Sage Pay - Problems this Weekend?

martindow

We use Sage Pay to process card transactions on our site and received an email about an upgrade on Saturday. Here is an extract:

[FONT=Helvetica,arial]Work will start at 22:00 on Saturday 17th April 2010. The upgrade has been carefully planned to minimise disruption to you and your business and the only potential risk of downtime will be the time it takes the internet Name Servers to pick up our new IP addresses. This could be as little as a few seconds, however it may be slightly longer — unfortunately we have no control over the internet Name Servers except to suggest how often they check for new addresses.[/FONT]

There is a rather technical thread on the Sage Pay forum

https://support.sagepay.com/forum/Topic11078-29-1.aspx#bm11082

suggesting that payments might be out of action for much more than 'a few seconds'. Should we worry that orders will be lost or is it all a fuss over nothing?

fguk

Martin

This could be a lot of fuss over nothing, and I am sure they have put systems in place to mitigate problems as much as possible. When changing DNS settings to point to new IP addresses (sorry for the jargon), which is what it sounds like they are doing, it is quite possible that the Name Servers on the internet will not be updated for a good few hours, even days.

That is worse case, and usually it is a lot quicker than that, and as mentioned they can use all sorts of systems to mitigate the problem.

The other issue, from the email I read from them is if you have hard coded IP informatioin (as opposed to a FQDN like www.sagepay.com) into your website, pointing to the Sage Pay site. These will need checking and changing. Might be worth talking to your web developer.

martindow

Thank you. We use Actinic and I am assured that this uses FQDN rather than IP addresses. So it is just the time it takes to migrate - hopefully sooner rather than later.