brav0
09-20-2001, 05:52 AM
There has been a lot of discussion lately about third partY processor's reliability. The following announcement is from Revecom's site and it may shed some light into why their service deteriorated so badly in the last month.
What a Nightmare…
We would like to apologize to all merchants regarding this week’s service and network performance. These technical difficulties have been rectified, and would like to take a minute to explain the events that occurred this week that have resulted in sub-standard support and network uptime.
We signed an agreement with Cable & Wireless to host our high-stress network. As described on paper, it seemed to be the best backbone capable of handling our transactional volume. We finally transferred to C&W at night on Monday September 10, 2001. The transfer went seamlessly, although certain critical server components were to be installed on Tuesday morning. Tuesday’s tragedy caused C&W to close their Washington facility delaying the update until Wednesday. On Wednesday, C&W issued an “Upgrade Ticket” which was only concluded on Thursday night.
We quickly became aware that C&W had not the staff, nor the equipment to handle our systems. We were on the telephone with their network engineers, server engineers and implementation managers from Wednesday to Saturday without any satisfactory results. Since Monday, as a precautionary measure, the decision was made to upgrade our existing infrastructure. We added more database capacity, and additional payment and merchant control servers. By Saturday, we were so frustrated with C&W that we cancelled our agreement. The DNS was modified and websites were transferred. In order to minimize down time, we left the database server at C&W until the DNS issue was resolved.
Our databases were transferred from C&W this morning. Systems are all healthy. We know that many of you have been extremely frustrated by this situation. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you. We truly expected this upgrade to be an enhancement and instead, it turned out to be a disaster for both PaySystems.com and its merchants. The precautionary upgrade we implemented proved to be our lifeline, and now we are overwhelmingly pleased with the results of this upgrade. This new setup will support all our needs reliably for a long time to come.
What a Nightmare…
We would like to apologize to all merchants regarding this week’s service and network performance. These technical difficulties have been rectified, and would like to take a minute to explain the events that occurred this week that have resulted in sub-standard support and network uptime.
We signed an agreement with Cable & Wireless to host our high-stress network. As described on paper, it seemed to be the best backbone capable of handling our transactional volume. We finally transferred to C&W at night on Monday September 10, 2001. The transfer went seamlessly, although certain critical server components were to be installed on Tuesday morning. Tuesday’s tragedy caused C&W to close their Washington facility delaying the update until Wednesday. On Wednesday, C&W issued an “Upgrade Ticket” which was only concluded on Thursday night.
We quickly became aware that C&W had not the staff, nor the equipment to handle our systems. We were on the telephone with their network engineers, server engineers and implementation managers from Wednesday to Saturday without any satisfactory results. Since Monday, as a precautionary measure, the decision was made to upgrade our existing infrastructure. We added more database capacity, and additional payment and merchant control servers. By Saturday, we were so frustrated with C&W that we cancelled our agreement. The DNS was modified and websites were transferred. In order to minimize down time, we left the database server at C&W until the DNS issue was resolved.
Our databases were transferred from C&W this morning. Systems are all healthy. We know that many of you have been extremely frustrated by this situation. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you. We truly expected this upgrade to be an enhancement and instead, it turned out to be a disaster for both PaySystems.com and its merchants. The precautionary upgrade we implemented proved to be our lifeline, and now we are overwhelmingly pleased with the results of this upgrade. This new setup will support all our needs reliably for a long time to come.