When things go dark

As I write this, we just ended a day and a half power outage.

This time we were a bit more prepared than a couple of years back. Batteries were fully charged, the camp stove had fuel, and we had plenty of light. Overall it wasn't that bad, just required a lot of waiting and eating of cold apple pie.

Running your store on Shopify means you'll benefit from their teams when there's an outage. You won't have to dig into server logs, assemble new machines, or run cabling when there's an outage. Outages will still suck but you'll just be waiting around for most of it.

It can be a different story with any apps and 3rd party vendors though.

If the app isn't part of your core infrastructure, you can usually ignore an outage. If Repeat Customer Insights has an outage, that means you won't be able to run its reports for a time. It won't impact checkout or email campaigns or anything else.

If the app is part of your core infrastructure, you have two options:

1. wait for the vendor to fix things
2. have an alternative you can swap to quickly.

An alternative could be as simple as turning off the feature (e.g. disable PayPal checkout) or as complex as quickly setting up a whole new app (e.g. page builder). The hard part will be deciding when to swap over to the alternative.

You can prepare for this ahead of time by going through your systems and making notes about what would be impacted by an outage. From there you can propose rough plans (e.g. replace X with Y after one hour of outage). Just don't get too caught up with the detail. The specifics of the outage might change your plans.

Eric Davis