Worldpa's incompetence reaches new heights

[Update] It appears that Worldpay's service is back up and running.

We accept payment via two methods on SourceSecure: Worldpay and PayPal and it seems that decision to choose redundancy in this paid off. No sooner had I announced that SourceSecure was going live that Worldpay's payment system went down. (I would like to think that the rush of upgrade orders from SourceSecure caused this but something tells me that it wasn't so!)

This is unacceptable. We're talking about a service run by the Royal Bank of Scotland. (Then again, it's only fitting that they run their business like a royal mess.)

Look at SourceSecure: We don't have 1/10th the resources of the great Royal Bank of Scotland and yet we have built a system that is fully-redundant and geographically dispersed. We've set up servers on both sides of the world so that our customer's data is always safe (barring a total global tragedy, in which case drinking water, shelter and food should be your priorities.)

This is not the first time either. They were hit by a DOS attack this year that crippled them for days -- after having received a similar attack last year and apparently not beefing up their defenses.

I want to know where all the money we're paying for Worldpay's outrageous rates is going. A huge annual fee, fees for each service, etc.

I know where it's *not* going and that's their customer support: "Umm... yeah, the payment service is down... umm, I don't know what's wrong. I'm not on the technical team... but I don't think they have a clue either... there *is* a backup server... I don't know why it didn't work... no, I don't know when it'll be back up... really sorry about this... I'm sure it won't be *days*..."

Well, that was comforting!

We signed up with Worldpay because we thought it would be *stable* and we were willing to pay for it. Needless to say, I am now in the process of getting us our own merchant account and changing to a payment service that actually supports xml-based integration.

In the meanwhile, I must apologize if anyone has tried to upgrade their account using the Worldpay links. Please, for the time being, use the PayPal links (you will *not* need to open up a PayPal account -- something I would actively discourage you from doing in any case -- you can pay normally using your credit card.)

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