for many many years it was a website that took you to a plain purple page, it was quite a favourite of tech support types for checking web connections because purple is very hard to mishear over the phone, it loaded quickly, and it was obvious when you connected.

if you were quick, there was an FAQ link that disappeared after a second or two and the guy that ran the site was funny, I don't remember exactly but I'm fairly sure the answer to "can I advertise on purple.com?" was that yes you could but it cost an outrageous amount of money, and that there was a game on the site where a purple squirrel would run onto the screen and you had to click them. There was no reward or score counter but the squirrel would know. There was even a changelog from when they changed the shade of purple after receiving feedback that it wasn't purple enough.

They never said why they maintained the site so long, but speculation I've seen is that they liked having an @purple.com email, and perhaps as a file server. It was a piece of web history and I'm genuinely really sad it's gone.