When a provider breaks, keep going

Failover sends a request to another provider when the first one fails. DigitSpace tracks the health of every provider and model, and when a call times out, returns a 429 or a 5xx, the same request goes to the next healthy provider, up to three in all.

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Asked forauto (balanced)

1. anthropic / claude-haiku-5-5503 · 240 ms
2. openai / gpt-6-luna200 · 1.4 s

Your code receives one normal answer. x-digitspace-provider: openai

Which errors fail over

What the provider returned	What happens
Timeout or network error	Next provider
429, rate limited	Next provider
500 to 599, server error	Next provider
400 to 499 (except 429), a bad request	Returned to you straight away: another provider won't fix it

A wooden switchboard with rows of white and coloured keys and a rotary dial. — Every key on a switchboard was a decision about where a call should go.
Orion & Oriola switchboard, Elisa Telephone Museum. Antti Leppänen, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Health is tracked, not guessed

Every call to a provider is recorded for that provider and model: whether it worked and how long it took. A provider with three failures in a row is marked as failing straight away, without waiting for its success rate to fall.

A provider counts as healthy at a 90% success rate over its last 50 calls. Healthy providers are always tried first; failing ones stay at the back of the list as a last resort.

What a failed-over request looks like

An "auto" request: the first choice returns a 503, so the same request goes to the next model on the shortlist, and your code just gets the answer. With a named model, the next provider serving that model takes over.

Asked forauto (balanced)

1. anthropic / claude-haiku-5-5503 · 240 ms
2. openai / gpt-6-luna200 · 1.4 s

Your code receives one normal answer. x-digitspace-provider: openai

What you see

The answer: Your code receives one normal response, from whichever provider answered.
The provider: The "x-digitspace-provider" header names it.
Every attempt: Your logs list each attempt with its status and time, so you know when a provider is struggling.

Questions

A telephone exchange room around 1900, with a long wooden switchboard, operator stools and a desk. — General Telephone Company of the Northwest, exchange room, about 1900, public domain, cropped, via Wikimedia Commons.

Do I pay for failed attempts?

No. You pay for the attempt that answered.

Can failover switch to a different model?

With "auto", the shortlist can include more than one model, so yes. With a named model it only moves between that model's providers.

What if I pinned a provider?

Then there's no other provider to move to, and the provider's error comes back to you.

Is there an uptime guarantee?

Enterprise contracts include a 99.9% uptime SLA for the gateway.

Live in a minute.

Create a key, change the base URL, send a request. No card needed with your own provider keys.

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