This morning I noticed that the scripts that link to the Blogads servers weren’t working, and that page loading was being impacted severely. I commented out the script code and then started doing some investigative work.
A whois lookup shows that the domain registration for the Blogads.com servers was changed today. It now points to the parent company called PressFlex, whose main address is in Budapest, Hungary. But the ad servers themselves appear to be offline.
Henry Copeland at Blogads has done a good job at building up this service. It’s very widely used across the Internet, especially among political blogs. I hope this is just a simple DNS error and that it gets sorted out soon.
Update: Henry says it was indeed a stupid domain error:
We screwed up our domain name registry entry yesterday afternoon, which means we made our servers’ addresses invisible to much of the Internet. A stupid human error which should not have occured. I went home last night thinking everything would be ok in 30 minutes, and didn’t blog about the problem because I was unable to access the blog server myself. The error propagated very quickly, but the correction has taken longer to spread. (As my colleague noted, bad news travels faster than good news. )
I’ve now restored the Blogads strip on the right and all should be well again.
Ed Bott 