Successful business relies on trust. Without it, no relationships are made and no transactions take place.
As a company, we take this idea seriously and work extremely hard to serve our customers with excellence. Choosing our current hosting provider was no exception. We spent months reviewing their system and testing our setup within their environment. We trusted they would be with us in a long-term relationship to bring a reliable, secure experience to our customers. Branded as a leader in secure hosting, our initial impressions were very positive.
Since last November, however, we continued to experience intermittent outages that were completely out of our control. Outbound and inbound DOSS attacks, network configuration issues and the like. After multiple conversations with them, many with their company’s president, we were assured each time that they were making changes to fix the underlying issues. Last night’s data center relocation was part of those changes. We hoped the worst was behind us. Today’s extended outages have shown us that is not the case.
As a technology company, we have to put our trust in others just as our users put trust in us. When that trust is broken, there’s nothing we can do but put everything else on hold and try to find someone else who is more trustworthy. We completely understand if you have to do the same. You are counting on us to provide an excellent shopping cart experience which also means it’s our responsibility to find a reliable, secure hosting environment. No hosting company is perfect, and we understand that, but we have to balance the cost and time associated with switching providers with the goals we’ve set for our own uptime and reliability.
Trust is everything in business. If we or a vendor we’ve selected can’t provide a reliable service, we don’t deserve your business. As we’ve done from day one, we will continue to work harder, taking every step we can to earn your business.
While ultimately the issues today lie with our hosting partner and we’re unable to address them ourselves, we do currently have our entire team working on getting our systems back up in whatever ways we can, and we’re exploring every option we have. We’ll continue to update http://status.foxycart.com/ with details of this outage, but we also will post again on our forum and here in our blog when we have more concrete plans.
Update #1, 08:37 PDT, 2011-04-11: Our hosting partner has posted an explanation (of sorts) on their blog. We will update this incident again if they explain further what happened. We are continuing to evaluate our options to make sure we eliminate as many potential single points of failure as possible. As quickly as we are able we will communicate further regarding our exact course of action to ensure something like this never happens again.
Update #2, 08:53 PDT, 2011-04-11: We sincerely appreciate all the support we’ve received from our users, but we’re also aware that many users are remaining silent and taking steps to find another ecommerce provider. We understand, but if that is the case we’d still love to know (via the contact form to the right). We won’t try to hard sell you, as we totally understand, but we would like to be able to personally apologize.
