Authorize.net has downtime like any other (see my other post below). Specifically they were hit by a DDOS last summer that took them down for 3 days + some intermittent outages for about a week. We've just started having our traditional "holiday" outages with them today. They usually last less than a minute, but even so...they're not entirely reliable.
Having said that, 99.0% of the time they're up, and their support is ok.
Our Payment Gateway has also been flaky occasionally. Whether it's a targeted ddos in the summertime (actually happened), or a massive surge in traffic (ddos?) during the holidays, our Payment Gateway will occasionally refuse to process transactions for hours at a time.
We sell online services, with a business model similar to the "buy a download key to unlock our shareware" model, so storing CC #'s for later is not an option. Once we give the service, it's given, so we need to process the cards in real-time.
I approached "upper management" about getting a 2nd Payment Gateway account for redundancy last year, but in the end they were more willing to risk losing the sales during the downtime than spending the $$ and time to implement a redundant payment system.
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Authorize.net has downtime like any other (see my other post below). Specifically they were hit by a DDOS last summer that took them down for 3 days + some intermittent outages for about a week. We've just started having our traditional "holiday" outages with them today. They usually last less than a minute, but even so...they're not entirely reliable.
Having said that, 99.0% of the time they're up, and their support is ok.
Our Payment Gateway has also been flaky occasionally. Whether it's a targeted ddos in the summertime (actually happened), or a massive surge in traffic (ddos?) during the holidays, our Payment Gateway will occasionally refuse to process transactions for hours at a time. We sell online services, with a business model similar to the "buy a download key to unlock our shareware" model, so storing CC #'s for later is not an option. Once we give the service, it's given, so we need to process the cards in real-time. I approached "upper management" about getting a 2nd Payment Gateway account for redundancy last year, but in the end they were more willing to risk losing the sales during the downtime than spending the $$ and time to implement a redundant payment system.