If you happen to "need" or planned on visiting and using the domain marketplace Afternic.com today, you are out of luck.
Update: The Afternic.com website is back up and running.
Afternic.com is down for site upgrades according to the sites home page.
I thought it was funny that they said they are "Operational" during this period…
I always think it is wise if you will be taking down your service for a planned outage, that you email your customers and inform them that this will be taking place!
Currently, any link to Afternic resolves to the image above. So if you are forwarding your domain name to your listing page or use Afternic to handle your domain transaction.. do not expect to get any offers today or sending an interested party to your listing page on Afternic because they will currently only see the above image.
I do offer my customers the option of visiting Afternic or Sedo and I noticed that sending my customers to my listing page on Afternic today resulted in the above image.
I understand taking down the site and upgrading etc, but it is always nice to let your customers know about it, so they can prepare for it and not look like an ass sending a customer to a down service.
On the flip side of the coin, it will be interesting to see what these new "upgrades" include, but I sure hope they put some focus on bulk functions with making changes to domain names in your account as these functions need great help at Afternic.
Leonard Britt
Normally these sort of upgrades are down during the wee hours of the morning to avoid disruption – not during the middle of the day. But how likely is it that we missed an offer today?
Anthony
They also dont believe in testing their changes first – otherwise there wouldnt be the numerous bugs and non-working functions that they have. Either that, or they really do need a new programming staff or better – a new IT director.
I just received this message too and wonder, how is this operational? I am with you, I have no clue as to what they are doing over there but the need to seriously focus on getting their functionality back to where it was several years ago. Has anyone actually tried to SORT by any column or even perform anything but a simple search? This functionality USED TO be there – but its gone now.
Interesting is that Afternic thinks that the domain name business is Mon-Fri 9-5pm Eastern Timezone and thats it. Good luck trying to get an email reply for support at night or on the weekends.
I am getting very tire of this same old stuff actually.. I am getting tired of ‘competing’ with them. People who have a few dozen domain names are up against them pushing their own portfolio of millions of domains and honestly, I think that is poor business if not a serious conflict. Has anyone ever seen them advertise anything but their own domain name on Twitter or elsewhere (other than MAYBE their own site buried deep somewhere)?
Competition is always good, change is NOT always good.
Jamie Zoch
@Leonard,
In my case, I sent a customer to the direct listing page on Afternic for my domain listed, so the customer could make a Secure Purchase using a third party service… they emailed me back saying “The site doesn’t work” that you sent me to…
Anthony
BuyDomains.com is also down too for “upgrades”…
BUT…. they’re both ‘operational’ during this time.
Not.