Optimizely provides you with and maintains two hosting environments: Sandbox and Production.
Optimizely hosts these environments on Azure and handles code deployments through Git. Sandbox is an environment where you can deploy your project code prior to go-live and stage user acceptance testing (UAT) scenarios, while Production is the live environment where you conduct eCommerce business via your website.
Your partner/implementation team is responsible for hosting all development and test environments. A sandbox site primarily is for UAT-type scenarios.
For more information about how Optimizely manages releases for Sandbox and Production environments, see Cloud Release Information.
Expectations for Sandbox Management and Performance
While Sandbox and Production environments are similar, Optimizely treats issues with the Sandbox environment differently. There are no service level agreements (SLAs) for Sandbox support or uptime. There is currently a higher ratio of customer sites per environment in Sandbox compared to Production, so there may be times of high overall activity, which could cause slower performance for your Sandbox site. Optimizely actively monitors the usage of the Sandbox environment and scales it as the number of customers active in this environment grows.
It’s possible for internal configuration, database or other infrastructure changes to cause Sandbox outages occasionally. While Optimizely addresses Sandbox outages as soon as we are aware, Optimizely is not obligated to share details about the root causes of outages that occur in this environment.
Even though Sandbox is not considered a production environment, Optimizely attempts to resolve issues in this environment as quickly as possible. However, unlike Production, Optimizely is not currently externally monitoring individual sites in Sandbox, so it is possible for a site to be down without us receiving an automatic notification.
If you experience consistent performance concerns in Sandbox, reach out through your partner or implementation team or submit a ticket so Optimizely can review these concerns. Optimizely Hosting will communicate with you via the ticket or otherwise, as needed.
Expectations for Production Management and Performance
Optimizely has controls and processes around how we manage and support Production environments.
Due to the difference in population between Sandbox and Production environments, you may see different performance in Sandbox compared to your Production environment. Moving from Sandbox to Production is not an automatic performance enhancement.
For Production environments, Optimizely has service level agreements (SLAs) for support and uptime and we do provide root cause analysis when outages occur in this environment. See the Terms of Service Agreement and Trust Center pages on our website for more details.
Submit a ticket if you experience any issues with your Production environment after you go-live. Optimizely will communicate with you via the ticket or otherwise, as needed.
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