I'm one of the founders of Chargify. Whether or not you choose to use us (our focus is the management of recurring billing, products, coupons, proration, etc.), here is an article I wrote to help startups and SMBs understand payment gateways and merchant accounts:
If you just need to accept credit card payments of any sort, this is the foundation you'll need. PayPal Website Payments Pro is their version of gateway + merchant account, but frankly, after seeing hundreds of merchants choose this or that solution, I recommend other gateway/merchant account combos.
Quick note about us (Chargify): we now support http://quickpay.net as our newest payment gateway. They are in Denmark and they support most UK & EU merchants.
Hey, thanks to all who have mentioned Chargify. We definitely appreciate it!
The issue of long-term viability is a valid one... I would ask the same thing when evaluating vendors, and, in fact, I used the same logic in choosing to join Chargify last Fall.
I really like my co-founders' 6-year history running Grasshopper.com, and they architected things right - based on roughly 10 million telephony transactions that their existing system rates each month.
And, for what it's worth, my first company is still selling Basic Stamp computers 23 years after we founded it, and Engine Yard is growing every month.
I can speak for all 3 founders of Chargify when I say that we enjoy building utilitarian businesses that deliver good value over a long time.
We are very sorry for Friday's downtime on one of our clusters in Sacramento.
We take downtime seriously and we learn from each incident. Yesterday's incident appears to be the result of a software malfunction in 2 or more of 4 switches that handle traffic between a group of servers and their SAN shelves. The switches are from Extreme Networks, which has a good reputation, and they are helping us debug error logs.
Organizationally, we are making changes to reduce the incidence of such problems and to always improve how we deal with them in the future. We're expanding the group that focuses on infrastructure design and management. This group looks at ways to improve our technology (design and vendor choices) and human processes. For instance, one of the top people in that group visited a SAN vendor earlier this week to review their latest offerings.
If you were affected by this downtime, please contact your account manager to discuss service credits. If you don't know your account manager, please send an email to '[email protected]' and your message will reach them.
Thanks for being our customer, and again, sorry for the downtime. Believe me, when I hear about downtime while on a week off with my dad coming this weekend, it is not pleasant - it actually hurts!