Originally Posted by DigitalPimp

Agreed on the dialers! Here's another one. If a program has unexpected downtime, sometimes even expected downtime due to scheduled server maintenence, many will often not bother to notify affiliates before, during or after it happens. Every notice a period in the day, or god forbid a few days, when your stats just show nothing - bingo.

I suspect some programs just think that most of their affiliates will not notice it so why bother letting them know about it. Others might be afraid that affiliates would pull their links and not put them back up. Probably their biggest concern is that affiliates will expect or request compensation for downtime and their running on too tight a margins to afford to offer such.

If it is a short outage, it is usually not too big a deal for most affilaites but if you are spending 100s or 1000s a day on PPC ads or elsewhere and you are not periodically monitoring their servers, you can be screwed pretty quick by such a routine occurance.