Etsy migration to new data center may cause access issues
According to this Etsy thread, users of some ISP’s have been reporting connectivity issues to Etsy which are caused by Etsy moving their servers to a new data center. (These are the physical location of the server machines)
alternate link to Etsy thread if you cannot access Etsy
Rokali says:
Hi everyone,As people here have seen, this is a DNS issue. Anytime any changes to DNS are made, those changes have to propagate to servers around the world. This can take a bit of time.
We’re in the process of migrating from one data center to another (larger) data center. As part of this migration, we moved our DNS servers. This means they got a new IP address. (There are always at least two DNS servers, for redundancy, so it’s multiple IP addresses, and we set Primary, Secondary, Tertiary etc. status for each of them).
It’s these new IP addresses that needs to propagate. Being well aware of this, we kept our old DNS servers up & running, so as the new IP addresses propagated, even if people still hit the old IP addresses, it would work.
This did work, but we recently discovered an edge case, which causes problems. This edge case is a good example of how intertwined the Web is.
In order for Etsy not to be loading for you, the following three ingredients need to be in the recipe of how you connect to the site:
1. Your internet service provider (ISP) has been slow to update its own DNS servers (this happens daily for almost all ISPs), and hasn’t recognized the new IP addresses of our DNS servers
2. You’re hitting the secondary DNS server at our old data center
3. You’re getting a specific type of error message from this DNS server, due to how your request has been routed (what “hops” it’s taking)
*Then* you have problems accessing Etsy.
We have made special changes to how the secondary DNS server handles these requests, and we expect this to resolve the issue. It might still take a bit of time, because the fix needs to propagate out to the rest of the world.
In an ideal world, our changes would propagate out to all the DNS servers in the amount of time they’re supposed to (1-2 days). Alas, some ISPs take their time, and for that ~1% it can take more like 5 days.
As some people here have noted, you can manually change what DNS servers you use on your computer, but in general this isn’t something we’d recommend. It can slow down accessing other sites on the Web.
Of course please keep letting us know here if any of the issues persist.
Footnote: What is an IP address? It’s a numerical locator, that gets mapped to a domain name. For example, www.etsy.com is also 72.37.157.20 — you can copy that string into your Web browser and use it to visit this site. (Your browser might try and force you to use the domain name though.)
Back when the Web first started, there weren’t domain names, there were only IP addresses. But these were really hard to remember, hence the need for domain names.
A DNS server is what connects the domain name (www.etsy.com) to the IP address (72.37.157.20), approximately speaking. There are master lists on DNS servers around the world, and anytime a domain name points to a different IP, these servers need to update what domain points to what IP address.
Disclaimer: This explanation is oversimplified, and I’m not a system administrator. This is what I’ve learned from reading up on the issue, and getting some input from Etsy’s own sys admins, who have been amazingly busy keep the site up & fast. They’re doing a great job.
If you *really* want to learn more, there’s always Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address
Posted at 11:19 pm, June 28 2008 EST -
earlier in the same thread, Revolving Dork said:
RevolvingDork says:
Hi all,We’ve gotten some scattered reports of users being unable to access Etsy, generally receiving “cannot connect” errors from their browsers.
We’ve run all of our diagnostic tools, and everything appears to be running properly within our network. Our global monitoring tools also have not shown any activity out of the ordinary.
We have been in touch with various ISPs, and we believe we have found the root of the issue. With their cooperation, the issue should be resolved quickly.
We’ll share more information with you as we receive it. In the meantime, if you or anyone you’re in contact with is having Etsy connectivity problems, please post their location here and the nature of their problems.
Thank you!
Posted at 5:24 pm, June 28 2008 EST -
There was an earlier thread that was locked, in which RD said the problem was not on Etsy’s end, and the failure was most likely due to some ISP.
RevolvingDork says:
Hi all,We’ve gotten some scattered reports of users being unable to access Etsy, generally receiving “cannot connect” errors from their browsers.
We’ve run all of our diagnostic tools, and everything appears to be running properly within our network. Our global monitoring tools also have not shown any activity out of the ordinary.
The evidence we have so far is pointing towards a failure in one or more ISPs ( internet service providers ) around the world, causing routing problems and cutting some users off from Etsy’s servers. This issue is unfortunately out of our hands, as we only have control over our internal network.
We are in contact with our ISP to see if they have any more information about potential issues. They are also reporting no problems currently, but we’re working with them to figure out the root cause of the issue.
We’ll share more information with you as we receive it. In the meantime, if you or anyone you’re in contact with is having Etsy connectivity problems, please post their location here and the nature of their problems.
