If the credit card that you have stored in your SiteHost account has stopped working recently, this article is for you. The important things to note are:
Some credit cards have stopped working because we’ve switched to a new payment gateway.
We’re sorry.
The fix is for you to add your credit card again.
We can’t do this on your behalf because we don’t know your card details. If we could spare you the hassle we would.
There’s more explanation below, or if you just want to get the problem fixed then log in and select Billing > Credit Cards to re-add cards.
Why we’ve changed payment gateways
Any credit cards that have stopped working will have been entered into our old payment gateway, Windcave.
As you probably already know, payment gateways sit between vendors (like us) and banks. When you enter a credit card it is the gateway, not the vendor, that verifies and stores encrypted credit card details. For companies like us, selecting a payment gateway is a job that’s crucial to get right.
We went with Windcave in good faith and were happy with our choice until they announced changes that would step on our relationship with our bank. That wasn’t a path we wanted to go down. On top of that, Windcave weren’t willing or able to let us export the data that we needed to easily switch to a new provider. Our customer experience was not an obvious priority.
Many website owners, not just us, will have been scrambling with similar 'run to stand still' projects. It’s never fun putting in work just to stop your own services from sliding backwards.
To stand up an alternative gateway meant one of two things. We could keep Windcave in place for customers already using it while adding new credit cards to a new gateway (which would mean a three-year changeover period as cards expire), or we could do our best to work around the data export issue and make the cleanest break possible.
We went with the second option.
This has not been quick or easy. We’ve been working with our new provider and our bank to implement the change with minimal disruption to you. The major task of securely moving a lot of encrypted credit card data between gateways proved to be a particular challenge.
Prioritising encryption and security
Just to be very clear: At no stage have we seen or stored any credit card numbers. Data remained encrypted and out of our hands during the entire migration. As always, only the last four digits of your credit card number are stored in your SiteHost account.
A quick aside on CX in the web industry
This isn’t the time or place for soapboxes, but it’s worth noting that a little more customer centricity would have gone a long way when Windcave made the decisions that they did. Many website owners, not just us, will have been scrambling with similar “run to stand still” projects. It’s never fun putting in work just to stop your own services from sliding backwards—especially when a single supplier could have made that work easier, or entirely unnecessary.
Every hour spent maintaining payment capabilities is an hour not spent on improvements that customers will actually notice. The web industry will have seen a lot of those hours lately.
Most but not all credit cards were migrated
The credit cards that have been successfully migrated include all of those that were used to pay a SiteHost invoice in the last four months. We verified and migrated a number of less active cards as well. In all those cases, there is no outward change. Payments will work as normal, and your account’s Billing screens will contain all the same details as before.
In a small minority of cases - around 5% at most - it wasn’t possible to move cards between gateways. There are various reasons, but the result is the same: Unmigrated cards will probably disappear from your SiteHost account, but even if they are still visible they’ll be connected to a gateway (Windcave) that now leads nowhere.
If your card is one of the ones that didn’t make it, we’re sorry to ask that you take a minute or two to fix this up.
The only fix is a manual fix
Security reminder: Recent scams have targeted SiteHost customers. Please always check that you are on cp.sitehost.nz before entering your credit card details or password.
If there’s a card visible in your Billing screen, but your payments are not going through, the first step is to delete it.
When you re-add the same card (or any other card), it will connect to our new gateway. Then everything will be joined up again, and your payments will flow like they should.
Again, we’re sorry to ask you to spend your time on this. If you have already helped us to leave Windcave behind, thank you.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.