We’re asking some customers to re-enter credit card details. Here’s why.

If the credit card that you have stored in your MyHost account has stopped working recently, this article is for you. The important things to note are:

• Some credit cards aren’t working right now because we’ve switched to a new payment system.
• We’re sorry.
• The fix is for you to add your credit card again.
• We can’t do this job for you because we don’t have access to your card details. If we could spare you the hassle we would.

Read on to understand what’s going on or, if you just want to get the problem fixed, log in and head to your Payment Methods screen where you can re-add cards.

The explanation: We’re changing payment gateways

When you add a credit card to your MyHost account, it is verified and securely stored by a payment gateway that sits between us and our bank. This protects your card details - in fact, only the last four digits of your card number are kept in any of our systems. Even a complete hack of your MyHost account wouldn’t be enough to steal your credit card.

Until now we’ve used a payment gateway provided by Windcave.

Recently Windcave made some changes that, long story short, mean that we are going to stop using their gateway and switch to a new one. This has been one of those internal projects that has used up a lot of our time and effort but which, from your point of view, won’t change much at all. It’s felt a bit like running on a treadmill.

Most credit cards have moved with us

As part of the switch we have worked with our bank and our new gateway provider to move encrypted credit card data to the new gateway. In as many cases as possible, accounts will keep working like they should. Because this was all done with encrypted data, we have not seen or stored your credit card details.

We’ve successfully moved any card that was used to pay a MyHost invoice in the last four months, as well as some others. In all of those cases our customers will have noticed absolutely nothing. Payments will still work as always, and your account’s Payment Methods screen will show all the same details as before.

Some credit cards were left behind

In some cases though, it hasn’t been possible to move cards between gateways. There are various reasons, but the outcome is the same: Unmigrated cards will have disappeared from your Payment Methods screen, because they were connected to a gateway (Windcave) that doesn’t go anywhere anymore.

If your card is one of the ones stuck in this dead end, we’re sorry to say that you need to spend a couple of minutes fixing it up.

The only fix is a manual fix

When you re-add the same card (or any other card), it will connect to our new gateway instead. 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. Our thanks to everyone who has helped us to leave Windcave behind.