Online FAQ

This FAQ covers questions around using Fieldpine Online specifically

What is an Access Minute?

An access minute is how we charge Fieldpine Online if you are not using a bundle. ie for retailers that are paying for only what they use. When providing Fieldpine Online, we incur costs in various dimensions, such as compute, disk storage, network bandwidth, active connections, transaction rate. All retailers are different, so there isn't really a common average, so we charge based on each minute you use, with limits within that minute. Disk Storage is charged seperately.

An access minute opens a window of 60 seconds during which you can make any number of calls and data upload/downloads, but with limits to prevent excesses.

So, a normal web browser performing a sale, will probably request 10-15 things at the start, then only a few things as items are sold. All of this happens over one or minutes, so the charge is 1 or 2 minutes. If you walk away for 10 minutes in the middle of the sale, then no traffic happens, so there is no charge for that idle time.

An Excel reporting user however, may open and calculate a very large spreadsheet, which results in thousands of requests coming to Fieldpine Online as quick as Excel can resolve them. In this case, we charge only for the calculation time (while requests are coming into our servers). However, Excel user may exceed the limit of transactions permitted within an Access Minute, so their "minute" might terminate before the 60 seconds is up, and a new access minute begins.

A background maintenance task might call APIs and download large amounts of data in a short period of time, in this case a new Access Minute can be started each time they exceed the bandwidth limit.

There are some other exceptions, such as applications that make 1 or 2 calls every couple of minutes, or bulk downloading data from single APIs (think complete database copy)

If I use Fieldpine Online (cloud), can I xxxx?

Can I run CRON jobs.
No. You cannot run any Operating System level tasks. Period.

Can I install custom code, such as DLLs
No.

If you have absolute need to do any of the above, then don't use Fieldpine Online and use a self hosted solution

If I use Fieldpine Online (cloud), can I extract all retail data?

Yes of course. Your data is yours.

For smaller retailers, you can request a database download and a link will be returned to download your database.
For larger retailers, there are APIs and webhooks that can be used to maintain copies of your database is an efficient manner

What Domain or IP do I need to whitelist?

If you are restricting outbound network access, then

• The domain you are allocated will vary and be allocated when you sign up. You can BYO domain, such as mypos.mystore.xyz if you wish.
• Fieldpine Online uses Cloudflare for most retailers, and their current IP ranges are available here

What are Fieldpines outbound IP addresses?

Our servers all use dynamic addresses and do not have fixed IPs. Outbound calls will originate from Azure, AWS and other sources.

Which Countries is my data housed in?

Our primary servers are located in several places, such as Europe, Australia, New Zealand. We do not currently run servers in the USA, but do store backups in US based data centers.