Connecting to Spectrum OnDemand Servers

Spectrum OnDemand has servers in three regions. Each region has a staging environment and a production environment. In case you are not sure of the region, use the Global URL.

Server URLs

The Americas server is the only one that has USPS® Delivery Point Validation (DPV®) data installed on it, so you must use the Americas URL if you want to perform DPV processing. If the Americas server is unavailable, requests are rerouted to another region and DPV processing becomes unavailable.

Staging and Production Environments

The staging environment uses the same hardware and software as our production environment. A new update of Spectrum OnDemand is applied to the staging environment first. This allows you to test the update before we deploy it to the production environment.

Performance and Security Testing

Use the staging environment to evaluate services, experiment with different parameters, and to perform testing (UAT, Sanity, and so on). You must perform your performance and security testing on the staging environment.

Use the production environment for final acceptance testing and calls. Use the production environment for all the business critical tasks. Do not use the production environment for evaluation or other testing.

Server IP Addresses

Use URLs in your code and security appliances. Our IP addresses change often as part of our effort to provide fast responses and handle failures within our environment. If you have a security policy that requires you to know Spectrum OnDemand IP addresses, contact your Spectrum OnDemand Account Manager for details about the Static IP Pool program.

If your company's systems cache Spectrum OnDemand DNS entries, the cache needs to honor the Time to Live (TTL) attribute returned from the DNS authority. Systems that ignore the TTL attribute and use the same IP address for a period of time will experience a connectivity error when trying to connect to an IP address that is no longer active.

HTTPS

Use HTTPS when calling Spectrum OnDemand so your communication is secure.

Supported TLS Security Protocol and Ciphers

Certificate Updates

We update our certificates annually. In addition, we may update our certificates at any time without notice to address security vulnerabilities reasons.

Retry Requests

HTTPS is a stateless protocol that does not guarantee delivery, so you should include retry logic in your application. For example, here is a synchronous variation of the AWS Backoff Algorithm:

retries = 0
DO
    wait for (2^retries * 100) milliseconds

    status = Call Synchronous Web Service

    IF status = SUCCESS
        retry = false
    ELSE IF status = HTTP 500, 502, 503 or 504 error
        retry = true
    ELSE
        Some other error occurred, so stop calling the web service.
        retry = false
    END IF

    retries = retries + 1
WHILE (retry AND (retries < MAX_RETRIES))

Persistent Connections

Spectrum OnDemand does not honor HTTP keep-alive requests and will disconnect after the first request is processed. This prevents you from remaining connected to a server that has failed or is offline for maintenance.

Monitoring

Spectrum OnDemand has extensive internal and external monitoring to ensure that services are available, including monitoring from 20 different sites within the US alone. It is not necessary for you to perform your own "heartbeat" check to verify that Spectrum OnDemand services are available. If your business has a special need for monitoring, contact your Spectrum OnDemand Account Manager.