Dealer.com Sites are Down!!!

[Dave Rowe]

Money in an acquisition doesn't go to the _company_ though - it goes to the shareholders of the acquired company. Now - should Cox have invested more in their infrastructure? Sure. However, having a perfect infrastructure isn't easy to do. I'm not making excuses for them - but it very well could be things that are out of their immediate control (one could say they should have mitigated that risk, obviously) - possibly too heavy of a dependance on Akamai? Not sure. Having been on the systems side of things - I do wish them Godspeed in resolving the issues.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Money in an acquisition doesn't go to the _company_ though - it goes to the shareholders of the acquired company. Now - should Cox have invested more in their infrastructure? Sure. However, having a perfect infrastructure isn't easy to do. I'm not making excuses for them - but it very well could be things that are out of their immediate control (one could say they should have mitigated that risk, obviously) - possibly too heavy of a dependance on Akamai? Not sure. Having been on the systems side of things - I do wish them Godspeed in resolving the issues.

I read you, but if part of that $1B+ acquisition hasn't provided them with the resources to retain or conquest talent in an effort to progress with a redundancy plan, what does that say about them?

 

[Alex Snyder]

I respectfully disagree. They were sold for what, $1B?!? Your "joke" is funny.

I'm sorry, that should have allotted for a new server structure and a half and the support team and redundancy plan to go with it. The nature of technology... look they should have been all over it with that kind of money. There are really zero excuses here, except for piss poor planning on their part. Craig is right, as usual.

The final dollar amount was a little more than that by the time the last checks were received. But, I will defend the Dealer.com guys to the end of the earth. The Dealer.com guys that did it right and took it to that point. Sadly, there aren't many of them left at Dealer.com today. And the ones that are still there seemingly have to fight political battles instead of concentrating on the things they are experts at.

I guess my point is to not think of this as a Dealer.com issue, but a Cox issue.

The lack of redundancy is both shocking and troubling. I think they teach redundancy in Websites 101 if I'm not mistaken.

it is shocking on the surface. But it seems to point to the obvious: Dealer.com WAS a tech company. Cox is an acquisition company.

Money in an acquisition doesn't go to the _company_ though - it goes to the shareholders of the acquired company. Now - should Cox have invested more in their infrastructure? Sure. However, having a perfect infrastructure isn't easy to do. I'm not making excuses for them - but it very well could be things that are out of their immediate control (one could say they should have mitigated that risk, obviously) - possibly too heavy of a dependance on Akamai? Not sure. Having been on the systems side of things - I do wish them Godspeed in resolving the issues.

Thanks Dave. You made the post I should have originally.

 

[George Nenni]

They scaled up to 13,000 dealership websites and thousands of daily ad campaigns over a 20 year run. That doesn't sound laughable to me. Technology changes and I know one of their biggest initiatives has been to move off of old server systems into a bigger cloud-based world. It is the nature of how technology works.

I'm not saying we should give them a pass for poor performance, but I do take a little issue with calling them a laughable and a joke. They do deserve some credit…. at least $1.2 billion worth



You're correct. They use an adaptive approach with the marketing term "seamless" to define it. @georgenenni can you explain why you think this approach is hurting them?

@Alex Snyder I won't profess to be an expert on responsive vs. adaptive vs. hybrid, etc. and I know this is a hotly debated topic. My point is that they are among the oldest (if not the oldest) platform out there. Sitting through the recent FordDirect demos for each of the website providers, it felt like they constantly had to justify why they weren't responsive and instead were adaptive, or hybrid, or seamless, etc. They are either very right or very wrong, since everyone else seems to be going in a different direction. They also seem to stand out as having more issues than others, outages, poor results on speed tests, the indexing issues covered on DR, etc. Maybe correlation vs. causation, who knows.

 

[Alexander Lau]

The final dollar amount was a little more than that by the time the last checks were received. But, I will defend the Dealer.com guys to the end of the earth. The Dealer.com guys that did it right and took it to that point. Sadly, there aren't many of them left at Dealer.com today. And the ones that are still there seemingly have to fight political battles instead of concentrating on the things they are experts at.

I guess my point is to not think of this as a Dealer.com issue, but a Cox issue.



it is shocking on the surface. But it seems to point to the obvious: Dealer.com WAS a tech company. Cox is an acquisition company.



Thank Dave. You made the post I should have originally.

I'm 100% with your assessment there. In fact, having worked with so many DDC sites pre-acquisition, I cannot remember when they once went down. Cobalt / CDK (ADP) on the other hand...

I could see some Cox signal caller saying something along the lines of "we're going to keep this infrastructure until those servers physically die!"

 

[craigh]

The lack of redundancy is both shocking and troubling. I think they teach redundancy in Websites 101 if I'm not mistaken.

This is my issue though. They setup a monolith structure where 1 primary node (whether that be networking or servers) is providing services to everyone. That even includes Canada - so when there is a networking issue in the US all the Canadian AutoTrader partner sites are down as well.
AutoTrader should have asked for dedicated servers for Canada, that's on them.

In today's world, it is so much easier to solve this problem.
You can have every request go to a different server, even while they share the same database and cluster file storage.
Their architecture is very dated and has proven that it worked back in the day, but clearly something has been less reliable lately.

I guess my point is to not think of this as a Dealer.com issue, but a Cox issue.

You're too attached to the past
Dealer.com is still Dealer.com - this is still their issue.
The team that used to be there and the company that you worked for are not responsible.

 

[Alexander Lau]

@Alex Snyder I won't profess to be an expert on responsive vs. adaptive vs. hybrid, etc. and I know this is a hotly debated topic. My point is that they are among the oldest (if not the oldest) platform out there. Sitting through the recent FordDirect demos for each of the website providers, it felt like they constantly had to justify why they weren't responsive and instead were adaptive, or hybrid, or seamless, etc. They are either very right or very wrong, since everyone else seems to be going in a different direction. They also seem to stand out as having more issues than others, outages, poor results on speed tests, the indexing issues covered on DR, etc. Maybe correlation vs. causation, who knows.

George, I think it highly depends on the theme and tier you are on with them. There are far better themes than others, not that it's a good excuse.

 

[Alex Snyder]

You're too attached to the past
Dealer.com is still Dealer.com - this is still their issue.
The team that used to be there and the company that you worked for are not responsible.

Many of the old crew have parted ways with Cox for various reasons. Some are coming back into the automotive space and I would like to see them not be tarnished by an association to what looks like a downward spiral today…. myself included

So, I'll just say this. A Cox guy runs Dealer.com today. He's a good dude for sure. But he isn't the tech dude the last boss was.

 

[ejyoder]

Hey, at least www.dealer.com is still up...

 

[Rick Buffkin]

latest email from support.