Netster 宅男

Hi every one,

If you were redi­rected while surf­ing my blog pages to an unfa­mil­iar site (exam­ple below) yes­ter­day, I like to apolo­gies. This is due to advertlets.com domain name expired and they will still hav­ing the same prob­lem resolv­ing their domain name for the next 24 – 48 hours because Advertlets.com renew their domain one day after the domain name expired. I have deleted off some of their link from my blog to avoid my blog being hi-jacked to dis­play the expired domain name announce­ment + ille­gal ads!

This whole week seem a bad week for me. My house phone was down from Tues­day – Fri­day, to make the whole thing more com­pli­cated my house Streamyx DSL line was down even after my house phone line was fix on Fri­day. I have to pay extra using 3G inter­net con­nec­tion to surf online. Not to men­tion my “lengthy, waste time & money” con­ver­sa­tion with TM. Does TM hir­ing a bunch of peo­ple that get a job done or make the sit­u­a­tion worse? How do you feel when you were on hold for 15min and when it get con­nected some one singing hap­pily at the background?

Here are few tips to all domain name owner! Keep­ing your domain name live and healthy is impor­tant for your web­site. You may risk los­ing cus­tomers & read­ers and impor­tantly, money! There are no good excuses for you to renew your domain name on the last min­utes or on the last day it self.

• Renew your domain name early, DON’T do it last min­utes or face DNS resolv­ing issues and it may takes up to 24 – 48 hours. Renew­ing your domain name last min­utes may get your domain name hi-jacked by domain name hunter. This is true when your domain is not under your full control/ownership. So you got to be care­ful not to let your domain name expired. Trust me on this, I have got expe­ri­ence on this which lead us (our IRC net­work) to change domain name for 4 times.
• Don’t ever get FREE or CHEAP domain name, sounds good but don’t! You risk los­ing own­er­ship to the domain name in the long run.
• Some good reg­is­trar may email you one month in advance request­ing domain name renewal. You can always WHOIS on your own domain name to ver­ify the valid­ity of your domain name.
• Take full con­trol of your own domain name! Reg­is­trant, Admin­is­tra­tive, Technical…
• Add more NS (name server) to your domain name. The more loca­tion your domain name were hosted, the bet­ter! Most Malaysian NS prac­tices 2 set but this 2 set of NS, I believe is from the same loca­tion. Put for fun? Hehe­hehe I’m not so sure…
• Renew up to ten years if you wish! why not? it’s not that expen­sive any­way if you are run­ning dot com business.

Advertlets.com, Thanks you!

*Update 8th Jan­u­ary 2008*
Josh Lim of Advertlets.com sends “We’re Sorry” mail to all blog­gers. I felt sorry for Josh too… any­way, les­son learned. This small-but-bad-mistake is a hard way to learned. Success only comes after fail­ing, Josh Lim will def­i­nitely be very suc­cess­ful in the future pro­vided he don’t give up.

from “Josh Lim @ Advertlets”

Hi,

This is Josh Lim here from Advertlets. This mes­sage is sent out to all blog­gers that have reg­is­tered with Advertlets in our key mar­kets of Malaysia & Singapore.

Firstly, we admit. We made an error in judg­ment, and we did not intend for this to hap­pen. And we are very sorry that it did, and would like to apol­o­gize for every­one affected.

Some small mis­takes are resolved eas­ily, and affect a few. And some mis­takes, how­ever small, can affect millions.

Most of you are prob­a­bly dis­ap­pointed, con­fused or angry at the recent down­time that has hap­pened, that has cut off access to your blogs. Over the past few days, we have been doing every­thing we can to restore ser­vice, as well as answer­ing e-mails, phone calls, smses, media inter­views, and sup­port requests.

Its hard to apol­o­gize to more than 15,000 mem­bers, and this e-mail was hard to type, but undoubt­edly nec­es­sary. And first, I’ll prob­a­bly be best to start by answer­ing ques­tions you might have:

What hap­pened?
==============
A com­pli­ca­tion in the renewal process caused the Advertlets.com domain to expire, and caused issues for blog­gers with our ads installed, which made their blogs redi­rect to a place­holder page. It was not our intent to do so. Advertlets.com blog users were unable to login to their Advertlets accounts and access the web­site as well.

How many did it affect?
=======================
Accord­ing to our sta­tis­tics, it affected 30–65% of traf­fic to our net­work over the past 2 days. On most days, we expe­ri­ence between 3–4 mil­lion ad impres­sions per day. The view­ers of most blogs were affected in some way, depend­ing on the nature of how DNS set­tings would resolve in dif­fer­ent coun­tries and ISPs. Some would resolve faster, some would not, which caused vary­ing expe­ri­ences for view­ers in dif­fer­ent places.

What can I do to resolve the prob­lem?
=====================================
You can fol­low some trou­bleshoot­ing steps listed at http://advertlets.blogspot.com, a site tem­porar­ily set up to assist in
this issue. Or, you can remove your code for the time being, and we will notify you when it has been fully resolved.

Whose fault is it?
==================
Ours. The short answer is that it is our fault. The longer answer is that we tried every­thing we could as soon as we knew, how­ever, some uncon­tactable and unco­op­er­a­tive par­ties made it harder. Nev­er­the­less, the blame lies with us, and we will take full respon­si­bil­ity for it, and to resolve it.

What will hap­pen to my cur­rent earn­ings?
========================================
Your cur­rent earn­ings will be retained within the sys­tem, and we will con­tinue to serve paid ads for you to con­tinue to earn in future.

If I choose to con­tinue with Advertlets, can I be assured that this will never hap­pen again? And how do you intend to com­pen­sate us for the error?
=======================================================================
The domain has also been renewed, and we will make sure that this can never hap­pen again. We resolve to do bet­ter in future, and have more fail­safe options avail­able. A finan­cial com­pen­sa­tion plan is being worked out, and will be announced on after we have assessed the full situation.

Will we be con­tin­u­ing oper­a­tions?
=================================
Yes. Paid ads are begin­ning to be served through the sys­tem again in avail­able locations.

Where is ser­vice avail­able as of now? How soon until every­thing is okay?
=======================================================================
We’ve received reports that most of the DNS has suc­cess­fully resolved for the fol­low­ing ISPs:

- Jar­ing (Malaysia)
– TMNet (Malaysia)
– Starhub Max­on­line (Sin­ga­pore)
– PT Telkom (Indonesia)

Ser­vice is con­tin­u­ing to be restored through­out the rest of Asia and the world and all ser­vice should be fully restored in less than 12
hours.

Its heart­en­ing that some have been of great assis­tance to us in this dif­fi­cult time, pro­vid­ing us with ser­vice updates from their area as well as moral sup­port. But to those that were frus­trated, we under­stand your frus­tra­tion, and it frus­trates us even more to have
been the source of it. All in all, we are still in awe as to how pas­sion­ate all of you are.

And how many peo­ple have cho­sen to make Advertlets part of their chan­nel of expres­sion. It is our hope that you can con­tinue to do so. Ser­vice is close to being 100% restored, and we will be noti­fy­ing all when ser­vice is fully func­tional, to assist you with your deci­sion on the con­tin­ued use of our ser­vices. Your impres­sions are your votes. And if you can for­give us, we will make sure your trust is never again misplaced.

We will be mak­ing some per­son­nel changes and new addi­tions to ensure that every­thing — sup­port, ad load­ing time, code, and more run smoothly in future. Major upgrades to the sys­tem are due in Feb­ru­ary, in the form of Advertlets 2.0 with new ad for­mats, refer­rals, earn­ing graphs, social fea­tures, and traf­fic gen­er­a­tion facil­i­ties. And of course more­con­tests, adver­tis­ing rev­enue and spon­sored post opportunities.

We hope that in the next few days we can prove our­selves again to you, nev­er­the­less, our redemp­tion will be in your hands. Once again, we apologize.

Regards,
– -
Josh Lim
On behalf of all at Advertlets.com

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