Another Riff on Vendor Viability

On Monday I'm rolling out a registration capability on securityincite.com. There will be more details then about why you want to register. During my evaluation of membership and subscription management software, I looked at many different options.

One of the best seemed to be PHPGuarddog. It would have integrated right into my Drupal-based website and had all the features I was looking for. Ultimately I decided to go with another product because it had even cleaner integration, but just for kicks went back for one last time to PHPGuarddog. This is what I found: 

To our PHP Guard Dog customers:

We regret to inform you that PHP Guard Dog will be ceasing operations.
However, we will be supporting the product until the end of March, 2006.
Thank you for your continued support and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Your software will continue to function as normal indefinitely.  For notes on how
to update your authorize.php file in case you change IP addresses or domains in
the future, click here. 

Holy smokes Batman! That was a close call. I could have been left holding the bag, and given that I'm reasonably limited in my technical prowess, that bag could have gotten VERY smelly. My downside exposure here was $99, so I don't want to overdramatize. BUT, the point is the same.

Pick your vendors carefully because it's a bad day when you are left holding a $100,000 bag.