Adrien Rey-Jarthon

To accept payments on updown.io, we first added support for Stripe which is by far the most popular payment gateway for startups and for a good reason. Their service is of awesome quality: the UI is gorgeous, the integration is easy, the documentation is great, the API is super stable and well thought. I can't recommend it enough.

We then added support for PayPal which is pretty popular for people who have money on it and don't know where to spend it (it can make it feel like you're spending less when it comes from PayPal wallet), or for people who prefer not to enter a credit card on a new website. This was pretty well received and we're currently receiving about 25% of our purchases from PayPal. The documentation and integration is much more painful than with Stripe IMO, I can't recommend them for that, but not having it is basically dodging potential sales.

Finally we more recently added support of BitPay for #Bitcoin and BitcoinCash payments, which was a pretty easy process but not worth the time in the end due to the low usage and the always changing conditions of the network: the transaction fees got huge after price raise and bitcoin because unusable for small payments, they then introduced support for BCH and a newer Bitcoin protocol for lower fees, but then you need a special wallet to pay and in the end it's too cumbersome, even for bitcoin users, to pay with it. I think unless you expect a bit number of payments using cryptocurrencies it's not worth implementing this solution, and better to accept them manually.

Hosting updown.io started with a single OVH server and quickly grew to more server, first it was DigitalOcean VMs and we were very satisfied about them. But we then noticed some shortcomings about #IPv6 networking, although DigitalOcean supports it they don't provide the standard IP range to each VM (by choice) and thus have to block port 25 to avoid other machines being blocked in case of spammer. This is not good for us it means we can't monitor IPv6 SMTP servers properly, that's why we switched to @Vultr (one of their main competitors) which provides similar prices, more locations, and true IPv6 support with no blocked ports. Of course they offer less tools and the support is probably better at DigitalOcean but so far we're happy with @Vultr.

We still use some @OVH servers (which offers tremendous price/performance ratio) for the main web and database server + 2 of the daemons. In addition to this, we also have 2 DigitalOcean VMs for the secondary web and database server and for the automatic TLS termination proxy used to automatically issue Let's Encrypt certs for status page custom domains (for these servers the IPv6 port block is not an issue)

I chose Rails and MongoDB to build updown.io because it's very convenient and already in my skill set. This allows me to save on development and research time. The schema-less design of MongoDB allows for easier migrations and the replicaset feature for easier ops.