

Cloud Hosting Single Point Of Failure - Your Credit Card - pud
http://pud.com/post/43177561997/when-you-host-with-cloud-services-your-credit-card

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icebraining
I'd say your single point of failure was your Xeround account.

As an aside, this is a decent argument for a better email client. Those
messages should've been highlighted instead of hiding among the chaff.

~~~
sethist
If the failure can be attributed to the credit card, the Xeround account, and
the authors email client, then it isn't really a single point of failure. If
one (or even two) of those failed, the others should have been able to
identify the problem and address it before the sites were taken offline. It
was the combination of the three failing at the same time that led to the
ultimate failure.

------
byoung2
Bank of America has a feature called ShopSafe
([https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-
cards/shopsaf...](https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-
cards/shopsafe.go)) where you can create temporary numbers that redirect to
your real Visa or MC account. BofA assures me that the generated number
continues to work even if you lose the physical card and get a replacement.

You can use the temporary one for up to 12 recurring payments, which means
you'd have to update your payment info for a bunch of services every year, and
each card is only good for one merchant, so you'd need a different one for
each.

It may be better to just get a separate card exclusively for recurring
services to reduce the chance that it gets flagged because of travel or other
suspicious activity (Christmas shopping, etc.).

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felciano
Same thing happened to us, but with <http://www.crashplan.com>: out of the
country for 2 weeks that happened to overlap with the expiry of our annual
subscription. Because the credit card on file had expired, CrashPlan tried to
contact us via email for a week and then deleted all of the backups!

This does seem like a key aspect of the "service" component of SaaS, in
particular for cases where data is deleted or is otherwise difficult to
restore (i.e. recovery involves more than just a new, valid credit card
number). Maybe we need some sort of SaaS evaluation or ranking system that
took these types of policies (grace periods, etc) into account...

------
edanm
That's really ridiculous of Xeround. 5 business days is simply not enough time
to expect most people to update credit card details.

I've had similar situations with Amazon, Rackspace, etc. when my card expired,
and they all gave several weeks of leeway in updating to new details, as well
they should.

