PayPal IPN Failing again!

For several years s2Member has successfully looked after the membership status on our website.

In August 2017 we moved our website to a new web host (siteground.com). The membership system continued to work well with the new host until November, when we began to receive IPN Failure Notifications from PayPal and new members were unable to access protected pages.

We contacted SiteGround and PayPal via their support pages, and I posted on this forum (as you see below).

Over some eight days, each company blamed the others for the issue and seeing that we were getting nowhere, we took the advice offered on this forum and changed back to the hosting company (British Telecom) that we’d been with originally (before the IPN problem began).

This was a new account with a new domain name and SSL certificate. We simply copied over the WP database and media from the previous host and amended the database and s2Member settings as necessary to make them relevant to the new domain.

The IPN notifications immediately began to work again - and all has been fine until this week. Now, new customers are once more complaining that they cannot access videos that they’ve paid to watch, and yesterday we received an IPN Failure Notifications email from PayPal.

There were two more failure emails this morning, but we also had one new member transaction which worked OK.

In each case, the problem has occurred three months after moving to a new hosting company, and in each case we had made no recent changes to the web pages, PayPal buttons or any settings of any kind. IPN Notifications are enabled in the PayPal account, and (as before when we had this issue) the url which PayPal quotes as failing (https://sheepdog-training.com/?s2member_paypal_notify=1 ) returns:
“This PayPal IPN Handler by s2Member® is active & listening.” when pasted into a browser.

We’re very worried indeed about this now. To be honest, the support we got from PayPal Merchant Technical Support was less than helpful, so we’re hoping someone here might be able to help us to get this resolved as quickly as possible.

We have a full PayPal Pro Merchant account and have even been assigned a member of their support staff to “caretake” our account - although for some reason she was unable to reply to the email we sent yesterday asking for help with this…

Just for the record, I’ve checked with the current web hosts and there is no caching facility currently working on the domain sheepdog-training.com

It sounds very much like a PayPal issue. PayPal has history on this; they regularly make undocumented changes to their API and so cause these problems. Your “caretaker” needs to talk to the right people to find out if that’s what’s happened here.

Otherwise, your only long-term solution is going to be to change your payment processor.

Thanks Tim. Opened a Stripe account yesterday… but I really don’t understand why PayPal is the default processor for s2Member, when you speak so highly (elsewhere) of Stripe.
My experience of PayPal has been somewhat bumpy over the years, so we’ll probably lean towards Stripe for the near future, but an awful lot of our customers have PayPal accounts so we’ll still have to offer it as an option.

The only reason, I think (remember I’m not part of the dev team), is that Stripe was added as a payment processor for s2Member (and only for Pro) relatively late in s2Member’s life. So PayPal was already the default and has just remained so.

Well, here we go again!
PayPal are suggesting the hosting company is blocking their IPs and the hosting company is denying it.
Meanwhile, we’re stuck in the middle with nowhere to go other than (reluctantly) ditch PayPal.
Thanks to Tim Kaye for helping though.