Slightly hypey headline, which I hope you’ll forgive, but I got an email from Paypal telling me about planned maintenance.

Seems on Friday, 30th May, they’re going to have about an hour’s downtime when they won’t be processing payments – so nobody can buy your stuff during that time. At least that’s how it reads to me.

I’m just hoping they don’t break anything like they did a week or two back, when IPN got busted for a while. IPN stands for Instant Payment Notification and it’s the bit that makes it possible for your customer to pay you and then be redirected to a download page to get their stuff.

A couple of days after that they started canceling a ton of subscriptions, it seems, where there was no reason to do so – at least according to the subscription members who contacted me.

Not their best month, I think.

As I say, I’m hoping they won’t do anything that hurts us with this maintenance, but with systems as complex as theirs must be, it’s impossible to tell until it’s too late. A couple of weeks back I wrote about the special offer 2Checkout were having. You could open up an account and get the sign-on cost returned. I did just that, for the sole purpose of having a back-up payment processor for the future.

Boy, am I glad I did that now.

Related posts:

1. Paypal IPN has stopped working
2. Online Payment Processing
3. What happens when you’re ill?