Party Craze:
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Then Pay Pal wrote back **
Please note PayPal does not block website IP addresses.
Contrary to what many would like you to think, it is true, PayPal do not block IP addresses.
To do so would be counter productive and detrimental to their services.
For the exact same reasons, the 'ozpost' servers that I run can and will never block IP addresses.
This is actually true for many/most businesses that depend on public access to their servers/services (Government departments, Banks, etc, etc).
The biggest 'problem' with blocking by IP address (and why it isn't a good course of action), is because very few hackers will attempt to compromise the sites directly, instead they'll log into someones home computer and carry out their attacks from there. If the Banks, PayPal, etc were to block the attackers IP address, they are in fact blocking access to an innocent victim. The real hacker just moves onto someone else's computer to continue their activities.
Having said that, there are many other reasons why a connection cannot be made, that have nothing to do with IP blocking, but sadly, nothing that is within your control.
This problem can only be solved with your host and PayPal working together to determine where the breakdown is occurring, and then one or the other of them will be able to rectify the problem.
As you have discovered, neither party is going to admit that their systems/servers are at fault, and that could well be true, the problem could easily be caused by invalid rules in one of the many routers that exist between your host and the paypal servers.
Other than changing hosts, all you can really do is act as a middleman, and forward all responses from your host over to PayPal, and all of their responses back to your host. Sooner or later someone will take the matter seriously and fix the problem. Dare I say, but you need to go out of your way to annoy them. There are several ways to do this. Using their contact forms and posting a message like 'its still broken' every hour or two, may seem futile, but it actually works.
Another thing I've often done is to start sending emails about the complaint to other departments of the businesses... A technical complaint to the billing department is often a successful tactic, because it is often the billing/accounting departments that have the most pulling power to get things done.
Likewise, start sending a copy of all correspondence to 'manager@xxxxxxx' is sure to attract attention (as long as they don't bounce).
While doing this, you might also want to add 'root', 'postmaster' and 'webmaster' to the list of persons to 'annoy' with the copies of your correspondence.
I'm not suggesting you try all of these tactics all at once, just make yourself progressively more annoying until the problem is fixed. :)
It is mainly a matter of time. We will never find out the real cause, because even when fixed, neither side is going to acknowledge that it was their doing.
Very frustrating.
Cheers
Rod
ps. Meanwhile, you could enable PayPal standard (IPN) module. This will allow your customer to still use paypal, because with this module there is no direct communication between your host and the paypal servers. Alas, it is this lack of two way communication that makes this method a LOT less reliable than the Express checkout though.
