1ShoppingCart.com, a popular shopping cart provider, has been down for 3 hours and counting...

Since 1ShoppingCart is a centralized system, this means every single merchant using 1shoppingcart is losing leads and sales hand over fist.

Twitter is full with raging customers and no ETA from 1Shoppingcart:



Contact us if you'd like to test drive the SPI shopping cart and experience first-hand, why so many are switching over.

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This outage is the second major outage for 1ShoppingCart in the last 6 months.

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Earlier tonight, at 11:00PM EDT, iWeb - a large data center headquartered in Canada, experienced a power outage due to a nearby fire, taking a third of its data center completely down.

As of this writing, 372 servers are still affected and iWeb is working frantically to bring machines back up.



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No matter which hosting provider you use, Murphy's law will have every single one of them go down on you, when you least expect it.

Five 9's reliability is no longer enough.

Customers demand 100% uptime and unless you're Twitter or Facebook, customers will go elsewhere when your service availability begins to deteriorate.

If 100% uptime is important to you, contact us. We can help.

Earlier tonight, at 1:30am EST, SoftLayer - one of the tier 1 data centers we use, experienced a power outage in their primary facility, rendering thousands of sites dead.



SPI engineers were alerted to the outage within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was a total data-center failure, we verified load balancers are properly redirecting traffic to other locations.

The Power Outage lasted a total of 2 hours and 3 minutes according to our friends at Pingdom:



All SPI client sites are multi-homed, which means we host everything in two independent data centers: Rackspace, Softlayer, NTT Verio and iWeb.

SPI utilizes redundant global load balancing, to immediately redirect end users from west coast to east coast, when such global outages happen.

How it works

New end users hitting your mydomain.com are diverted to active servers.

Old users / scripts (which keep a cached version of your website ip address) continue getting routed to the old server until their local DNS cache is cleared.

What's Next

While the DNS ttl (time to live) is setup as 60 seconds, some browsers and ISPs don't honor that and can take up to 2 hours until the DNS entry is refreshed.

As a workaround for these type of catastrophes where active users have cached a malfunctioning server's ip address, we'll be configuring the load balancers to reply back with all available server ip addresses, letting an end-user's machine rotate ips internally.

We understand the importance of keeping your sites up at all times and although our current setup ensures 100% uptime for new users, we are determined to come up with a solution for users with a cached version of a malfunctioning server ip address.

Your SPI account manager will contact you with any specific steps you have to take, in order to enable this setup for your domains.

Authorize.net, the largest payment gateway in the US, lost power to their Seattle data center early this morning.

SJC data center cannot handle the load and as a result, all payments are declining

Twitter is full with users reporting Authorize.net outages:



Expected resolution time is 2 hours.

If you're using the SPI shopping cart and have defined more than a single payment gateway, the system will automatically divert charges to your secondary payment gateway.

Otherwise, if you only have Authorize.net, contact your SPI account manager and we'll instruct you how to easily resubmit all declines once Authorize.net is back online.

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This outage is the third major outage this week and once again goes to show the importance of multihomed hosting.

Rackspace, one of the largest tier-1 hosting providers, is down today, affecting tens of thousands of websites, including some celebrity sites like Justin Timberlake and many others...



Here at SPI, we believe in multi-homed hosting.

Our client sites are hosted with Rackspace, NTT Verio, Softlayer and iWeb... all at the same time.

They're all great hosting providers, but as our friends at Pingdom frequently report, if things can go wrong they will.

Replicating our client sites across multiple data-centers with multiple non-related hosting providers, is the only way to deliver true 100% uptime across the board.

If your site needs to be up and running at all times, contact us today. We'd love to help.

Need to move files between two servers? No need to download to your local machine first. You can use ncftpget to recursively download all files from a remote server.

Use as follows:


Where,

* -R : Copy all subdirectories and files (recursive)
* -v : Verbose i.e. display download activity and progess
* -u "USERNAME" : FTP server username, if skipped ncftpget will try anonymous username
* ftp.softwareprojects.com : Ftp server name
* /home/backup : Download everything to this directory
* /www-data : Remote ftp directory you wish to copy

If you get an error which read as follows:

tar: End of archive volume 1 reached
tar: Sorry, unable to determine archive format.
Could not read directory listing data: Connection reset by peer

Then add -T option to ncftpget command:


Where:

* -T : Do not try to use TAR mode with Recursive mode

Chris Carpenter, Joel Comm, Amit Mehta, Tellman Knudson, Anik Singal and Mike Masterson are just some of the Super Affiliates you might recognize, who are bringing home hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, thanks to work and services rendered by third party providers.

The common misconceptions involving outsourcing are

(a) Outsourcing is about paying an offshore freelancer $10/hour to produce low quality work
(b) Outsourcing requires a lot of micro-management
(c) Outsourcing is risky because I will be revealing all my secrets to a company I don't know
(d) Outsourcing is something only big companies use
(e) I have technical skills and have engineers on staff, Outsourcing is not for me.

In reality, none of these arguments hold much merit. Much like PPC is a tool to drive qualified leads to a target website, Outsourcing done right, is a tool that can help you get your ideas to fruition at minimum risk. Successful companies (Microsoft, Sony, HP), Super Affilites and individual Entrepreneurs alike use Outsourcing daily to develop prototypes, clone websites, launch products and test new ideas.

What's the key to it all? Three little letters known as ROI (Return On Investment). If you want to duplicate the success other super affiliates are seeing with outsourcing, your first step is to get over your natural instinct to hustle. Shopping for an Outsourcing partner is not like looking for the best deal on an 8GB iPhone. And it's not like a visit to your local flea market. Not all outsourcing companies are created equal.

Forget about price-per-hour. Use deadline-guarantees, references and specific experience in your target vertical as your metrics when looking for an outsourcing partner. Pick a budget for the project and insist on deadline guarantees with penalties for not meeting the deadline. Look for a company that employs marketing account managers who can take your ideas and work directly with the engineers, so that you don't have to waste your time.

In his book, "The 4-hour Workweek", Thimothy Ferriss shares how he managed to outsource his entire life, using virtual assistants across the globe to send flowers to his wife on their anniversery, remind him to pick up his son from practice etc.

While I don't encourage you to go that far, I do invite you to explore how you can use Outsourcing to effectively employ an army of software engineers, link builders or copywriters, to grow your business for you. Start small but never lose sight of your Outsourcing projects ROI. Outsourcing done right is simply when total revenues exceed outsourcing project investment AND does not require your direct involvement every step of the way.

Working with Super Affiliates, one of the most popular uses of Outsourcing we see is when a Super Affiliate has been working with a particular niche for a long time, gets great results and is now looking to increase his/her profit margins. Using Outsourcing, the Super Affiliate can hire a small team to clone a website or create a standalone product, so that the affiliate becomes a merchant and significantly increases profit margins. This is a great model that is almost always guaranteed to work well, with the right outsourcing partner.

Another popular example is when affiliates look to avoid the mundane tasks of running a website. Content generation, Handling support tickets and maintaining your website are all tasks that you should never ever be wasting your time on.

You'll be getting a much better ROI on your time if you focus on what you do best - Marketing.

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