Today we’re happy to announce the full support for this TLD. The .POST sTLD is now supported in all domain and whois API methods.

As part of these improvements, we decided to start versioning our API. In this way we’ll be able to release product updates without breaking compatibility with existing applications.

The current API is now known as API v1. All the existing API methods are now available under the /v1 prefix. The API documentation has been updated to reflect these changes.

If you used a custom library, all you have to do is to change the API endpoint from

http://api.robowhois.com/

to

http://api.robowhois.com/v1/

If you use our Ruby client make sure to upgrade to the release 3.0.0.

The old API endpoint will continue to work for a while, but we expect to drop it sometime before the end of June 2013.

These ccTLDs are immediately available for any of our whois API endpoints.

With immediate effect, every request to the website, whether you’re logged in or not, is served via HTTPS with secure cookies.

What happened

The root cause of this issue is a failure of the Redis instance we use to cache some API information, such as the number of API requests. Our Redis provider has been offline since yesterday, without any apparent explanation. Actually, their Redis service is still offline and we heard no words from them.

The issue was reported yesterday by our monitoring tools and some of our clients. We started investigating, but the Redis instance went up for a few minutes and the issue was (temporary) solved. Unfortunately, the instance went down again a few hours later and our tools didn’t immediately reported the error to us for a combination of reasons:

1. The issue was logged by Airbrake, but not flagged as resolved. Airbrake only sends you one notification per exception, not matter how many times it is logged. Additionally, they don’t deliver any daily/hourly digest (hint), thus we never received the notification that the application was misbehaving again.
2. We use Pingdom to monitor application and API availability. However, the service was configured to check our API sending a request to the /account path and this specific API call wasn’t affected by the Redis outage, because it doesn’t hit Redis at all.

For these reasons, our response to the latest outage has been quite slow, and we are extremely sorry about this.

We care about your business

We realize that there are businesses that count on our service and, sometimes, apologizing is not enough.

If you think that your business was affected by this service interruption, let us know at support@robowhois.com and we’ll send you a refund for this month: monthly plans will receive a 10% discount on the next billing cycle, pay-as-you-go plans will be recharged for the number of failed requests during this outage multiplies by 2.

What’s next?

In the short terms, we already migrated our Redis instance to a new provider and we’ll work with the old one to understand what happened and recover the lost data (just caches and logging information, nothing extremely valuable).

We also changed our Pingdom service to monitor a real API call instead of the account details, to make sure the check stresses all the system infrastructure.

We’re now working to audit our service and make sure such issues won’t happen again in the future.

If you should have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Today we’re happy to announce the full support for this TLD. You can now query all response details, including contacts, registrant and registrar, given that the server response includes this information.

Full support means you are able to get the raw WHOIS record or single WHOIS properties such as registry, contacts and nameservers.

We collected the most interesting code snippets and today we’re making them available in the new Examples page.

So far, we published examples about using our Whois API with PHP, Python and ASP Classic.

But this is just the beginning. If you have code that interacts with the RoboWhois API in any way, then we would love to see it. Please, send over any code samples you have to support@robowhois.com.

UPDATE: Maintenance completed.