The Systems
While providing 100% uptime is impossible, we at FoxyCart take ever care to ensure we get as close to 100% as realistically possible. When FoxyCart does experience problems, however, we have functionality in place to minimize the impact on your own site. Please read this page thoroughly if you are concerned about what happens when FoxyCart goes down.
There are many components of “FoxyCart”, and some components are spread across multiple physical or virtual machines in order to improve performance, security, and reliability. These systems are referred to as:
- APP is how we refer to our primary servers, providing the FoxyCart service to stores worldwide. This is generally what FoxyCart users care about most. While there are multiple servers within “APP”, the entire environment is called “APP”.
- ADMIN is the FoxyCart admin, where you can change settings and review orders.
- WWW is the public www.foxycart.com.
- FORUM
- WIKI
- AFFILIATE
- CDN is our Content Delivery Network, and includes
static.foxycart.com,cdn.foxycart.com,cdns.foxycart.com, andcdn.www.foxycart.com. - MONITORING is an internal system and not publicly accessible, but is included in this list because it is often mentioned in incident reports.
When Down…
APP
When our monitoring systems detect that the APP system is unavailable, requests are sent to failover.foxycart.com. Typically requests should be handed over to the failover system within minutes of a detected outage. Because APP serves various types of requests, how the request is handled depends on what is actually being requested.
@cart@, checkout, and receipt Requests
cart, checkout, and receipt requests are redirected to a generic customer-facing page notifying potential customers of the store’s current unavailability, as well as an estimated time for service restoration and a contact form to allow potential customers to contact you.
When known (for example, when a maintenance window is scheduled), the estimated service restoration is given in the visitor’s local timezone. When unknown (for example, when a temporary and unscheduled service interruption is experienced) it will give a 10 minute estimate.
The specific text or language for this page is configurable per store. You could, for example, modify that language to offer a coupon code in exchange for the visitor’s email, or any other incentive for completing the form. (You would have to create a corresponding coupon code and email it to your customers yourself. The FoxyCart failover system does not handle followup emails.)
To test the failover functionality you can load up a link structured like http://status.foxycart.com/scheduled-maintenance-collecting?domain=YOUR_FOXYCART_DOMAIN. Replace “@YOUR_FOXYCART_DOMAIN@” with your domain (something like example.foxycart.com or secure.example.com) and you can complete the failover form to test. It will send an email to your store’s configured email address, but will not send any sort of email to the customer.
Other Requests
JSONandJSONPrequests tocartwill return an emptyJSONobject*.jsrequests are served an empty file.*.cssrequests are served an empty file.*.jpg,*.jpeg,*.gif, and*.pngrequests are served a 1px square transparentspacer.gif- All other requests are sent to the above mentioned generic customer-facing status page.
For stores v0.5.1 and prior, and for v0.6.0 stores not using the CDN, foxycart_includes.js requests are served a javascript file with the latest version of jQuery currently used by those versions of FoxyCart (v1.3.2), and nothing else.
ADMIN
Any requests to the FoxyCart admin will be redirected to status.foxycart.com.
CDN
The CDN should be mostly unaffected by any APP connectivity issues. Due to the way the CDN caches files from APP, if a file is being requested for the first time in a specific geographic area the CDN may be impacted by APP connectivity issues. For example, if your site has been live for days or weeks with a call to your foxycart.complete.js file, the CDN will continue to serve that file even if APP disappears entirely. If, however, the file has never been requested, the CDN will attempt to retrieve the file from APP, in which case the CDN would return an error response.
Other Systems
Other systems, such as WWW, FORUM, and WIKI, will failover to backups in different ways, or they will redirect to status.foxycart.com. Nothing from these systems are critical to APP or ADMIN, and as such they cannot cause problems for customers or stores if they go down.
Questions
If you have any questions about this list of services, failover functionality, or status updates, please post on our forum.