Greetings and apologies from salonMonster

As you may be aware salonMonster experienced some downtime on Sunday evening and we have been working around the clock to resolve the issues related to this. We wanted to explain to you what occurred and what we are doing to improve salonMonster so that this won’t happen again and if it does that it won’t have as much of an impact.

What happened:

Our primary Web host experienced a hardware failure on the equipment that hosts salonMonster. They were unable to move us off that hardware onto functioning equipment when this failure occurred.

What we did to rectify it:

We were very concerned about this downtime and after a discussion with our primary Web host we decided to move salonMonster over to our backup Web host. salonMonster is configured so that there is always a redundant host with backups of all the salonMonster data and application. We were able to move our systems over to our backup system in under 30 minutes and then proceeded to change the settings to point everyone to the backup system.

What we were unhappy with:

When we changed the settings to point everyone to our backup system it took between 5 minutes and 24 hours for everyone’s different internet service providers to update their systems and switch things over. Each internet service provider deals with this differently. We found the time it took for this change over to happen unacceptable. This variance between how internet service providers handle the changeover also meant that when we then switched back to our main host some people switched back quickly while others took a whole day. Because of this we had to synchronize your data back to our main host from the backup system throughout the day to ensure that things were up-to-date.
What we are going to do to improve things in case this ever happens again:

We want to make sure that if this ever happens again we can switch everyone over to the backup system much faster. To make this happen we are adding a new setting to our system that will manage which Web host to send people to. This will eliminate the problem we experienced with some internet service providers taking up to 24 hours to switch things over. In the future we should be able to switch everyone to our backup within 5 to 10 minutes. We also want to avoid any problems with re-synchronizing bookings made on our backup system with the main system when we switch things back. To resolve this we are going to make the backup version a “read only” version of the application. In the case of downtime you will still be able to access and view all your bookings but not add any new bookings to the system.
We want to thank you for your patience throughout this process and offer our humblest apologies for any inconvenience we may have caused you. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

The salonMonster Team