Expired domain and domain auction platform hit by outage.
Domain name auction site SnapNames is unavailable again, marking at least the 4th major outage this summer. A notice on the company’s web site for at least the past hour reads “The SnapNames site is temporarily unavailable. We’re sorry for this brief inconvenience. Please try again in a few minutes”.
The first time I noticed the outage was shortly after the scheduled conclusion of the Search Engine Strategies silent auction this afternoon. It is unclear if the silent auction concluded successfully before the site went down. [Update: Moniker tells me that all SES auctions completed successfully before the site problems.]
Earlier this month the site was down for a couple days. SnapNames also experienced a prolonged outage over the Fourth of July weekend. SnapNames has since blamed a third party service provider for the problems.
Prior to this summer, SnapNames had not experienced major interruptions like these.
Jim Jones says
Who’s the “third party service provider”???
Andrew says
dunno. It could be hosting or a software service.
Jamie says
Wow, this is getting old FAST! 3rd party or not, no reason for this. I have lost trust in them and won’t be listing my domains for sale with them anytime soon.
Curtis says
Another strange thing… why is it that when I watched the auction in the final hours, there was some huge bids of $500k plus, and now when I look at their auction results link from the show the largest sale was around $9000. Is it that they cannot divulge the final sale amounts on big sales or are these sales that fell through?
You think it would be in their best interest to show the big numbers to show how successful the show was?
Jamie says
Curtis~ I wrote a little bit about “how the bids work in “In Auction” and I think this will help you out. http://www.dotweekly.com/2008/08/11/snapnamescom-in-auction-format-explained/ . Let me know if you have any questions.
Curtis says
Yes, thanks that helps. Yes I agree with your article… very misleading.