of Fuel Interactive.