And if Findalo goes down: availability, plan B and how to leave with your data

If you're going to put your store's search in the hands of an outside provider, you're entitled to ask three uncomfortable questions before signing: what happens if you go down, what happens if you shut down, and what happens if I want to leave.

Almost no website in this industry answers them. Ours didn't either, and that's worse still when the same website tells visitors that a provider in this field once closed its doors. Planting the doubt and not resolving it is doing the doubt's work for it.

So here are all three, with numbers where there are numbers and without them where there aren't.

1. If we go down

There are two front doors, not one

The module you install in your store doesn't point to a single place. It ships with a second address on independent infrastructure, separate from the main one, configured out of the box. If the first doesn't answer, your store's search uses the second.

There's nothing to switch on or configure: it comes set up. And it isn't theoretical — it's the same route we used when part of the Spanish network blocked whole address ranges for reasons that had nothing to do with us, taking half the internet down with them at weekends.

What happens if everything goes down anyway

Let's be clear: if both fail, the widget can't return results. Your store carries on working in full — home page, categories, product pages, cart and checkout — but search doesn't answer.

That's why the question to ask isn't "can it go down?", to which the answer is always yes, but "how long does it take to come back, and will I find out?". There's a public status page at findalo.io/status that updates itself and that you can check yourself before writing to us.

The commitments, in the same size type

There's a written availability commitment from the Business plan up: 99.5%. On the Custom plan it rises to 99.9%.

Below Business there is no committed figure. That doesn't mean the service is different — it's the same service and the same infrastructure for everyone — it means there's no signed number to hold on to. We say it here because finding it in the contract afterwards would be shabby.

2. If we close

The real question, and the one everyone who has watched a provider close asks.

First, the thing that matters: your catalogue doesn't live with us. It lives in your store. We keep an indexed copy so we can search it. If we disappeared tomorrow, you wouldn't lose a single product, description or photo: it's all where it's always been.

What you'd lose is the search service and the analytics history. The first can be replaced. The second can't, which is why it's worth exporting what matters to you now and then.

And second, which is only fair to say: we're a small company. If what you need is a guarantee that your provider will still be here in ten years no matter what, we can't give you that guarantee, and be wary of anyone who does. What we can give you is that leaving is cheap and quick, which is the only real protection against this that exists.

3. If you want to leave

This is where you see whether a provider trusts its product or its contract.

• There's no minimum term. You cancel from your dashboard, with no phone calls and no notice period.
• Uninstalling the module leaves your store as it was. Your platform's search comes back. There's no debris to clean up and no templates to repair.
• Price changes are announced 30 days ahead, and if they don't suit you, you cancel with no penalty.
• You can ask for your data. What we hold of yours, we give you.

An honest note on the last point: the analytics history doesn't transfer to another provider automatically, because nobody shares a format. You can take it with you, but to consult it, not to plug it into the next search engine. That's an industry problem, not a trick of ours.

What you can do to sleep better

Four things, and none of them depends on us:

1. Check the module is up to date. Resilience improvements travel in it.
2. Look at the status page once so you know where it is on the day you need it.
3. Export your analytics periodically if the long series matters to you.
4. Try uninstalling in your test environment. It takes two minutes and removes the fear for good, because now you know what happens.

Why we publish this

Because everyone asks themselves this objection and almost nobody says it out loud. It stays inside, unanswered, and decides the purchase without anyone having had the chance to respond to it.

We'd rather the answer were written down, with the good parts and the parts that aren't: there are two front doors and it comes out of the box, there's a public status page, and there's an availability commitment from Business up and not before.

If you have a question of this kind that isn't answered here, send it to us. If it's a good one, it'll end up in this post.