

Stripe Blog: Track Stripe's uptime - saikat
https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-status

======
latchkey
Is it just me, or is this really confusing? Which services are responsible for
taking payments? If the website goes down, does that affect taking payments?
Isn't stripe.js part of the API? If the API goes down, doesn't that affect
stripe.js?

Also, what is up with all of that downtime? I think I'd expect my payment
provider to have better uptime. Makes me wonder how quality the backend really
is.

If I was using stripe and my site couldn't accept payments for X minutes
during a really important time (which seems to have happened 5 times in the
last couple months), I'd be really pissed.

Also, from a UX experience, getting my mouse pointer to line up over a 4 pixel
wide line is a pain in the ass. It looks pretty, but isn't really usable.

Update: Why the downvote? At least respond to me.

~~~
pc
Thanks for the honest feedback.

 _Also, what is up with all of that downtime? I think I'd expect my payment
provider to have better uptime. Makes me wonder how quality the backend really
is._

While all downtime is bad, we think 99.99% is decent.

The best service providers -- including the services that might power your
site -- tend to have guarantees in this range. Amazon EC2 and Google App
Engine both have SLAs for 99.95% uptime.

More generally, this is part of the point: other payments companies don't tend
to talk about their availability at all. We think that this is harmful. What
should count as acceptable uptime performance is a fair question. As a first
step, we think we should all make our uptime public.

 _Is it just me, or is this really confusing? Which services are responsible
for taking payments? If the website goes down, does that affect taking
payments? Isn't stripe.js part of the API? If the API goes down, doesn't that
affect stripe.js?_

No, the Stripe site going down won't impact your ability to accept payments at
all. stripe.js is optional, and so we've exposed its uptime separately too.
Again, other services like Amazon and Google break out their availability on a
per-service basis, and I think this makes a lot of sense.

~~~
latchkey
I don't see a SLA for Stripe on the ToS page, why not?

GAE has actually had 100% uptime for the last year.
[http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/01/happy-
birthday-h...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/01/happy-birthday-
high-replication.html)

~~~
moe
_I don't see a SLA for Stripe on the ToS page, why not?_

Blanket SLAs are not normally worth the paper they're written on. Look up the
breach-compensation for your favorite TOS-SLA sometime.

Publishing the uptime history is a much more honest approach. Kudos to stripe
for doing just that.

~~~
latchkey
I'm not knocking them for publishing their failures. That is all great.

I'm questioning the comparison with other unrelated systems that are much
bigger than them, especially when they don't publish a SLA themselves.

~~~
moe
Why should they publish an arbitrarily chosen figure in addition to telling
you the _actual_ figure?

~~~
pestaa
That is a really good way to put it, but I can't seem to ignore the abscence
of an important business document. It feels like the arbitrarily chosen figure
is step 1, the actual figure is step 2, and they just skipped the first half.

------
xxcode
Why is this important? Why are you telling this to people? Why is this news
that a Hacker should know.

I might not get it, but IMHO if its not something of general interest, it
shouldn't be on HN (even though the company might be PG's portfolio).

~~~
learc83
Many people on HN are using Stripe to handle payment processing for their
startups/projects. How can you argue this information isn't relevant?

~~~
saurik
Oh come now: the shear number of stories regarding Stripe that hit HN (and
often hit it pretty hard, although this one did falter) is staggering. There
are tons of services and technologies that "many people on HN are using" that
don't get this kind of play; on the contrary, I've seen complaints before
regarding "HN is not a change-log for ______".

