Linkpoint Down?

no outage notice given

[oldpro]

Anybody who uses linkpoint notice it is down right now (Sunday)? Was notice given and I missed it?

[axgrindr]

I think they're lumping all of their notices into one email.

[edited by: lorax at 12:59 pm (utc) on Oct. 23, 2006]
[edit reason] no email plz (see TOS [webmasterworld.com]) [/edit]

[Corey Bryant]

They should be back up. They transferred their EFS Net from Williamsburg to Atlanta the other night and also added a new database. They rolled everything back out last night to get the gateway back up
-Corey

[tigerflag]

I got a notice that they would be doing scheduled maintenance between midnight and 4AM Sunday. I never like it that they can be down for so long on a regular basis. At 4PM I got an email from a customer telling me that she was having trouble placing an order. I called Linkpoint at 5, and they told me it would be down for another hour. It was still down at 8PM! When I checked at 10 it was up.

My poor customer tried to place her order 3 times before giving up. It was a long, complex order and a costly loss for me. I am so disgusted, I'm looking for another merchant account. Any suggestions?

[bwnbwn]

If I were you I would call the customer and do the order for them or since you spoke to them I would have gotten the info then. You missed the order here.

I consider this as a required step in keeping good ssl data secure. Been with them 4 years now and have read reports of others I would safely say you are with one of the best. Besides it ain't cheap to switch and then find the grass ain't so green on the other side and switch again.
You state it is a complicated matter to order why is it so complicated to order seems this is something I would look into as ordering should be as easy as possible.

[Corey Bryant]

Plus hopefully next year, LinkPoint will have redundant datacenters as well. Currently the only gateway that has that is Cybersource.

They are just trying to prepare for this next phase of upgrading

-Corey

[tigerflag]

bwnbwn wrote:
"If I were you I would call the customer and do the order for them or since you spoke to them I would have gotten the info then. You missed the order here."

I consider this as a required step in keeping good ssl data secure. Been with them 4 years now and have read reports of others I would safely say you are with one of the best. Besides it ain't cheap to switch and then find the grass ain't so green on the other side and switch again.

You state it is a complicated matter to order why is it so complicated to order seems this is something I would look into as ordering should be as easy as possible."

The order is in the shopping cart, it just didn't go through for payment authorization. I'm hoping she will go back and submit it again.

By "complicated", I mean she ordered a lot of items from a lot of different pages. The process is actually easy, it just took her quite a bit of time, and she's blind to boot. She likes my site because it's accessible. The problem arose when she submitted her card to pay. The gateway couldn't capture the information in order to authorize the sale. I couldn't do it over the phone, either. I couldn't even call Linkpoint and have one of their reps authorize the sale because even THEY couldn't get in!

For security, I do not take credit card data over the phone and write it down to submit later. It's a PCI compliance issue. I know most people do, but I don't.

I know switching isn't cheap. I just wish they had redundant servers so that if they have to work on the system it could stay up.

[bwnbwn]

"The order is in the shopping cart, it just didn't go through for payment authorization. I'm hoping she will go back and submit it again."

I see "no pun intended" You could call her expalin and nudge her to complete the order. In my cart it would be gone as the cookies would be lost and it would have to be redone.

We are small pods in the pea so I am sure they are working on another datacenter as I know the big hitters are having a fit as well especially those doing international business in Japan as it was prime time for them when it went down.

[oldpro]

I am so disgusted, I'm looking for another merchant account. Any suggestions?

I would suggest you stay with linkpoint...sure these outages are a frustrating, but linkpoint is about as good as you get. You may go with a smaller outfit only to learn that they are simply a "middleman" between you and linkpoint.

[Corey Bryant]

Each gateway will go down from time to time. Do a search - Authorizenet.com has been down as well as Verisign's Payflow unfortunately. Hopefully though by this time next year they will have redundant data centers and that should prevent the downtime.

-Corey

[tigerflag]

I did email her throughout the evening to tell her that I was trying to help, and told her today that things were working again. She said she understood and wasn't upset. She just placed the order and it went through. Glad that's over, and hope this doesn't happen again for a very long time.

Thank you all for explaining what happened. I feel a little better about staying with Linkpoint now. I love this forum...

[philbish]

Lost a bunch of sales on Sunday because of the outage :(

[tsdpsg]

I've been considering switching from Linkpoint also because customers are getting payment errors for no apparent reason ( credit limit is good, card company did not flag account).

Even when logging in to manually process, we can see that connectivity is not always there. Sometimes we get blank images and sometimes is just goes to a 404 error. You hit the back button and try again, then it is ok.

Problem with that is we do real time processing in our ShopSite shopping cart and if there is a break in connectivity, then the order doesn't go through. This happens alot. I called Linkpoint and they say there is absolutely nothing wrong with their system. Their opinion is that it's soemthing between my computer and there's. Well, if that was the case, then I'd be able to notice this during the day when we are online all day long (several computers). It only happens with Linkpoint so I do not believe that it is a local connectivity issue.

If Linkpoint doesn't give a return authorization status, then the shopping cart doesn't have anything to work with, and no order completion.

I've been with Linkpont for 6 years so I'm reluctant to switch but if thta's the case, then I have to. What is seems like to me is that their server is overloaded and can't handle the volume. A redundant system as previously posted would be a good idea. I just can't believe that they don't already have that.

Anybody else have issues like this? And if so, did you find a solution?

Thanks!

[Corey Bryant]

They actualy have scheduled maintenance every Saturday night / Sunday morning. Usually nothing goes wrong. They make changes to the database, etc because MasterCard / Visa makes changes to their system. They have not been down hard like Authorizenet.com - two years ago Auth.net was down about eight times.

You might want to take a look at LinkShield. You also might want to take a look at the DLL if you are on Windows. They have a new DLL that is out that no longer requires the Open SSL. We installed that and have not had any problems on Windows 2003. 2003 had a patch that was causing some problems with the DLL

-Corey