When all business systems were "in house", the internal IT Department was in charge of all software infrastructure. This is no longer the case. Cloud vendors and Web Hosting companies may be providing the software infrastructure.
. The picture below is referenced in the instructions for this Discussion.
Earlier in the course, you created some web pages and uploaded them to a Web Server like the one in the picture above. The Web Server happened to be hosted by a company called midphase.com and the domain name used in the course was dombsb.com
I develop and maintain two web sites for the North Shore Choral Society at this same host and use the domain name nortshorechoral.org. The first site is for the public to view information about concerts and for singers to be able to review rehearsal recordings as well as get information not available to the public. You can see the site at http://www.northshorechoral.org
The second site uses an open source software package called CiviCRM to maintain donor and member data. This site is not available to the public. Both sites use web pages like the ones you have built. Both sites also have application logic that run on the Application Server (see picture). This logic access databases that reside on the Database Server (see picture). The logic may also access external services such as Google Maps to show where maps of concert venues. All web pages, application logic, and databases are backed-up at least once per week and multiple backups are stored off-site.
Midphase.com provides the software infrastructure runs the Application Server (PHP) and the software that manages the databases (MySQL). They provide all this and host dombsb.com, all my course videos on millerjw.com, and the two North Shore Choral Society web sites for only $90 per year. The price is low because I share a server with a number of other Midphase customers.
On Thursday, August 3, at 1:00 PM in the afternoon both North Shore Choral Society sites stopped working. Instead of displaying pages, they displayed very technical error messages about PHP application code that was no longer working.
It turned out that Midphase had upgraded all Application Servers from PHP Version 5.6 to PHP Version 7.1 and the application code that my sites are running is not compatible with PHP Version 7.1. Restoring from backup would not make a difference. Coding changes need to be made in both sites so that they become compatible with PHP Version 7.1. The effort will require 150 person hours.
Case Question #1: Is there anything that can be done to get the site up faster than one month? After two calls to Midphase, they agreed allow my hosting account to use PHP 5.6 until August 31 at which time PHP is being removed from all of their shared servers. This got the site back up and running after a 12 hour outage. The outage was probably not observed by the general public because the North Shore Choral Society is between seasons and the next concert it not until November. The problem now becomes "What can be done by August 31?" Midphase would let me use my own dedicated server for $1,500 per year but it would take me at least a week (50 person hours) to configure a dedicated server with all the software needed including PHP 5.6 and move the two North Shore Choral Society sites to the dedicated server. Also, the Board of Directors would need to approve the expense.
Case Question #2: What approach is being taken to solve the immediate problem? Midphase would let me use my own dedicated server for $1,500 per year, It would take me at least a week (50 person hours) to configure a dedicated server with all the software needed including PHP 5.6 and move the two North Shore Choral Society sites to the dedicated server. The Board of Directors would need to approve the expense. I am trying to avoid this approach because of the ongoing additional maintenance effort of keeping a dedicated server up and running and protecting it from attacks. Using a shared server puts much of this responsibility on the hosting company. Another hosting company, a2hosting.com, will allow use of PHP 5.6 for at least the rest of this year. For $200/year, the North Shore Choral Society can have all the hosting facilities needed to run the two web sites. 4GB of files have been copied to the new host and the sites will be configured to use the new host next week. The goal is to point the northshorechoral.org domain to the new host before August 31. The public will not notice the switch to the new host because they will access the site on the new host with the same domain name they have always used.
Case Question #3a: What could have been done to avoid this situation? The public web site uses a content management system called Joomla. An old version Joomla 2.5 is being used. Upgrading to the latest version of Joomla will require about 130 hours of effort and could involve tedious changes to every page on the site. This effort was attempted one year ago and stopped once the size of the effort became apparent. Everyone involved in maintaining the software and the site is a volunteer and wanted to "do it later". If we had already done this project, the site would run successfully on PHP 7.1. The second site contains the donor/member management system. It uses Joomla as well as the open source Customer Relationship Management package CiviCRM. This site does use the current version of Joomla. Two years ago, I hired the consulting firm Joomlashack to upgrade Joomla on this site. The cost was low enough that I could pay for it out of my own pocket. Joomlashack outsourced the work to a team in Guatemala. My high school Spanish classes were very helpful in reading comments in the Joomla and CiviCRM configuration files. This solves the big part of the problem but still does not get CiviCRM up and running under PHP 7.1. Why? CiviCRM has bugs that prevent it from running under 7.1. It will however run under PHP 7.0 at the current time. Moving to the new host that does not have a hard deadline of August 31 will buy time to allow CiviCRM to make changes. CiviCRM has a very small development team so the "time to fix" is not known at this time. If I had monitored the bug reports from CiviCRM and the maintenance notices from Midphase, I could have seen this problem coming six months ago. This would have allowed a more orderly approach to solving the problem. Also, three years ago when the North Shore Choral Society started using CiviCRM, I could have hosted it on a professional host that specializes in hosting CiviCRM sites. This would have cost about $600/year and I decided to save the expense by configuring CiviCRM myself to run on the host (Midphase) that we use for our public web site.
Case Question #3b: What should be done in the future to keep this from happening again? I am so focused on making sure both sites are working after August 31 that I will ignore this issue until September. You are welcome to make suggestions in the W7D3 Discussion. Here are two major constraints:
1. The North Shore Choral Society has an annual budget of less than $125,000 per year. This low number is partially due to most work being done by volunteers such as myself. Unnecessary hosting and technology costs are to be avoided. Note: Given that many of the volunteers are my age or older and younger volunteers are hard to find, it may be necessary to change strategy, increase fund raising efforts, and hire more work done. As a member of the Board of Directors, I will be involved with this strategic issue.
2. I need to implement a solution that does not significantly increase the time I spend volunteering.