E-Junkie Forum

Post #23

Thu, 4 Dec 2008 21:46:28 GMT

See this post for an explanation of why some Merchants may have been unable to access the e-junkie.com website last night:
http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/3015/pg/0#post8415

Note that buyers should not be affected; it's just that the defensive countermeasures we installed last night were blocking some Merchants from using our site (e.g. Admin pages) as a side effect of blocking would-be attacker IPs. We are working on a solution to prevent that sort of inadvertent blockage as well.

As you may notice from the date of the posts prior to yours in this thread, we haven't had a real outage since Spring 2008. This is because, since that time, we have made comprehensive upgrades to our server architecture, such as moving our equipment into a high-security, "top-shelf" datacenter where we have a rack with ample room to hook up as many redundant, load-balanced server CPUs and other equipment as we may need to meet capacity demands. There is no single "main E-junkie server" nor other single-point of failure; if one CPU should happen to fail, that capacity would be taken over by the other equipment, and other hardware has a bypass mode in event of a fault to exclude that unit from the system automatically without a hitch.

The only real difference in our standard JS buttons vs. non-JS buttons is that the latter open the cart in a popup window/tab rather than using the nice cart overlay screen; order processing works the same for both versions.

We do have a 24-hour emergency hotline voicemail number to report the unlikely event of an outage (or any other apparent/pending lapse in service, typically due to an urgent billing situation), listed here:
http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php
Calling that line notifies senior staff who are able to take action in case of emergency, so as soon as you leave a message there, someone in a position to respond can evaluate the matter and take action forthwith if necessary.

Post #22

Thu, 4 Dec 2008 18:56:29 GMT

E-junkie overall is great,

however I am concerned regarding this downtime problem.

E-junkie and thus our site was down for over 1 hour last night

( between 1am to 2am GMT roughly)

I notice this statement

"Serving 4400+ merchants. Processing a sale every 19 seconds. Processed $4.5 million+ worth of sales in Oct '08."

I wonder how many sales were made (or missed!) last night!

this is no laughing matter, most merchants use pay per click ads, have timed mail outs , etc. etc.

It's bad enough hoping our own server doesn't go down...

So I some questions please:

1) Is there a backup solution if main E-junkie server is down?

2) Having non JS buttons - does that allow payments to process and downloads to complete even if E-junkie server is down?

3) Is there anyone we can contact 24hrs who when notified can reboot the server or whatever needs to be done

Thank you in advance

Post #21

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:28:08 GMT

Good suggestion Allen...

Post #20

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:56:42 GMT

Tyson.....Thank you for you for your PROMPT reply and appreciated. You sound like a straight shooter and that is a half century talking, but I could be wrong, i. e. hope my business does not lose $$$.

As far as “a live tech support person,” you are politely telling us it is not in the budget.

However, I dislike whiners and complainers and most always come up with a follow through solution, so how is this for upper management:

ADD A $1 SURCHARGE ON TO YOUR MONTHLY FEES AND PROBLEM SOLVED. TO HAVE A LIVE TECH THAT “KNOWS” WHAT THEY ARE DOING 24/7 IS WORTH $12 MORE A YEAR TO ME, TYVM. WIN-WIN FOR ALL HERE; GREAT PR AND YOUR BUSINESS AND THE BOTTOM LINE TOO.

Post #19

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:14:38 GMT

I understand your concerns, and regret the unfortunate timing of your arrival here. Rest assured that EVERY instance of service outage referred to in this forum was related to the old datacenter from which we have already migrated away. While the old datacenter was perhaps adequate and affordable for our nascent early days, our recent, unexpectedly explosive growth in membership meant that we had simply outgrown our britches very quickly and urgently needed to move up to some serious businessman's trousers, which we have now done.

As I have said, ever since migrating our Web services over to the new datacenter on Fri04Apr08, we have not suffered so much as a momentary blip of outage. Any more historic uptime stats I could provide would be irrelevant to our present service configuration, as those stats would have their basis in the shortcomings of a datacenter we no longer use; one cannot mix data from dissimilar operating conditions to draw any meaningful conclusions relevant to present-day reality.

As for live phone support, at present we simply do not have the staffing to sustain that on any regular or consistent basis, although we are hiring locally for another support person or two, so we do indeed plan to offer that service as soon as we are able to deliver what we would promise in that regard.

I don't expect anyone to believe what I say at face value; believe the solid track record we have established ever since leaving the old datacenter two weeks ago, and be aware that further improvements are in the works to continue enhancing our robust reliability, performance, and scalability to accommodate future growth.

Post #18

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:05:27 GMT

Just recently signed up with E-Junkie on a free trial basis and it is “just what I needed” at this time and am very pleased at what I have experienced so far with the exception of A LIVE TECH SUPPORT person, that E-Junkie seems to have a FIRE WALL on.

However, after that lack of tech contact, I was told to check out this “forum” stuff and broke out in a cold sweat on this downing of our business site issues.

MY QUESTION TO TYSON_N, ADMIN, ET AL, since this is not to be found on your home page/site, would someone informed on this matter expressly state to your membership THIS STATEMENT THE TOP HOSTING SITES RELENTLESSLY slam home:

WHAT IS YOUR PERCENTAGE IN EITHER UP OR DOWN TIME, SO YOUR MEMBERSHIP KNOWS WHERE YOUR QUALITY OF I.T./PROGRAMMING SERVICES STANDS.

TO NOTE: When E-Junkie is down, it is COSTING OUR BUSINESSES MONEY and unless there is some form of reimbursement for that, THIS IS A CRITICAL ISSUE OF IMMEDIATE CONCERN. No matter how good our hosting site is, if you are down, we are out; my hoster’s claim of 99.9% is a mute point if I am tied into your services with anything less.

Thank you for your valuable time (and mine) in this matter.

Post #17

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:15:47 GMT

I've never seen so much amazing and wonderful writing in the replies in all my life. I am shocked at how artful and creative the posts have become. The length of each reply truely takes my breath away...

I can see a solution for this world class problem coming quickly.

Post #16

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:53:44 GMT

"Never trust the teller. Trust the tale." ~Author: D. H. Lawrence

Post #15

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:51:59 GMT

I wish I knew Javascript well enough myself to offer an unofficial/unsupported "use at your own risk" suggestion to splice in, and Development has got their hands full for the time being, working intensely on things that will benefit everyone. Seriously, if anyone here knows Javascript (or knows someone who does), you're more than welcome to offer script suggestions for anyone interested to try out.

BTW, just for the record, we haven't had even a passing moment of service outage now for 10 days straight (and counting :^). In fact, right this very moment, sitting across from my desk here at E-junkie HQ, I'm looking at yet another server blade as it's being prepped to add to our rack at the new datacenter. :^D

Post #14

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:15:47 GMT

Thanks for that Tyson,

I get the long story, perhaps I'm the only one concerned that your service can hang all your customer sites when your server is down. (hangs on view cart button code with no error or degraded mode). I'm also clear that if I find the fact that you can efectively hang my site on your system failure unacceptable, my loss is of little concern because it's all for the greater good, it's a feature!

1) Your solution is not only simple, it's elegant - that's why I chose to switch vendors
2) Do centralize & optimize the code for everyone's obvious benefits, but,
3) Your solution still makes your customer's websites inoperable and I'm unaware of any bloated bug-ridden packages that do that, so
4) Surely a small fail-safe if/then else statement (I'm not a programmer but I can cut & paste just fine) can be issued for us concerned customers without contributing to code bloat.

If anyone has a work-around for this issue, I'd think we could all benefit becasue in the end e-junkie's solution is excellent ... when its servers are online.

Post #13

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:09:02 GMT

Honestly, it's part of the simplicity vs. features tradeoff, where we generally tend to side with simplicity and ease-of-use whenever possible.

Since all of the scripting that makes our cart work is loaded into your page on-the-fly from our servers, any such scripting as you suggest would never load in the first place if our servers can't be reached. The only code we provide to you for copy-pasting is the minimum possible code necessary to call upon scripts from our servers and make the cart buttons (and any corresponding menus/text-boxes) appear on your pages. The only way around this is to add something to the code that you have to manually paste-in on your own pages (which you can certainly do, or hire someone to do, yourself), and that frankly starts to open a whole can o'worms if we start providing that sort of solution.

Simplicity and ease-of-use is our core mission (with apologies for the corporate buzzspeak :^), without which we'd just be yet another complicated, feature-bloated, bug-ridden, hard-to-implement cart -- of which there are plenty on the market to choose from, if that's what you want. If we tried to be everything to everybody, there'd be little left that distinguishes E-junkie from any other cart solution, while compounding the complexity that becomes harder for a small team to maintain, harder for our Merchants to implement on their sites, and increases the likelihood of conflicts/bugs/crashes/failure. If we have to let one Merchant go elsewhere in order to keep the majority of our simplicity-loving Merchants happy here, that's a business dilemma we have to accept.

As part of this business strategy, we intentionally keep most of our scripting code on our server, so we have centralized control over how it functions and can provide the most minimal-possible codes for you to copy and paste-in for our cart buttons, without requiring any ongoing maintenance or remediation on your part to "keep up with us". Besides centralizing our ability to offer improvements and bug-fixes, this also minimizes any chance for mistakes or conflicts when you are implementing our cart on your own sites' pages (you wouldn't believe how many people need assistance just copy-pasting our minimal code as it is already); whenever we fix a bug, improve something, or expand functionality, it instantly becomes active for every single Merchant without them having to do a single thing. In other words...

"It's not a bug; it's a feature." :^)

Post #12

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:22:53 GMT

Hey Tyson,

Glad your company is putting measures in place but the fact remains, outages do happen and a system failure, and your implementing codes, should not ripple into failing your customer's site! Surely!!!

I agree with lemonbar. Never mind commends about we've solved it, or avoid a kludge, implement code that does not stall your customer's sites. Whay can you not add a brief default time-out if no-response to allow our sites to load?

Is that not reasonable? ... Bill

Post #11

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:43:46 GMT

It is more a matter or making a better site presence. I am sure it will be a simple peice of code probably in an if statement or just a certain way of coding the call to e-junkie site.

Nothing big, I just want the site to show instead of hanging for whatever reason when it trys to execute your code.

Someone that knows web development knows the answer right of the bat is what I am thinking.

I figured your guys would have figured out a trick by now.

Post #10

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:59:57 GMT

You might notice that, since switching our Web serivces over to the new datacenter last Friday afternoon, all of a sudden we haven't had a single service outage, not even so much as a blip. That is the proof of our new pudding, and just the start of even bigger and better things.

So the question is now no longer "when" but, rather, "if" we are ever down again, and that "if" has become a slim-to-none chance getting slimmer by margins every day, and slimmer by chunks with every step of our upgrade plans that we implement (of the few steps still waiting on other agents to catch up to us).

Anyone handy with scripting could prolly kludge something together to put in your pages that would test our site before loading any scripts/images from us, but that would only make your pages load slower every single time, even when we're up and Internet traffic is light; you're welcome to do that or hire someone for that if it's important to you. We'd rather dedicate our time to making the rest of our improvements happen forthwith, rather than taking time away from those goals to script tools that would bog your site down in preparation for an outage contingency that we have already planned, and largely already enacted, to prevent from occurring in the first place.

Post #9

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:26:06 GMT

So is there some code that can check e-junkie site to see if it is up before calling the standard ejunkie code?

When your site is down my whole site hangs since it just waits for that code to execute I guess.

Isn't there some programming way around this to allow the site to still load all its graphics even if you site is down?

Post #8

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:19:18 GMT

The main difference with the non-JS cart buttons are that they can only operate by opening the cart screen into a new window; the JS is necessary to have the nice cart overlay that appears "inside" your own page window.

When you Get Button Code, if you UNCHECK the box as indicated above the copyable code blocks, that will auto-convert those code snippets to our non-JS version, then just recopy the new, non-JS button codes and replace your existing JS codes on your site. BTW, the View Cart button code (whether JS or non-JS) is common to all your products, so you can just copy that code once and paste-paste-paste to replace/insert all your View Cart buttons.

Post #7

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:39:52 GMT

Maybe I am misunderstanding something but I am using my own graphic buttons. I am using your code.

Are you saying I can use some other code instead?

Where is that code?

How is that going to function differently?

Post #6

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:29:31 GMT

You can switch to non-JS version of our buttons so you don't have to rely on the JS hosted on E-j either.

Post #5

Tue, 8 Apr 2008 22:21:45 GMT

I am using my own buttons. I made them myself and they are located on my site.

What can I do to get my page not to freeze when waiting to load e-junkie code when it is down?

Post #4

Tue, 8 Apr 2008 22:11:54 GMT

We agree; we haven't been living up to world-class service in recent weeks, which is exactly why we've been taking the steps we have, to improve our physical infrastructure as well as beefing up our staff.

BTW, you ~can~ use your own button images, or even linked text, in lieu of loading the button images from our server; see the "Customizing your purchase buttons" section for details, about 2/3 down the page here:
http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.customization.php

As part of the demo I showed Robin to get hired here, I made a text-only Add to Cart link that I spiced up a bit with this as the text (replacing the std tag):

& rarr;Add to Cart& larr;

You'll notice the odd codes at the beginning and end; those tell the browser to display a Right-pointing Arrow and Left-pointing Arrow symbol respectively, so it's more obviously an action item rather than a regular text link to some other page. BTW, I had to add a space after the &s for demonstration purposes, so it wouldn't actually do this: →Add to Cart←