Thawte down for several hours

Broke site for duration, no online orders could be placed :(

[whoisgregg]

Came in this morning at 9 EST and noticed pages on my sites would never finish loading. Realized that the thawte seal was the culprit, assumed it would fix itself in a few minutes.

Got a report from a co-worker about a broken page at 11:45 EST, turned out the thawte seal was still broken.

It seems to be working now, but it certainly explains why no orders came through this morning. >:-(

Ideas on how to deal with future outages? I can't seem to find anything on their site resembling a "server status" page... I am considering writing a cron job that checks download speed of the seal every five minutes or so and switches to using a static seal when they are down.

Or should I just switch to a static seal? Anyone with data on whether or not that affects conversions?

[flyerguy]

Unless you're getting an SSL error message popup or something, I don't think a broken seal image would mean a -total- loss of sales. Depends on the volume of sales per day I guess but some people (i.e. Firefox users) wouldn't even see the broken images symbol.

My crazy solution: Maybe you could place a clone of the image on a z-index higher than the button itself with CSS? Of course the image is updated with the date daily but I know of several scripts (from an .ASP perspective) where you can write text directly onto images. So you copy the base button logo and write the days date on it each day with a cron job.

I guess the button itself wouldn't be clickable anymore if you placed an image on a higher z-level, maybe if you made the clone image slightly smaller so it obscures the broken image symbol but still leaves a few pixels around the edge, it could still be clickable.

It would take me about an hour to write such a system, i'm sure the same could be done with PHP. May sound a bit hardcore but it's up to you what one hour of your time / paying a programmer to do it, vs. indeterminate lost sales because of a broken image.

*PS. Having these types of seals is oft debated here and elsewhere, do you have hard data that they really affect conversion rates?

[Bewenched]

I didn't notice it here in CST, but it's happened in the past. I'm actually thinking about using another service when ours comes up for renewal.

I've had several outages with them in the past.

[zomega42]

If the seal is making your page hang, the code is probably javascript rather than just an img tag. Easy solution: place the seal code inside an iframe, then the rest of your page won't hang if the seal is broken. Only the iframe will hang, and nobody will notice.

[whoisgregg]

If the seal is making your page hang, the code is probably javascript

That is the situation. The seal javascript hangs the rest of the page, preventing clicks of any kind.

I contacted them and they assured me they have upgraded their hardware to prevent any future outages. Was this their standard response during past outages as well? Or did they actually do something?

I don't know, but I'd rather not chance it... I'll be writing some kind of status checking script in the next few weeks.

[Rugles]

The exact same thing happened to us 2 years ago. We ditched the Thawte seal when it happened. Page not completely loading, giving an error message to the user and have them leave the site because they thought the site was crashing.

It is not worth losing a half day of sales for the unknown benefit we were getting from displaying the seal.

I dont even think we contacted Thawte after we figured out the cause of the error.