Web Designer Hosting - Case Study - Site Deployment Testing

Case Study - 'Nimble Designs' vs 'Donkey Studios'

Scenario 2 - Pre-Deployment Testing and Site Deployment

A new customer, 'Just Roasted Coffee Co.', would like their existing site redesigned. They'd like the transition from the old site to the new site to be as smooth as possible, with their hosting arrangements taken care of.

They'd like to view the development of the new site 'as it happens' and have bought a temporary domain 'jrcoffee-development.co.uk' as a place for the new site to exist during testing.

Bob Nimble is hosting the development site on his reseller hosting account. Setting it up costs him nothing.

Dave Donkey takes out another hosting account with Company B, at a cost of £6 per month to host the development site.

A couple of months later, development work and site testing is complete. It's time for the development site to go live on the company's primary domain - 'jrcoffee.co.uk'.

Bob Nimble (Reseller Hosting)

Bob loads the WHM web-based interface.
He clicks 'Modify an Account'
He selects the 'jrcoffee-development.co.uk' account.

He changes the domain to 'jrcoffee.co.uk'.
He clicks 'Save'.
The primary domain for the account is 'jrcoffee.co.uk'

As a result, what was previously the development site is now the live site. Bob can be sure that everything that worked in the development site will work in the live site, because they are exactly the same sites. The only thing which has changed is the primary domain setting.

Now all he has to do is change the nameservers for the client's domain, wait 24 hours, and the new site will be fully deployed across the Internet.

Time spent: 5 minutes.

Additional cost: Nothing

Dave Donkey (Conventional Third Party Hosting)

When Dave gets word to launch the live site, he places an order for another account with Company B. It also costs £6 per month. 24 hours later, the setup of this new account is complete, and he receives his login details.

As the new account is with the same company, Dave is reasonably confident that what is currently working on the development site will work on the new account. He uploads the files of the new site to the new account. He creates the appropriate database, and imports the data. He checks that connections to the database are possible and performs a cursory inspection of the new site. All appears to be well.

Dave updates the nameserver details for the live domain, and 24 hours later the new site goes live.

Shortly after, he receives word from his client that logins to the site are not working. Dave investigates. The login suceeds, but the user is kicked out again on the load of the next page after the login screen. Further research reveals that the configuration setting 'register globals' is set to 'off' for the server that this new account is hosted on. The server hosting the development account had 'register globals' set to 'on', and Dave's code depends upon it. Without 'register globals' being set to 'on', Dave's code will not function properly. Disaster!

He e-mails Company B's support, and asks them if they can change the config. 24 hours later, they reply and say that they can, but that it will cost him a £20 one-off fee.

Having learned from his previous mistake, Dave pays the fee. 6 hours later, the setting is changed and the site starts to work properly. Dave spends the rest of the day checking for any other issues on the live site.

Dave sleeps badly that night, wondering what other possible server configuration differences there might be between the development account and the live account, and what bugs they might cause in the live site.

Time spent: 4 days, one night

Additional cost: £12 per month, £20 one-off fee

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