August 24, 2015
Overview
On Friday morning we started to get alerts on many of our HipCommerce websites. These sites were having intermittent trouble where visitors received an error message while trying to browse the website. This article attempts to explain this problem and the course of action taken to resolve it.
Problem
HipCommerce is a plugin to WordPress, and this plugin passes data back and forth using what's called an application programming interface (API). This API is used to pass all data back and forth between your website, Store Manager and your POS system. Typically, you never need to worry about this API because it is designed to work in the background doing its thing.
Last Friday, the server responsible for running the code for this API started to experience problems. Modern Retail's developers and Rackspace engineers worked tirelessly to resolve the issue, and after many hours, decided it was a server-related issue.
Solution
Working with Rackspace, we built a new server as quickly as possible and migrated the API to this new server. This was completed early Sunday morning, which seems to have completely solved the problem.
We're sorry for the outage your business experienced during this time. We know you rely on your website, and Modern Retail, to provide an additional revenue stream for your business. We're sorry to have let you down and will continue to work hard to provide a safe, secure and reliable website for you and your customers.
If you have any questions, please let us know. We'll be happy to help the best we can. Thank you.