RACS STORE MAINTENANCE & DOWNTIME - UPDATE 2

UPDATE: So far so good. Our store maint continues and everything is currently on schedule. We should complete the back-end maint sometime late this evening. 

The store is currently up and running normally, including secure checkout, and orders may be placed on the store site as per normal.

There will be no regular order shipments today (Friday, April 28th). Tomorrow we will begin to process orders and shipments that have accumulated since Wednesday evening. These will be completely caught up by Monday.

Qued email confirmations for orders placed since Wednesday evening will begin going out late this evening. Qued order number assignments will also occur at this time.

For a short time there will be a lot of broken images on the store site. We are bringing up all the back-end systems first. The new templates that pull the new image server URL's will be the last thing we do.

Customer service continues to function normally. If you have any questions about anything at all, just drop us a line.

There will be no newsletter today (Friday). I'm planning to work one up for you tomorrow morning after our systems are back up

We greatly appreciate everyone's patience while we complete this work. Thanks very much!

RACS STORE MAINTENANCE & DOWNTIME - UPDATE

UPDATE: The engineers weren't quite ready to begin last night, so we had to push the start of the server work up a day. We did end up processing and shipping orders placed on Wednesday April 26th.

After a 24 hour delay, we began our store server migration Wednesday, April 26th at 10PM Eastern Time (EDT). During this time, checkout will be disabled and even if the store is working, adding to the cart will fail. In addition APIs, such as Order API and Catalog API are going be disabled. There will be periods Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning when attempts to access the store site will trigger your browser's 'not private' or 'not secure' error message. This cannot be helped, so do not be alarmed.

After approximately 8 hours, sometime Thursday morning the store will come back online, checkout will be re-enabled and orders will be able to be placed. Once that happens availability and some functions/images will be spotty. Order numbers will not be immediately assigned to placed orders, and email confirmations will not immediately be sent. We have to turn these things back on step by step, so please be patient.

There may be some broken image links once the store is restored. That will be the last thing we fix once everything else is back up and running.

We will not be processing orders on Thursday April 27th. Order processing will resume sometime Friday afternoon, however, we may not catch up on email notifications until Monday May 1st. Looks like we will be working Saturday to wrap everything up. Hopefully, I can sleep on Sunday. ;-)

Again, thanks for your patience!

RACS STORE MAINTENANCE & DOWNTIME

  

On Tuesday, April 25 beginning around midnight EST, the RACS team will be migrating the RACS store site back-end servers and performing upgrades on our store software. There may be short periods early Wednesday morning where order checkout will be unavailable. 

From Wednesday morning thru Thursday evening store availability and some functions/images may be spotty, however, orders should be able to be placed normally. During this period:

• Order numbers will not be generated immediately
• Order notification and confirmation emails will not be sent immediately
• Realtime authorizations will be done, but auto-capture will not occur immediately
• Existing coupons will function normally
• Real-time discounts will function normally
• Gift certificate redemption will not be available
• Promotions will not be active
• Some store images will not load properly
  

During this maintenance period customer service messaging will function normally.

Orders placed thru 5pm EST on Tuesday, April 25th will be processed prior to the store maint.

No store order shipments will be processed on Wednesday April 26th. Shipments should resume in the afternoon on Thursday April 27th, and we should be all caught up on order shipments by close of business on Friday April 28th. 

Having been through many such updates I'm sure there will be little SNAFU's that we will need to sort out on the other side, so our goal is to have all store functions back up and running Friday morning, and fix any cosmetic issues over the weekend. 

And don't worry, the store site itself is not going to change. It's not time for that yet... ;-)

We greatly appreciate everyone's patience during this period as the updates are a necessary step in the process to facilitate some new things we are planning to roll out for the RACS store site later this year.

Thanks!

Store Site Maintenance Notice

Happy Monday Morning everyone!

Just a heads up, we're currently in the process of rolling out some administrative additions / updates to the backend and software that runs the RACS store site. This process will be rolled out in stages slowly over the next few days, and may cause a few glitches in the site, most notably there may be times some portions of the site like 'search' may produce https// results that don't immediately resolve on the site (without removing the 's').

Running an E-Comm store is a lot like adding a lane to an interstate highway. Traffic has to be able to use the road the entire time the work is being done. We greatly appreciate everyone's patience during this process as we work thru our updates!

-Bob and the rest of the RACS Crew

RACS Online Store - Server Migration

I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we will be migrating the entire RACS store site to a new server on Thursday Sept 4th. We'll start working on this around 11am EST, and everything should be completed within a couple of hours. While the migration should be 'seamless' and 'transparent' (these are the systems engineers words, not mine), there will be a DNS propagation for the AnimeCornerStore.com domain and depending on where you are this might make accessing the store site inaccessible thru our domain for a few minutes to several hours. If you have any trouble accessing the store site thru the regular URL tomorrow, try this direct link.

While I'm assured the migration will not result in any downtime for the store (hey, you know how these things go), if you are planning to place a new order this week do us a favor and try to get it placed before 10am EST on Thursday. That way we can make sure the warehouse folks have plenty to work on if the site experiences any downtime, and that you won't run into any issues trying to place your order Thursday afternoon.

I'll post back once the migration is finished, and while we don't anticipate any issues, I'd appreciate reports from anyone experiencing any anomalies with the store site once it's all done.

Thanks everyone!

UPDATE [1:15pm, Sep 4th]: Migration complete and should have been totally transparent to everyone on the front end. No down time. Looks like we hit it 100% - a testament to two months worth of planning. Yeah!! :-)

E-Mail Server Down - Working on It....

FYI to everyone, our e-mail server has been down now for about a half hour, so incoming e-mails are probably bouncing while they reboot the PDS. Software patch gone awry.

Should be back up in maybe 20 minutes or so.

Meanwhile we will sit back and enjoy a few rare minutes of digital quiet... -_^

UPDATE: Back up as of 3:27 PM EST. Back to work....

Comcast DNS Issue - Resolved

Just a quick note for everyone who might have had an issue getting on our store site this morning. There was some sort of DNS resolution issue that Comcast customers ran into trying to access the RACS web store servers. As far as we can tell only Comcast customers were effected. The issue lasted about an hour and has been resolved.

It's never a dull moment, that's for sure... :-)

System Maintenance Notice

We will be conducting routine system maintenance on RACS's website back end from 12 Midnight (EST)on Monday May 3, 2010, to 4 AM (EST) on Tuesday May 4, 2010 (approx 4 hours).

Folks will be able to browse and place store orders as normal, however, there may be a short period (maybe an hour or 2) during which we will be be taking down the data server that keeps track of coupons and gift certificates, so these may be unavailable for a short time during the maintenance.

One of the things we will be doing is getting rid of PayPal's API code and permanently severing the link to their payment system. Won't be needing that anymore - ever. :-)

System Outage - We're Back Up!

The stores platform had a system wide outage that took us down last night, between around 6pm and 10:30pm (EST) last night. We had to drop our planned updates last night in order to work to get everything back up and running.

If you hit us up last night to do a little Anime shopping and could not get on the site, I'm sorry about that. Everything is back up and running now 100%. :-)

UPDATE: The service interruption was caused by a sophisticated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against a small number of merchants hosted on the Merchant Solutions platform. Upon recognition of the attack, we took immediate action to prevent continued impact to a broader population of Merchant Solutions accounts.

Store Site Server Maintanence Part II

Another FYI to you guys, on July 29th to early morning July 30th from 12 midnight to around 4 am (EST), we will be conducting our second round of system upgrades to increase capacity and help improve store site performance (and pave the way for a few other things coming this fall...).

As before, this maintenance period will be transparent to you, so you will still be able to use the store as normal, however, you may not be able to use coupons or gift certificates when placing an order during this time (as that database may go offline for a short time).

We won't be publishing out any new item pages or other changes we've recently made to the site until this is completed, so all the new October releases from ADV, Funi, and Media Blasters that we've recently built will appear on the site sometime during the early morning hours of July 30th.

I know many of you are waiting to see Clannad After Story or Blassreiter or the Naruto Shippuden Movie available for pre-order, and they will be up and available a few hours from now. :-)

Store Site Server Maintanence

Just an FYI to you guys, on July 14 to early morning July 15, from 12 midnight to 6 am (EST), we will be conducting system upgrades to increase capacity and help improve store site performance due to the larger than expected increase in store traffic that has been coming in over the last couple of months.


This maintenance period should be pretty much transparent to you, and you will still be able to use the store as normal, but you may not be able to use coupons or gift certificates when placing an order during this time. Also we won't be able to publish out any item page or other changes during this time - not that we would that late at night, but you never know - sometimes I get my best work done at 3:30 in the morning... :-)