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The Technologies Behind Uptime

We proudly stand behind our 99.999% uptime guarantee with the industry’s only financially backed Service Level Agreement. This level of uptime is trusted by leading global firms with mission-critical needs in areas such as finance, retail, technology and many others, and this is made possible thanks to the following technologies.

24/7/365 monitoring

To guarantee a 99.999% uptime you must first know when your systems are up. Keeping a constant eye on the state of the web services is the backbone of our high availability protocol. In our case, this actually consists of multiple eyes. 24/7/365 monitoring is in place from multiple locations to provide us with the most up to date insight into the availability of our services. The monitoring services feed us the critical information we need in order to make split-second decisions about network routing, server availability, and web service uptime.

Globally distributed servers

Our first line of defense against downtime starts at a global scale. The Service Objects web servers are globally distributed to help prevent location-based problems. When Mother Earth decides to bring in a hurricane or blizzard to the East coast, your validated data is not stuck traversing through the mess. An added benefit of the globally distributed servers is that web service response times are as fast as possible. Smart routing will take your data and validate it at the nearest data center. This ensures that a request from California does not have to do a round trip traversing halfway across the planet.

Failover Configuration

Load balancers

The next line of defense resides within each of our data centers. Multiple servers are leveraged in each data center to handle incoming requests. Each of your secure validations is directed to one of our compute nodes to be processed in the shortest line possible. The load balancers help keep one particular server from being overloaded with all of our customers’ traffic. A load-balanced approach helps to keep the traffic flowing as quickly as possible.

Automatic DNS redirection

The system for automatic redirection goes hand in hand with the continuous monitoring of all of our data centers. If a critical error is detected, the route to the problematic data center is automatically diverted to a functional location. The detection and correction are able to be performed without human intervention. If the system administrators are asleep and a problem occurs, your data validations are not hanging in limbo.

Regression testing

Our uptime guarantee is also made possible by a suite of regression tests that are performed before every new code update is pushed into production. We make sure to do our due diligence no matter how small the update is, in order to ensure that service-halting bugs are not pushed into the wild.

Failover logic built into code

The last line of defense ultimately falls on you, our client. But do not worry, we work hard to provide you with the best information possible. Our coding standards aim to have logic built into your system to ensure failover pathways. In the low-percentage case where one of our data centers is down, your integration can continue functioning. A backup endpoint is provided with your purchase to keep your workflow moving at all times. Sample code highlighting our best practices and procedures is available here. Our engineers are here to discuss high availability solutions that can be tailored to fit in your environment.