Tracking domains
Routy owns a small pool of short domains — kolmera.com, rantivo.com, tervila.com and so on —
bought purely to serve tracking links. A publisher gets one or more hosts off that pool, their
links are served on those hosts, and we know which publisher a click belongs to from the domain it
arrived on.
Tracking Domains (under System Admin) is where those domains are added and where publishers are put on them. It is sysadmin-only; nobody else sees the screen, and the endpoints behind it refuse anyone else.
Why there are several domains and not one
Ad networks blocklist tracking domains. When one gets blocked, only the publishers sitting on that domain stop working — and moving them somewhere else is instant, because the pool domains are configured as catch-alls and need no new DNS or certificate for a specific name.
One domain would mean one bad day takes every publisher down at once. That is why the Publishers column matters more than it looks: it is the spread, and the spread is the blast radius.
Domains
Each row is one domain we own.
- Domain — the domain itself, plus the reason provisioning failed if it did.
- Mode & scope — the two badges described below. Neither can be changed.
- Status — Draft, Assignable or Retired. Only an Assignable domain can take a publisher.
- Publishers — how many publishers sit on it. A Global domain shows Shared instead of a number, because nobody is assigned to a shared domain.
- Provisioned — when the setup last passed.
Mode and scope
Every domain has two settings, fixed the moment it is added. There is no way to change either afterwards — that is why the add form asks you to confirm them, and why they appear everywhere else as badges rather than as controls.
Mode decides what the links look like:
- Subdomain — the domain hands out one name per publisher:
k7f2.kolmera.com. Many publishers share it. This is the normal case. - Apex — the domain is the link host:
kolmera.com. There is no subdomain part. It is the shortest link we can produce, and it serves exactly one publisher.
Scope decides who is allowed on it:
- Assigned — only the publishers we put on it.
- Global — everyone. Nobody is "assigned" to a global domain; it is the shared default that publishers without a domain of their own are served from.
Only three combinations mean anything, so only those are offered:
Adding a domain
- Press Add domain. The dropdown lists every domain we own, read live from our DNS provider.
- Pick the domain, choose mode and scope, and confirm that they are permanent.
- Press Register. The domain is recorded as Draft — it serves nothing yet.
- Press Provision. This configures the domain and runs an end-to-end check.
A domain becomes usable only if every step passes. There is no partial success, because a half-configured domain fails quietly rather than loudly.
If a step fails, the checklist names it and the domain stays in Draft. Fix the underlying problem and press Provision again — re-running is safe and is the intended way to recover. The failure reason also stays on the row in the list, so you can see the next day why a domain never finished without re-running anything.
Provisioning makes several external calls and an end-to-end probe, so expect it to take seconds rather than to return instantly.
If the dropdown is empty, either every domain we own is already registered, or none has been bought yet. If the screen says our DNS provider could not be reached, that is a credentials problem rather than an empty pool.
Retiring a domain
Retire is not destructive. Existing hosts keep serving — only new assignment stops. Retire a domain when it has been blocklisted and you want to stop putting new publishers on it, then rotate the publishers already there off it one at a time.
Make default
The default is where assignment falls back when spreading has nothing to choose between. Setting it clears the flag on every other domain, so only one domain is ever the default.
Assignments
Each row is one publisher host on the pool.
- Host — the name their links are served on.
- Publisher — who it belongs to. A No live host badge means none of that publisher's hosts are enabled, which is worth fixing immediately; see below.
- Domain — which pool domain it sits on.
- Traffic source — the traffic source it is bound to, or All for a publisher-wide host.
- Status and Created.
Assigning a publisher
Press Assign publisher. Only the publisher is required; everything else is an override.
- Traffic source — bind the host to one traffic source, or leave it for all of them.
- Domain — leave it on Automatic. Automatic picks the least-loaded domain, and that spread is the protection described at the top of this page. Override it only when you deliberately want a specific domain. Automatic never picks an apex domain, because an apex assignment consumes a whole domain and is always a deliberate choice.
- Label — leave empty for a generated short label. The field disappears when you pick an apex domain, because an apex domain is one host and has nothing to label.
The result is immediate. There is no pending state, no verification and no waiting for DNS — the host works the moment it is created.
Rotating a publisher off a domain
When a domain gets blocklisted, rotate the publishers off it. Rotating creates a new host on a different domain and leaves the old one working for a grace period of 72 hours, so links already published in the wild keep functioning while the publisher updates them.
Rotate is the one action here that starts a clock on something live, which is why it asks you to confirm.
Sweep expired rotations (in the actions menu) suspends the hosts whose grace window has already passed. It is routine housekeeping and runs on its own schedule; the button is there for when you want it done now.
A publisher who cannot generate links
If a publisher has been given their own domains and all of them are retired or disabled, link generation fails outright rather than falling back to a shared domain. That is deliberate: they were given their own domains for a reason — usually a network blocking a shared one — so a silent fallback would put their links somewhere they may not work, with nothing to say so.
Their account manager is alerted automatically, so you do not need to report it. On this screen the state shows as a No live host badge on the publisher. The fix is to assign them a new host, which clears the alert.
When to escalate to engineering
- Provisioning fails on the same step repeatedly after the underlying problem looks fixed.
- The domain dropdown reports that our DNS provider cannot be reached.
- A publisher has an enabled host but their links still fail to generate.