Last Friday, Authorize.net had an outage for several hours due to a fire in a Seattle data center (coverage on TechCrunch), leaving many companies without the ability to accept credit cards.   In addition to the many ecommerce and software as a service companies that were impacted, many POS systems connect to Auth.net to process card-present transactions.

While Authorize.net has had several high-profile outages through its history, the overall reliability rate is pretty high.  Even so, prudent businesspeople should consider having a backup gateway setup in case of an Auth.net outage.

While there are some gateways that are processor-specific (for example Braintree), there are many that are not processor-specific, for example eProcessingNetwork and USAePay, that, like Authorize.net, can be used with most processors.  The cost of such gateways, with no transactions being processed, ranges between $10-$20 / month.  When you process a transaction with your alternate gateway, it will be transmitted in exactly the same way to your credit card processor and your billing and deposit will happen as if Auth.net had never gone down in the first place.

It is not very difficult to integrate an additional payment gateway into your software, in fact, most ecommerce packages and payment processing libraries have support for multiple gateways built in.  Some competing gateways, for example eProcessingNetwork, have auth.net emulation which allows even easier integration.

In short, if the latest Auth.net outage cost you more than $120-240, you should consider having a hot backup online and ready to go in case of another outage.