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Redundant Credit Card Processing Solution?
RokaMoka asks: "As I type this, I'm on hold with Verisign Payment Services, our (only) merchant services provider. I run several e-commerce sites, and how shall I say... 'tis the season. At the moment, VPS is totally down, and I am losing thousands of dollars per hour. Does anyone have any experience in designing and supporting e-commerce solutions with multiple vendors for CC processing? What other networks are out there, and what has been the customer experience with them? What should the strategy be, load-balance or fail-over?"
...and even beyond credit cards. There's e-gold, Norfeds, even faxing a check direct. CCs just cost you money, any way you look at it. It's *handy* to have a CC vendor,and as you can see it can also cause a problem, but it's also handy to store your loot and work with your loot in something besides federal reserve note digits being handled by the CC company loan sharks that isn't dropping daily in worth. In case you ain't seen it, the US funny money printing press buck is sinking pretty severely now because the rest of the planet has noticed they don't really have to filter their reality through it any longer, it's become redundant and expensive.
I know this is tangentially off the direct question, but just wanted to point out there are alternatives, and it doesn't hurt to offer them to your customers, and it's easy enough to do as well.