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Scheduled Downtime, Status, and Failover

September 9, 2009 - Product Updates

Scheduled Downtime: Saturday, 2009.09.12, 01:00am EST

In order to continue to provide reliable e-commerce service to our users, we are upgrading our main application servers. The new servers are faster, helping us to handle future growth while providing increased security, redundancy and performance. We are also switching datacenters in order to improve response times to Europe. In addition, we have expanded our security audits and ensured that your data will remain as strongly protected as ever on our new servers.

We are excited about this move and want to assure you this has been planned in great detail to ensure a successful transition.

Impact on Connectivity

Because this migration involves two separate datacenters, it will involve downtime. We have scheduled 2 full hours for this transition:

  • US, PST: 2009-09-11 10:00pm-12:00am PST

  • US, EST: 2009-09-12 01:00am-03:00am EST

  • International, GMT: 2009-09-12 05:00 and 2009-09-12 07:00 GMT

During this period you should plan for any FoxyCart requests to be non-functional. How requests will be handled is outlined on the new status.foxycart.com.

Planning

Strategically planning for this migration has included several dry runs and testing to ensure the highest level of success possible. Although there is very little room for human error and we do not anticipate any problems at this point, the entire FoxyCart team will be monitoring this procedure to immediately resolve any issues should they arise.

Recovery Plan

Should problems occur, we will revert DNS entries back to our current servers. We have already shortened the TTL (Time-to-Live) values for all of our affected DNS records so that our DNS changes will take effect as immediately as possible. We don’t anticipate needing to switch back, but this is our “just in case” fallback position in order to restore service by the end of the maintenance window.

Links of interest:

FoxyCart Status and Failover: New Systems, Improvements

Since the FoxyCart javascript and CSS files are typically included in the head section of a web page, problems loading those files can prevent loading of the rest of the page. As part of these system improvements we now have failover monitoring that will re-route requests to pages that will load when the main FoxyCart servers are unavailable. It’s very basic, and is described in more detail here, but the risk of having pages completely unreachable due to non-loading FoxyCart scripts is now greatly reduced.