Volusion Down - Downtime Over 24 Hours

Volusion went down on Friday for the whole day (10/12/2012). It was an unfortunate event for them, and I would never wish this upon anyone including our competitors. The reason I bring this up, because of how Volusion handled their situation.

They do not have a Twitter status account to report server wide outages, they dont keep their staff informed on the backup progress, their staff wasnt even aware of the outages because as it was happening someone in their company was trying to up-sell new paid features to their clients through Facebook. It was a complete panic mode in Volusion, and it seems to be this way every time their servers go down. Volusion doesnt seem to learn from their mistakes because they keep allowing these outages to happen every year.

I took a screen shot on Saturday afternoon to show you what has been going on.

One of their clients jumped ship today, and switched to Shopping Cart Elite. He is the one that brought our attention to this mess. He informed us to go and look at all the complaints on Facebook, because on Monday they will all be deleted as if nothing happened.

We closely monitor the industry for downtime events to try to learn from their mistakes. This year GoDaddy, Amazon, Zoho, Netflix, Chase and many other fortune 1000s went down. After 48 hours, they usually release a press release on what happened and how they will fix it for next time. What is surprising about Volusion is that after they bring their servers back online, they do not release a press release or provide a detailed explanation of what happened, why the downtime occurred and how they will fix it so it doesnt happen again.

In the past five years that Shopping Cart Elite has been in business we have been down once, for 6 hours during a DDOS attack in 2010 that we were not fully prepared to handle. A DDOS attack is a when thousands of computers attack your network to bring it offline. To protect us from DDOS attacks, we closed all public ports to our servers and set up a virtual firewall. The virtual firewall evaluates the traffic to see if a visitor is an offender or not, and decides if it will allow that visitor to pass to our servers. Over the years, we enhanced our virtual firewall to block known offenders, known bots, and we actively monitor our servers to make sure that DDOS attacks never happen.

Normally this is where I would leave off, but since Volusion has a Google Adwords campaign targeting our trademark with the title Why Shopping Cart Elite? I figured this is an appropriate time to answer that question. You should Join Shopping Cart Elite because you wont have the same experience with us, like you did or would have with Volusion on Friday (10/12/2012).

I would like to finish off by saying if you are considering a new Shopping Cart, read our Marketing Pitchdeck Here and join us.

UPDATE: MORE VOLUSION DOWNTIMES AFTER THIS BLOG POST