This is why LWN has never jumped into Google Checkout. Google is a great company in a lot of ways, but they just don't do customer service. When it comes to your revenue stream, it's really important to have somebody you can actually talk to.
The payment processing fee structure almost incentivizes these customer support nonresponses. If I'm a small company experiencing technical problems with payments, I'm losing ~95% on each error while the payment processor is losing the remaining sliver. For a startup, these sales are critical, but for the payment processor, the fees on these low volume transactions are chump change. I can only hope a bigger customer is experiencing similar issues so the bug fix can be expedited. My only recourses are switching payment processors and generating some bad publicity through a blog post.
The only real issue with Paypal is unfortunately a huge one if you're unlucky enough to get caught up in it - their overly-aggressive "holds" on funds in accounts. Other than that their customer service is better, their site easier to use, and they have the benefit of a huge network effect already in place. Paypal even called me a couple of days ago to verify that a transaction (I was the buyer) was legitimate. In the past they would have just rejected it and left it up to me to contact them to convince them otherwise.
I would not be surprised if this "issue" gets resolved within a few weeks or so. I had problems with getting my own wallet to work on a Google apps domain account and that is how long it took them to get it working (yes, I know weakness.com is a commercial account, but google doesn't appear to be prioritizing it).
I wonder if weakness.com would reinstate the payment method at that time.
Yep. If someone is reading this comment, please install at least a simple caching system for wordpress. Hypercache is the simplest and does the job quite well with absolutely no hassle.
It will save you at least 90% of the 30-or-so DB queries per page.
I still get something like 100 visitors a day to an old blog post [1] I did on wordpress performance, and emails most weeks asking for additional information. It's slightly depressing that wordpress itself doesn't ship with a decent basic caching function out of the box
That... that is an incredibly helpful walkthrough. It would have been nice if you included vsftpd or some other ftp program too - but bookmarked nonetheless.
The question is... do your really need FTP ? See, he installed ssh and allowed it through the firewall. IMO, who needs ftp when you have sftp ? (please read this question as : "Do you really want to use an old and crappy protocol when you have a decent, recent, secure protocol which, by the way, is certainly supported by your favorite FTP client ?")
Your blog post has been in my bookmarks for 6 months, working with a lot of WPs I'm referring to it several times a month ! Great ressource, thank you !
