A Simple Oversight Causes Not-So-Simple Website Downtime for FreshDirect.com

A Simple Oversight Causes Not-So-Simple Website Downtime for FreshDirect.com

The recent FreshDirect website downtime is a perfect example of an outage that could have been avoided with proper planning and adequate hosting. Unfortunately a simple renewal of the site’s domain name took the site offline for New York customers, costing the company quite a bit of revenue and some significant embarrassment.

Why Did FreshDirect.com Go Offline?

FreshDirect.com is a website that offers online grocery shopping, providing New Yorkers and some states in the surrounding area with the convenience of ordering groceries from the comfort of their home and having those groceries delivered right to their door. Many New Yorkers have come to rely on the service for their grocery needs. Unfortunately, the site went down Wednesday, leaving customers in the lurch. Why did the site go down? It all comes down to domain name renewal.

According to a customer service representative at Network Solutions, the hosting provider of FreshDirect, the website downtime was caused by update delays on the systems that are further away from the company’s home server. While the site is working for some customers, others can’t gain access to it. So what exactly were these delays? How does a domain name renewal result in website downtime? It doesn’t.

Allegedly, what actually happened was that FreshDirect forgot to renew their domain name or the credit card used to automatically renew the domain wasn’t valid. The company did manage to catch the error in time before someone else snatched the domain name up, but that doesn’t change the fact that the company lost revenue over a simple oversight.

Keep an Eye on Your Domain Renewal

Many would assume that a company like FreshDirect would have their domain name set to auto renew. Obviously this wasn’t the case. The silver lining in the situation? It’s a lesson for all of us to keep an eye on our domain names. If your domain name is not set to auto renew, change that setting and make sure your domain registration renews automatically. Once that is done, make sure that the credit card that you have on file for that automatic renewal is valid. If it’s not, you may end up facing the same situation that FreshDirect.com just dealt with – customers who want to buy from you but can’t.