Update @ 2030 GMT: SendGrid are back up and running, and emails from KMB should now be going out as normal.
KeepMeBooked uses SendGrid to despatch all emails that we generate (booking confirmations, etc.)
SendGrid are currently experiencing problems which is causing a delay in sending emails. They'll no doubt have it sorted soon. You might want to hold off on sending any manual emails from within KMB until SendGrid is back up and running smoothly. Their own status update is here:
http://support.sendgrid.com/entries/23417077-21-Mar-Website-Down-Refusing-Mail
Thursday, 21 March 2013
Monday, 28 January 2013
Major problem at PayPal, payment notifications are not being sent
Update @ 0730 GMT Jan 29th: PayPal have fixed the issue and are sending out IPNs now from transactions completed yesterday, although it may take until the end of today for the backlog of IPNs to be cleared:
https://www.x.com/content/update-8-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27
Update @ 1830 GMT:PayPal continue to work on the issue, but they have not fixed it yet:
https://www.x.com/content/update-3-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27
They plan to send out any missed IPNs once they have fixed the problem. This is unfortunate, really, as it is likely that users will already have entered payments manually by then. So when PayPal send out the IPNs, you will end up with a duplicate payment (one which you entered manually, then another once the IPN comes in). There really isn't much we can do, it is all in PayPal's hands. While PayPal is often maligned, their tech is normally good. It is highly unusual for them to have such a serious problem continue for many hours.
Update @ 1445 GMT: PayPal have now acknowledged that IPNs ("Instant Payment Notifications") are not working:
https://www.x.com/content/notification-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27
Update @ 1400 GMT: No further news from PayPal, but Twitter is awash with other users reporting problems with PayPal IPN:
https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=paypal+ipn&src=typd
We appreciate this will cause our users a lot of inconvenience, but it is out of our control, everyone is relying on PayPal to fix this a.s.a.p.
Original post: We are aware of a problem that PayPal are having sending "Instant Payment Notifications". Currently, these are not being sent, so we cannot fully process payments from PayPal.
Guests booking online can complete a payment, but PayPal is not sending us the payment notification so the booking on KMB expires (because it appears to us that the payment was never completed).
PayPal are working to resolve this. Their latest update shows it as resolved:
https://www.x.com/content/follow-major-impact-express-checkout-paypal-apis-virtual-terminal-and-website-payments-pro
but we think it is not resolved and we have advised PayPal of this.
As a workaround, you will need to manually mark PayPal-paid bookings as confirmed when you receive the payment confirmation email from PayPal. Remember that even if a booking expires due to "non-payment" you can still find it from the Guests section of the KMB and manually mark it as confirmed.
We will update here when we have more information from PayPal. Other gateways are not affected.
https://www.x.com/content/update-8-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27
Update @ 1830 GMT:PayPal continue to work on the issue, but they have not fixed it yet:
https://www.x.com/content/update-3-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27
They plan to send out any missed IPNs once they have fixed the problem. This is unfortunate, really, as it is likely that users will already have entered payments manually by then. So when PayPal send out the IPNs, you will end up with a duplicate payment (one which you entered manually, then another once the IPN comes in). There really isn't much we can do, it is all in PayPal's hands. While PayPal is often maligned, their tech is normally good. It is highly unusual for them to have such a serious problem continue for many hours.
Update @ 1445 GMT: PayPal have now acknowledged that IPNs ("Instant Payment Notifications") are not working:
https://www.x.com/content/notification-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27
Update @ 1400 GMT: No further news from PayPal, but Twitter is awash with other users reporting problems with PayPal IPN:
https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=paypal+ipn&src=typd
We appreciate this will cause our users a lot of inconvenience, but it is out of our control, everyone is relying on PayPal to fix this a.s.a.p.
Original post: We are aware of a problem that PayPal are having sending "Instant Payment Notifications". Currently, these are not being sent, so we cannot fully process payments from PayPal.
Guests booking online can complete a payment, but PayPal is not sending us the payment notification so the booking on KMB expires (because it appears to us that the payment was never completed).
PayPal are working to resolve this. Their latest update shows it as resolved:
https://www.x.com/content/follow-major-impact-express-checkout-paypal-apis-virtual-terminal-and-website-payments-pro
but we think it is not resolved and we have advised PayPal of this.
As a workaround, you will need to manually mark PayPal-paid bookings as confirmed when you receive the payment confirmation email from PayPal. Remember that even if a booking expires due to "non-payment" you can still find it from the Guests section of the KMB and manually mark it as confirmed.
We will update here when we have more information from PayPal. Other gateways are not affected.
Thursday, 8 November 2012
Showing rooms in price order
We've put a new option on the Customize Widget page to allow you to display rooms in price order when a guest books online:
You can select from "Same as Calendar order" (which will show the rooms in the same order you see them in your calendar) or "Price (Low -> High)" (which will show the rooms with cheapest at the top) or "Price (High -> Low)" (most expensive at the top).
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.
You can select from "Same as Calendar order" (which will show the rooms in the same order you see them in your calendar) or "Price (Low -> High)" (which will show the rooms with cheapest at the top) or "Price (High -> Low)" (most expensive at the top).
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.
Monday, 1 October 2012
Calling tax 'tax'. Or VAT, or GST, or whatever you need to it be called
You can now give 'tax' its own name, suitable for your location. In the UK, that'll be 'VAT', in Australia, 'GST', and so on.
To change how 'tax' is labelled, go to Settings > Your Details > Sales Tax and check the box 'Use custom label' and type the label that you need. For example, if you are using one percentage rate to cover tax and service, then put 'Tax & service' there:
Tax will now appear as "Tax & service" on your booking widget and on the PDF invoice which you print out for guests.
It'll still show on the booking details screen (that you as owner see) as simply 'Tax', but that's just because there isn't much room on that screen for anything longer. The important thing is that guests will see a familiar label when booking online and on their invoice.
*********
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.
To change how 'tax' is labelled, go to Settings > Your Details > Sales Tax and check the box 'Use custom label' and type the label that you need. For example, if you are using one percentage rate to cover tax and service, then put 'Tax & service' there:
Tax will now appear as "Tax & service" on your booking widget and on the PDF invoice which you print out for guests.
It'll still show on the booking details screen (that you as owner see) as simply 'Tax', but that's just because there isn't much room on that screen for anything longer. The important thing is that guests will see a familiar label when booking online and on their invoice.
*********
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.
New feature: reorder your rooms on the calendar screen
We just released a useful new feature. You can now re-order the rooms on your calendar screen (previously they just appeared in the order in which you first created them). Just click the "Reorder rooms..." link:
Then you'll see a pop-up screen appear where you can drag each room name to reorder it:
Just click-and-drag on a room name to move it to a different spot. Click save and you'll return to the calendar with your rooms in the new order.
Note: if you like to have the calendar open in multiple tabs, then close the extra tabs before you reorder rooms. Otherwise you might temporarily end up with different tabs showing a different room order which would be confusing.
Then you'll see a pop-up screen appear where you can drag each room name to reorder it:
Just click-and-drag on a room name to move it to a different spot. Click save and you'll return to the calendar with your rooms in the new order.
Note: if you like to have the calendar open in multiple tabs, then close the extra tabs before you reorder rooms. Otherwise you might temporarily end up with different tabs showing a different room order which would be confusing.
Thursday, 20 September 2012
Planned maintenance: 7am Tuesday September 25th (UK time)
Update @ 7am: Just starting maintenance now
Update @ 7.20am: Progressing well, hope to be done within the hour
Update @ 7.29am: Maintenance complete, we are back up
We are planning to take KeepMeBooked offline for a short time to perform some essential maintenance.
KeepMeBooked will be unavailable for approximately one hour starting at 7am BST on September 25th. That's:
San Francisco: 11pm Monday 24th
Sydney: 4pm Tuesday 25th
(Click here to see other timezones)
We hope to have the work done in less than 1 hour, we'll obviously come back online just as quickly as we can. Thank you in advance for your patience.
Update @ 7.20am: Progressing well, hope to be done within the hour
Update @ 7.29am: Maintenance complete, we are back up
We are planning to take KeepMeBooked offline for a short time to perform some essential maintenance.
KeepMeBooked will be unavailable for approximately one hour starting at 7am BST on September 25th. That's:
San Francisco: 11pm Monday 24th
Sydney: 4pm Tuesday 25th
(Click here to see other timezones)
We hope to have the work done in less than 1 hour, we'll obviously come back online just as quickly as we can. Thank you in advance for your patience.
Thursday, 26 July 2012
[Resolved] We are currently experiencing unplanned outages
We are currently experiencing unexpected, intermittent outages. We apologise for this and are investigating urgently.
Update 0924: Problem was resolved at around 0830, details to follow.
Update 1040: One of our two application servers went down at around 1am UK time on July 26 (that's 8pm July 25th in New York; 10am July 26 in Sydney). That left the other healthy server handling all our users, and that one server got frequently overloaded until we got the other server back up again at around 8.30am UK time.
KMB wasn't totally down for that whole time, many users will have been able to connect, but service was slow and often not available at all for several minutes at time. I am very sorry for this, I understand how much you all rely on KMB to run your businesses.
The reason it took so long to resolve was, embarrassingly enough, that we actually hadn't realised that one of our servers had gone down, despite a myriad of alerts telling us that it was.
We use Pingdom to make a simple "Is KeepMeBooked reachable?" check every five minutes. And we have NewRelic to give us detailed insight into what's going on on each of our servers.
The problem arose because we also use Pingdom to monitor SiteMinder PMSXchange, which is an external service that many of our users use in conjunction with KeepMeBooked. (We use Pingdom to check SiteMinder so that if our own application cannot reach SiteMinder, and nor can Pingdom, then we know there is a SiteMinder issue, not an issue with our application.)
Our developer in Indonesia got an alert from Pingdom saying that KeepMeBooked was down, but misread it, and thought it related to SiteMinder's PMSXchange. SiteMinder being unavailable would not have been a big deal, that doesn't really matter for short periods.
Only when I got up and saw a stack of Pingdom alerts on my phone did we know we had a problem. We then restarted the dead server and got back on track pretty quickly.
We've now added SMS alerts to our development team in Indonesia if Pingdom reports KeepMeBooked to be down. That means there will be much less risk of confusing a run-of-the-mill Pingdom alert with a panic-now-site-is-down Pingdom alert.
Again, I am very sorry for the trouble and uncertainty this will have caused, especially to our Australian users who suffered most of the day with terrible service.
Update 0924: Problem was resolved at around 0830, details to follow.
Update 1040: One of our two application servers went down at around 1am UK time on July 26 (that's 8pm July 25th in New York; 10am July 26 in Sydney). That left the other healthy server handling all our users, and that one server got frequently overloaded until we got the other server back up again at around 8.30am UK time.
KMB wasn't totally down for that whole time, many users will have been able to connect, but service was slow and often not available at all for several minutes at time. I am very sorry for this, I understand how much you all rely on KMB to run your businesses.
The reason it took so long to resolve was, embarrassingly enough, that we actually hadn't realised that one of our servers had gone down, despite a myriad of alerts telling us that it was.
We use Pingdom to make a simple "Is KeepMeBooked reachable?" check every five minutes. And we have NewRelic to give us detailed insight into what's going on on each of our servers.
The problem arose because we also use Pingdom to monitor SiteMinder PMSXchange, which is an external service that many of our users use in conjunction with KeepMeBooked. (We use Pingdom to check SiteMinder so that if our own application cannot reach SiteMinder, and nor can Pingdom, then we know there is a SiteMinder issue, not an issue with our application.)
Our developer in Indonesia got an alert from Pingdom saying that KeepMeBooked was down, but misread it, and thought it related to SiteMinder's PMSXchange. SiteMinder being unavailable would not have been a big deal, that doesn't really matter for short periods.
Only when I got up and saw a stack of Pingdom alerts on my phone did we know we had a problem. We then restarted the dead server and got back on track pretty quickly.
We've now added SMS alerts to our development team in Indonesia if Pingdom reports KeepMeBooked to be down. That means there will be much less risk of confusing a run-of-the-mill Pingdom alert with a panic-now-site-is-down Pingdom alert.
Again, I am very sorry for the trouble and uncertainty this will have caused, especially to our Australian users who suffered most of the day with terrible service.
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