We are releasing BillerStatus.com in an open public beta.
BillerStatus.com is a new website/service from Too Much Media which has been developed to help webmasters and program owners monitor the availability of billing options on the internet.
BillerStatus.com is a multihomed monitor which works by doing an http retrieval of the actual join page of each biller every 10 minutes. This data is reported back to a central location and displayed and logged for historical data.
We have devleoped this service becuase we will be introducing biller enabling and disabling based on the scores this service reports. This will allow NATS clients to set a minimum threshold score for a biller and if that biller should drop below that threshold it will be removed from the cascade until it rises above that threshold again. For instance if biller A goes down at 3am it can be removed from your cascades and reinserted at 6am when it comes back online, all automatically, all while you sleep.
People should be very cautious assuming a biller is down becuase there is a timeout from one location for one data point on a biller. This application has been developed to be mulithomed becuase there are many external factors that may lead to a biller not being reachable from a single point which could happen while the biller is still online and fully functional. Becuase of this we are currently monitoring billers from 3 locations and plan to expand it to 5-10 in the next few weeks. People should only assume a biller is not available if it is unreachable from most if not all locations.
Again, this service is in Beta. We are still doing some testing and tweaking of everything. We wanted to introduce the concept now and get some feedback on it. The auto-cascade enable/disable feature will be introduced with NATS v3 in Vegas.
http://www.billerstatus.com