The recent domain expiry problem with Advertlets.Com seriously begs the question: How serious is Advertlets about their business? In their Quick FAQ on domain issue posting, they explained what happened: “A complication regarding the renewal process of the domain for Advertlets.com. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”
I think they owe everyone, especially their customers, a much better explanation than that. What was the complication about? How complicated can it be to renew domain names? Besides, domain registrars do send out renewal reminders at least one month before the domain expiry. What can be so complicated that Advertlets cannot sort out in one month?
A business like Advertlets depends on its Internet presence, and a working domain name is certainly an important pre-requisite for its Internet presence to work. A typical brick-and-motar business can probably live with Internet outage, even if they do sell products or services over the Internet. For example, so what if Pizza Hut went off the net for a day. Big deal. I doubt it would seriously affect its business nor annoy its customers. But what if Amazon.Com went off the net?
The worse thing is that when Advertlets went off the net, blog sites that put up Advertlets advertisements ran into trouble: Visitors to their blog site found themselves redirected to a placeholder for the expired Advertlet.Com domain. It is one thing to be “out of service”, and another to bring all your customers down with you! Perhaps Advertlets needs to rethink how their advertisements are marked up in sites.
As I am writing this, Advertlets put up a new post claiming the issue has been partially resolved. Really? The WHOIS database continues to show that the domain is expired. The Internet DNS root servers for the .COM TLD also show that Advertlets.Com is currently parked at dns.parkpage.foundationapi.com. Who are they trying to kid? Their post also asks readers to leave comment to let them know “which areas are not facing the problem anymore”. If it works for anyone, well, then something is wrong because it is not supposed to work given that the DNS root servers are not updated!
I think they don’t know how the Internet works. How sad for a business to depend on the Internet and yet not understand how the Internet works.
ps: I don’t mean to be overly critical. I hope this would be a reminder to other Internet businesses to be mindful about “little matters” that can become big problems. 🙂Update (7 Jan 2008): Apology from Advertlets. Still doesn’t quite answer my dying question of “what happened”, but nevertheless, time to move on.