Solid advice.

You have missed the point so hard.

Why not just use one with the other as a fallback for now? Odds of both being down on a given moment aren't that high.

Timescale - a day or two. They say verification can take three days, but I submitted (and was rejected) within a day, then approved the next day with a modified form. You can pay for expedited verification.

Funding is good if you don't mind waiting a few days for a bank wire to move and paying for a bank wire. I get high wire fees from my bank (and found all the other funding options sketchy as hell, IMO), so I ended up not going through with using that site.

For what it's worth, I have used blockchain.info with ZipZap in the past with no issue. The fees are reasonable if not cheap, if memory serves - order of 5% between both services combined.